Space Cadets (2005)

Hosted by Johnny Vaughan and produced by Endemol-owned Zeppotron, Space Cadets launches on December 7, following a bunch of hapless contestants who think they're being trained for a space flight by the fictional Space Tourism Agency of Russia (STAR).

In fact, they will be given lectures and put through various hoops in a disused US airbase in Britain. The nearest they'll get to Russia is the toilet paper shipped in from Moscow and the nearest they'll get to outer space is in their imaginations.

"Zeppotron's creative director Ben Caudell came up with an idea for sending people into space and everyone agreed it would be next to impossible," said exec producer Shirley Jones. "He then thought of a twist to make it even harder to pull off - why not fake the space mission and try to convince people it’s for real..."

The format follows as 100 contestants are whittled down to just four for the space flight, but in a further twist one of these will be an actor, whose job it is to keep the other three convinced when the cracks start appearing. Together they'll live and train in a mocked up Russian base, complete with Russian teabags, sanitary towels and plugs, somewhere in the UK.

The series will culminate in the unwitting contestants being sent into "space" in a mock Space Shuttle, which was built for the Clint Eastwood film Space Cowboys, with hydraulic suspension and ultra hi-def graphics footage of earth unspooling outside the windows. Contestants will get £5,000 for each day they remain convinced.

Explaining the show, C4 commissioning editor Angela Jain said: "I think Reality TV is a slightly overused term - people use it to describe everything from Wife Swap to Big Brother. If you think of Candid Camera live in space, that’s a closer approximation to what it is.

"There are elements of drama, documentary and reality, and it’s a huge practical joke. TV has long been the playground for pranks and hoaxes, from Beadle’s About to Ali G. This is just continuing that tradition on a much larger scale, and doing the most elaborate and ambitious one-off TV hoax."