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London - Britain's Channel 4 television, which recently broadcast the country's first public autopsy for 170 years, is to show a Chinese artist eating the flesh of a dead baby, a British newspaper reported Monday.

The bizarre act will be shown in a documentary called "Beijing Swings", which looks at extreme practices of Chinese artists, according to The Guardian.

The programme, to be shown on British screens late Thursday, also shows a man drinking wine that has had an amputated ***** marinaded in it.

"The programme will be controversial and will shock some viewers but a warning will be given before it goes out on air," the paper quoted a Channel 4 spokesman as saying.

Viewers will see stills of artist Zhu Yu biting into a stillborn child. He says on the programme: "No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people.

"I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it." Zhu, who is a Christian, adds that religion has had a major impact on his work.

On November 20, Channel 4, which is a free-to-air terrestrial channel, filmed maverick German doctor, Professor Gunther von Hagens, carrying out Britain's first public autopsy in nearly two centuries, despite a public outcry and threats of police action.

The autopsy was performed on the corpse of a 72-year-old German man who had drunk up to two bottles of whisky a day and was a heavy smoker for the last 50 years of his life. - Sapa-AFP