We have the British to thank for the TV reality show, so it's only fitting that they can do a brilliant parody of the bloody thing as well.

	"SPEAK FOR ENGLAND" By James Hawes Macadam/Cage ($23)

"Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million" is the title of the imaginary extreme reality show in James Hawes' new novel that strands six ordinary Britons in a New Guinea jungle and waits for them to crack.

The last one standing gets the two million pounds.

It's the money that lands debt-ridden Brian Marley in the steamy, rotting, crocodile-infested place and it's his determination to prove to son Tommy that he does really amount to something that puts him on the brink of winning.

"One by one his rivals had given up, their greed for money and their lust for modern sainthood, media fame, finally giving way under the unspeakable, crawling, winged nightmare of the rainforest."

As the next-to-last contestant -- "a balding, divorced middle-aged schoolteacher from Swansea" -- crawled toward the rescue helicopters, his left leg already eaten by gangrene, Marley was poised for greatness.

It comes, eventually, not by money or media fame, but through one of the most entertaining plots found in recent fiction.

When the rescue copters crash killing all aboard, Marley is saved by a modern version of "The Lost Colony," a hardy band of Britons stranded on the island in a 1958 plane crash.

Led by the crusty "Headmaster," the tribe has reproduced not only new generations, but the mind set of England in the 1950s when it vied with the United States for world leadership. The crash was based on a real one, the loss without a trace in February '58 of a Comet, the troubled British jetliner, en route to Australia carrying a group of talented schoolchildren for scholastic games.

The Headmaster believes that a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West has destroyed England, meaning it's up to him and his colony to preserve the tradition, from honoring Queen Elizabeth to caning disobedient lads.

It's a vision of England remembered now only from old films and Ian Fleming novels when "real" Englishmen gave the Reds, other foreigners and of course, the poofs, a good cracking they wouldn't soon forget.

Marley does his best to describe 21st century England to the colony, now a place where the Labor Party "nowadays likes millionaires and private businesses." He also tells it about a series of novels popular with young readers:

"Some books by an Englishwoman about a secret boarding school full of ghosts and things where boys and girls who are born special get taken to learn magic."

The Headmaster is at first baffled, then delighted:

"Well, if we beat the Reds without firing a shot and we're still pally with the Yanks and we can still send our chaps in with armour and air support halfway round the world and everyone's given up on all that socialism and unions claptrap and we don't have to worry about nuclear buggery if we put a foot wrong and good old Elizabeth is still in Buck House and we're even winning at rugger."

With Marley's help, the colony is hauled back to England where the Headmaster's no-nonsense approach soon lands him in No. 10 Downing Street and he begins to transform Britain into his utopian, immigrant-free vision -- with one hilarious catch.

Hawes is under no illusions about "the good old days," and despite the problems of modern Britain, the Headmaster's solutions threaten the nation's best tradition -- democracy.

We Yanks will find it all great fun, but some of the satire could make our English cousins a bit uncomfortable.