The Place Of The Dead

(Saturday, ITV, 9pm)

It was meant to be the journey of a lifetime. It turned out to be a descent into hell.

In February 1994 ten soldiers set out to conquer an inhospitable gully in the heart of the Borneo jungle.

To the locals it was a holy but haunted place, inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors.

To the army it was an ideal space for a training expedition... until things started to go wrong.

"I had always resisted doing a film," says Sgt Hugh Brittan the man in charge of the adventure who at one point was stuck underground up to his neck in water.

"I don't dwell on it or dream about it and in many ways I wish people would leave the whole thing alone. Then, for some reason, I agreed to talk to a researcher."

Talk he did, and The Place of the Dead is the result. It shows how after a month of struggling up Mount Kinabalu and down in to the gully the men were separated.

"People will be piping about things that didn't happen," says Brittan, who is played by Sense And Sensibility hunk Greg Wise.

"But this is how things happened from my point of view."

Copyright 1997 MGN Ltd.

Thanks to Missy for the find