KEY POINTS:
The 13 'castaways' spending three months on Great Barrier Island for a new BBC reality television show have already arrived on the island to build their own shelter and grow and hunt their own food.
They include a lap dancer, a young Conservative, a former drug addict and
a "professional psychic", the BBC said today.
The original series of Castaway, broadcast seven years ago, followed the lives of 36 TV "villagers" on the Hebridean Island of Taransay.
It ran for a year at the turn of the millennium and featured romance, lawsuits and bullying claims.
But the NZ-based show will only last for 12 weeks and the group will be joined by a lucky viewer after eight.
BBC One controller Peter Fincham has promised "lot of twists and surprises" to the reality show format.
"Castaway was the original reality show and the genre has evolved enormously since then," he said.
"However, the original purpose - to see how people react once they are taken far away from all that they take for granted - remains the same."
"The castaways are not allowed to bring electrical equipment, no knives, they're not allowed to bring writing or reading materials.
"Between the 13 of them they are allowed one match. They used it to light a fire on the first night - and the fire went out."
The weekly series screens from Friday on BBC One in Britain with the producers promoting the mix of a former heroin addict, an 18-year-old public schoolboy and a deaf divorcee "on an idyllic sub-tropical island".
The 13 blindfolded participants were let loose at Harataonga Bay, one of the island's white sand beaches, just a half-hour flight from Auckland.
The Telegraph newspaper in London reported the BBC called the NZ show a "social experiment with a purpose" - presumably to distinguish it from the voyeurism featured on most reality TV.
The group's first task this week has been to make habitable a cluster of wooden huts. Participants were allowed to bring a suitcase full of possessions, although writing material, books and knives were prohibited.
Each week the programme's host, Danny Wallace, will present the participants with a decision they have to make -- anything from which vegetables to grow, to who will be allowed to make a telephone call home.
- NZPA