THE idea seemed simple enough. The team behind the Great North Run would use its expertise to stage a similiar mass participation event in Ethiopia, a country whose runners had suppported the world's biggest half-marathon from the start.

Sports presenter Ian Payne and the Tyne Tees film crew travelled with them to Africa to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary. What no one, organisers or documentary-makers, realised was that even 21 years of the Great North Run couldn't prepare them for organising and filming such an event in one of the world's poorest nations.

What happened, from a portable toilet dilemma to a finishing line riot broken up by stick-wielding policemen, is recounted in The Great Ethiopian Run on Tyne Tees on Monday.

"We couldn't have afforded to just detach ourselves and say we're going to watch you organise the event," says Payne. "There were 12 of us who've seen such a mass participation event before so we all helped out. It was all hands on deck. We were putting up banners and controlling crowds. The worst thing was the sudden realisation that they had never seen anything like this before. The organisers thought they'd thought of every detail but they couldn't anticipate some things."

Setting foot in Ethiopia was literally stepping back in time. The country follows the Gregorian calendar. "If you ask someone there they'll tell you it's 1994. It's six years before they celebrate the Millennium," he explains. "And their daily clock begins at daybreak, which was six in the morning, so the race started at ten in the morning our time but it was four hours into the day for them."

It all began when North-East athletics supremo Brendan Foster heard, through a friend who'd been in Addis Ababa when the last Olympics were taking place, that the locals watched coverage on a big screen set up in the main square.

"He latched on to this and thought it was strange that here was the greatest running nation on Earth but the people don't know they were because they don't have access to the media," says Payne.

The idea of taking the Great North Run to Ethiopia was born, but it couldn't have happened without Ethiopian athletics hero Haile Gebrselassie. "He's like David Beckham and the King all rolled into one. You won't get a bigger Ethiopian hero than him," Payne says.

"He's absolutely idolised by the people, and he's stayed loyal to his nation. He continued to live there because he became aware that, although he travelled the world taking part in these fantastic spectacles, he was always going outside the country to events.

People were still talking about Live Aid, famine, drought and poverty. He was trying to persuade them Ethiopia has moved on and a lot of good things have come out."

Foster and John Caine, his right hand man at sports events company Nova, joined Gebrselassie to stage the Great Ethiopian Run. A main aim was to promote Aids awareness in a country where the illness is a big problem and an African-based condom manufacturer agreed to sponsor the event. It was also decided that any money raised would go to developing an athletics facility in Sandafa, near Addis Ababa.

"No one in the country had seen an event like this," says Payne. "Our story is not so much the way it was conceived or where the money was going but the challenge that the organising team from the western world had in seeing if they could use their skills out there. They had to sort out everything from sourcing medals and T-shirts to supplying bottled water for the runners."

With an expected 10,000 runners and twice as many spectators, things weren't going to be easy. Some problems associated with such a run became irrelevant. There was no need for a big clean-up operation to remove empty bottles as water containers are valuable commodities and would be quickly "removed" by the locals. The Nova team started planning for portable toilets, only to be told that the people didn't have toilets where they lived so why would they want them for the run. "At every level it was an amazing new experience," he says. "As John Caine says, 'organising a sports event isn't a science, it's an art form. You can't just take a book off the shelf and apply it anywhere in the world'."

"The day itself was chaotic. The start and finish line was over two carriageways of a 13-lane carriageway. These people had never seen a starting line. They just knew the race was going to start in the square, so they lined up across all 13 lanes. The starting line became irrelevant. No one forsaw that one."

The ending of the 10km race - won by Gebrselassie - was equally difficult. Scuffles broke out with people grabbing medals and T-shirts. The latter were made in Blackpool as the local cotton industry couldn't supply such big numbers in time. "There were riots and police with sticks hitting people," recalls Payne.

The desire for T-shirts is hardly surprising when you learn that one was worth a month's salary to a worker. The sponsor's giant banners disappeared quickly too - to be used to make the best houses in the street.

"In the build-up to the race, we went to see some of their living conditions and were invited by one boy to his home in a shanty town. It was very difficult to do a fly-on-the-wall kind of film because as soon as you stopped your vehicle it was surrounded by everyone begging.

"The English of the young children was surprisingly good. Their education system seems to be kicking in. Often it's the youngest in the family whose English is best. A lot of mums were being dragged around by six-year-olds saying, 'please mister, some money'."

Despite all this, he hopes the film will help change the western view of Ethiopia. "The main problem has been giving people the background to the country, to dispel some of the myths, although we did have to bribe customs' officers and it is a very poor nation," says Payne.

* The Great Ethiopian Run: Tyne Tees, Monday, 10.50pm.