ROSS KEMP has been dreaming about Afghanistan since he returned from the front line of Helmand Province.

In one nightmare, he is playing football against the Taliban in the dark and the ball is an explosive. The opponents are wearing Afghan dishdasha robes, he is wearing body armour.

No-one knows when the explosive is going to go off, so they keep passing it back and forth across the halfway line.

“I always awoke before the explosion, safely in my comfortable bed at home,” he writes in his new book to accompany his award- winning Sky1 series, Ross Kemp On Afghanistan.

Anyone who missed the two documentary series filmed in 2007 and again in 2008, missed a frightening, exciting, eye- opener of what the war is really like out there.

Kemp joined his father’s old regiment, the Royal Anglians, and after training on Salisbury Plain and learning how to use the SA80 A2 standard rifle of the British Army, he and his camera crew found themselves in the thick of it in the Taliban stronghold.

The series wasn’t airbrushed, he wasn’t reporting from a distance like many war correspondents - it was real. During their time out there they were ambushed, shot at frequently and saw death first-hand.

They ate the same unpalatable ration packs as the troops, suffered the same discomfort of searing 50-degree heat and accompanying hygiene problems. There was no sneaking off to some five-star hotel when filming was over for the day.

Today, he talks candidly about his time there, but you sense he’s wary of journalists, and there’s an edge, a mistrust, a fear of hidden agendas in anything which appears in print about him.

As someone who was married to Rebekah Wade, the first female editor of The Sun, until their divorce earlier this year (although they had been separated for several years), he probably knows the machinations of the media better than most and has always refused to discuss his private life. Today is no exception.