Just when the Australians thought their favourite game show contestants couldn't trample the nation's identity anymore, they have. Those gorgeous boys and girls slogging it out for the £875,000 (US$ 1 million) bounty on Survivor: The Australian Outback have in recent weeks done about as much damage to Australian-American relations as any amount of colliding spy planes. You see, somebody has been rather naughty and gone and nicked part of the Great Barrier Reef of all things. The Australians are seething. The show was filmed in the outback in North Queensland and is now being broadcast over all the world. It pits contestants against each other in set tasks as they struggle to survive among the crocodiles and man-eating spiders of the native bush. The least popular contestant, or he or she who is deemed to pose the greatest "threat" to the others, is voted off the show at a daily Tribal Council. The last man standing pockets £875,000, and everybody else goes away with a good tan, and a few stone lighter to boot, thanks to the meagre rations. Viewers all over the world love it. In America alone more than 40 million tune in to every episode. But Down Under, the survivors have out-stayed their welcome. First they killed a wild pig in the outback on camera. Then came the story of the show's producers paying two Aborigines just £342 (800 Australian dollars) to parade around in kangaroo skins for more than two weeks as token "wild natives". Following hot on the heels of all that came news that the show's crew had been ferried around the country by the Royal Australian Air Force to the tune of £128,490's worth of flights without offering so much as a fiver petrol money. But in an episode televised here last Wednesday, the survivors struck a devastating blow to the national Australian psyche when Colby, perhaps the most annoying of the bunch (although it is close), returned from a day trip at the Great Barrier Reef with bits of coral for the other contestants. It must be remembered that is the man who once said: "When I wake up in the morning, there's two things I'm thankful for. I'm thankful I'm alive and I'm thankful I'm a Texan". Nobody had thought to tell him that taking the coral was a crime punishable by a £47,115 fine. When The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority learned of the incident they were outraged, and now a formal investigation has been launched. The matter has even been raised at cabinet. Julia Austin, a spokeswoman for the authority, said the incident was particularly worrying because "millions of Americans and Australians were being told that you can take coral from the Great Barrier Reef".

"When you are talking about 14 million Americans coming over here you are talking about a lot [of coral]," she said.