Nick Knowles Comic Relief

Last year Nick travelled to Nairobi in Kenya with Davina McCall, Julian Perryman and Chris Frediani (DIY SOS) to carry out a 24 hr challenge: to get a water pipeline to a village that needed it so badly and build a community centre hall. The film helped raise millions for Comic Relief. It was an ambitious project but it was Nick and Davina's relationship with the people that seems to have touched a nerve with viewers.

The trip was a return visit for Davina: these were people she'd met when filming for Comic Relief 2 years previously - people whom Red Nose Day 2001 money had helped to move out of the slums to a piece of land of their own. The only land that they could afford was pretty desolate and miles from water - it desperately needed water and a community hall - hence the return visit.

'Davina was fantastic. She treated the entire village like her own family, showing photos from home and hugging everyone and she introduced me to them all. I felt a special bond with Ndwiga, an elderly chap who had just moved into his dream home. It was no more than a garden shed to us but it was the home he'd always wanted. His dream was a concrete floor, a real floor to stand on and to put his first-ever bed on. He'd slept his whole life on dirt floors in cardboard shanty towns with the constant fear of being crushed by bulldozers coming to clear the land.

The schedule was pretty tight but the boys and I decided we could probably knock him up a concrete floor in our lunch break so we went for it. High altitude and soaring temperatures meant we were pretty knackered when we'd finished but the look on his face when Ndwiga saw his floor meant everything to us.

I felt a bit silly when I saw the film afterwards, the emotion and physical tiredness just got to us all and I lost it a bit, but it was just such an incredible thing that so little could do so much'

After being asked to go to Zambia to make a film about the AIDS crisis I researched the issue and was shocked by the statistics. But nothing prepared me for what I saw there, for the suffering that seems to have engulfed almost the entire country. It was the hardest journey of my entire life.'

The film is due to be broadcast in the summer as part of the Sport Relief campaign. If you want to find out more take a look at www.sportrelief.com