TV survivalist Ed Stafford will undertake one of his most extreme survival challenges ever when he 'strands' his family - including his 21-month-old son - on a desert island with no food, water or knife.
Straight from spending 60 days sleeping rough on UK streets, Stafford will have to use all his survival skills learned from previous experiences to keep his family safe.
Ed and his fellow explorer wife Laura Bingham will have to go "back to basics" when they are left on the Indonesian island with their toddler son, Ran, with just the clothes they are standing in next month.
Speaking exclusively to the Mirror about the Discovery TV show, Ed said: "It's not without its risks but I think it will be a really positive thing.
“Surviving on your own is one thing but in real life you would have dependents. So, the concept we pitched to Discovery was to do a show with Laura and Ran.
“When you have a baby you're told you need so much stuff - this type of stroller, this type of teat for your dummy, this type of toy.
"But if you were living in an indigenous tribe you wouldn't have any of these trappings of the western world.
"So the concept of what we're about to do as a family is plonk ourselves on an island and see if we can live without everything, literally start from scratch, so no water, no knife, no food, go literally in the clothes we're standing up in.
"I'm confident that I have enough survival skills to look after a little baby, and Laura's more than capable of handling herself.
"And it will be an amazing opportunity for all of us as a family to take the survival genre on.
"I don't think it is realistic for one man to be on TV beating his chest saying 'look how tough I am'. In a real survival situation you would have people who were dependent on you."
Laura, 26, is no stranger herself to surviving in extreme conditions after leading the first ever expedition to navigate Guyana's 620 mile Essequibo river from source to sea just eight months after giving birth to Ran.
Speaking about the family's new challenge she added: "It's going to be an extreme test on us and our strength and it's going to be an extreme test of our individual skills and it will really take us back to basics.
"Hopefully I can hold my own and do the hand drill (light a fire with sticks) and be an independent woman. It will be interesting to see how that evolution goes, who takes more of the childcare role or whether we're very equal with it all.
“It will be like Swiss Family Robinson,” she said with a grin.
I met up with Laura at her family home just weeks before Ed's latest TV challenge - 60 Nights on the Streets - aired on Channel 4.
Smiling, she swings open the heavy studded door to her home as two shaggy dogs the size of ponies push against her legs.
It's her birthday, but the intrepid explorer, world record setter, budding children's book author and mum agreed to an interview today anyway - pencilled in between hand drill fire lighting and fitness classes.
And learning to light fires with nothing but scavenged sticks may be a very important skill to master for Laura and Ed's new TV show.
But if anyone can successfully take on such a challenge, they can.
Last February, Laura led the first ever expedition to navigate Guyana's 620 mile Essequibo river from source to sea just eight months after giving birth to Ran.
And despite the physical pain of missing him (which she compared to being sliced open and having her intestines yanked out), she successfully completed her mission with fellow explorers Ness Knight and Pip Stewart.
Her husband Ed, 43, shot to fame when he became the first person to walk across the Amazon, filming the gruelling trip in which he had to contend with an inhospitable environment and occasionally hostile locals who held him up with guns and bows and arrows.
He has since filmed multiple TV series with Discovery Channel, including Naked and Marooned and First Man Out.
The couple already have some experience of bringing up baby in the wild.
When Ran was 10 months old he had already been to 14 countries, including the remote jungles of Guyana when Ed brought him to visit Laura on her expedition there.
And while they believe that wilderness can be a statistically safer place to raise a child than driving him around British roads, even some brushes with nature are too close for comfort for the family.
Ed pales a little as he remembers how a jaguar strolled through their camp in Guyana – straight over the area where Ran would have slept in a cot on the forest floor if they had not left just hours earlier.
Ed had decided to move him away from the expedition to wait out the next leg in a nearby settlement with better shelter and shade when the large cat joined camp.]
"Our baby was almost eaten by a jaguar. We can laugh now but it was scary," he said.
As Laura offers drinks in their charming country kitchen, where trussed up plants cascade from the ceiling and plant cuttings jostle towards the light on deep stone windowsills, a tall man with bright blue eyes swings open the back door.
With a shy smile he wishes Laura a happy birthday and hands her a box of chocolates.
"This is 'Mike', she says. "Ed met him filming in London and invited him back to help with our house painting.
Ed is just back from filming Channel 4 documentary, 60 Days on the Streets, where he lived rough with no food, water or shelter in Manchester, Glasgow and London for 60 days.
The three-part C4 documentary examines the homelessness epidemic currently sweeping Britain.
Laura said: “Ed's a very good judge of character, so when he texted saying 'do you mind if I bring someone back?' I was like, 'yes, yes you can.'
“He met 'Mike' on the first or second day, they struck up a conversation and Lee took him under his wing. He was essentially his 'in', his tour guide to the streets.
"So when they finished filming, Ed asked him to come here to help us with the house painting.
"'Mike's' amazing. He's really, really respectful, really non-imposing, he just gets on and does the painting stuff for us. He's a really nice, unimposing chap."
Ed added: “I told him the house was like a nursing home and there'd be lots of space.”
But after just 60 days on the streets eating fast food and sleeping rough, a previously healthy Ed has suffered heart, thyroid and gut problems.
Laura said: 'Ed is an extremely amazing man. He's like an emotional sponge, he feels pain a lot and I don't know if he's absorbed a lot of pain from the streets.
"He's got a leaky gut after eating two months of pure junk food. So health-wise he needs to pick himself back up and he's on a health mission.
"Ed's working with a vegetable protein company called Nuzest to fix his leaky gut.
"All of his levels were off, he was 100% on the road to cardiovascular disease, his thyroid's not working and all his blood tests showed everything you do not want in your body.
"And he has all that from eating junk food for two months.
"We were talking to you ('Mike') after getting the results and you were like 'I don't want those blood tests if that's what happens in two months.'"
'Mike', who did not wish to be identified by his real name, said: "Yeah, mine would be through the roof!"
Then, as if on cue, a courier calls to the door to collect a machete for a photoshoot to accompany a magazine article about Ed's favourite item - which of course is a very large, functional blade which he said cost about $19 in Brazil.
"It's very rusty," he says, as he checks that tape is covering the blade to avoid cutting any future, less knife-practiced, handlers.
More guests then call to the door laden with flowers, craft gin and a little silver bee keyring.
“I love bees,” said Laura smiling at it, before the avid gardener and bee keeper retrieved her precious seed box to share her plans for planting more bee-friendly flowers across their garden this year.
“I call Ed my Honeybee,” Laura said with a grin.
The couple met while Laura was planning to cycle across South America with no money.
“I emailed him for advice, he Googled me and said 'I'll meet up with you.'”
Ed smiled: “You happened to mention in first line of your email that you were a former model so that's why I Googled you.”
“My greatest campaign was genital psoriasis in case you're wondering,” Laura said smiling broadly.
“They said they wanted to book me because I had 'great facial expressions.' They only told me what it was for after I turned up so it was too late then.
“I mostly just did real life modelling jobs.
“I was told that if wanted to book proper stuff I needed to lose a lot of weight to compensate for not being pretty enough.
“I was a size eight but I was told to lose three inches from everywhere. Bulemia and drugs and are the only ways to do that so I chose to quit and be healthy instead.
“Now I punish myself in expeditions instead,” she joked.
The couple lived in London before selling their Battersea pad and moved to a big old country house in the pretty village of Hallaton, Leicestershire, near Ed's parents.
Ed wanted to move, and Laura “had never been a dream crusher” so she acquiesced.
Born in Stoke Charity, a small village outside Winchester, country life has not been too difficult an adaptation for her and she has filled any precious spare time with raising her chickens and bees and growing her garden.
“I'm much happier around plants and chickens, growing vegetables,” she said.
“If the apocalypse happens everyone can come here. I’ll grow the vegetables and Ed can teach survival skills.”
The couple bought their country pile after falling in love with it's rangy rooms and giant garden which stretches down to a lake and woodland.
The house's previous owners lived there happily for 60 years, until when aged 93 and 94, they died within months of each other.
So the house's history seemed a good omen for a new couple.
Months later, Laura gave birth to Ran in their bedroom, after having the two floors below her reinforced with steel joists to make sure her birthing pool did not plunge through the floor boards in the throes of labour.
“Ran is now the only person with Hallaton on his passport,” she said.
“And he’s the dictator of the house,” Ed said laughing.
But despite the happy, vibrant hive of activity that their home is, the last few months have not been entirely easy.
Laura suffered a miscarriage last year when she was three and a half months pregnant with twin girls.
She said: “It was a molar pregnancy where two sperm fertilise one egg so there are an extra set of chromosomes and I had eclampsia in early September.
“My body didn’t recognize that the babies had died, and the placenta grew like a tumour.
“If I did not have medical help, like so many of the women I’ve met on my travels don’t, it would have been fatal. One in seven women die in pregnancy or childbirth worldwide. It makes you hugely thankful to have western medicine.
“I felt awful with that pregnancy. I could barely get up off the couch, I started bleeding at 8 weeks and I was completely vulgar to Ed.
“I think he was relieved to go filming. He was like “Bye, I’ll go be homeless for two months instead of being here,'" Laura said jokingly.
“I’m almost in a good place now again after it.
“I’m not a patient person and I hate having to wait to get pregnant again but we have to wait until my hormone levels are back to normal.
“So we’ll go on our adventure in a month or so, and after that we’ll try again.
Laura is friendly but focused, occasionally slipping into a charming goofiness or cracking self-deprecating jokes.
She is beautiful, wearing no make-up on a face that nature made so perfectly it needs no further enhancement.
Her husband is unusually open for a TV personality, with the light and shade of unrepressed emotion and thought brightening and clouding his face like a shifting weather pattern. That openness and ability to connect with people is one of the things that makes him so likeable on screen.
Laura has been working on her first series of children's books based on ‘real adventures by real people’, which is due to be published by Award in June.
“I hate the idea of children growing up thinking that their self-worth comes from how big your cleavage is, or how short your skirt is, or how many guys stare at you in a day.
"I want the books to teach little girls and boys that self-worth comes from within, from what you can achieve in life and the goodness you can give to others."