VH1's ''reality'' show chronicles the garish, almost inconceivable relationship between hip-hop pixie Flavor Flav and statuesque former action star Brigitte Nielsen.

He's 5-foot-8. She's 6-2. He's from New York. She's from Rxdovre, Denmark. She speaks six languages. He has trouble making himself understood in English. She chain-smokes, even while dining. He won't touch any kind of food that isn't readily obtained from a drive-through window.

About all they have in common is that he often wears a Viking helmet with horns while she, as you may have noticed in such B movies as ''Red Sonja,'' looks like a genuine Valkyrie.

But together they have chemistry. Bizarre and volatile, but chemistry nonetheless. Imagine a Bronx Pepe Le Pew relentlessly pursuing a Nordic giraffe.

The first question people always ask when they see ''Strange Love'' is: Are they putting us on? Or do they really care for each other?

''It's real,'' insists Mark Cronin, the show's executive producer, ''because even when we're not filming them, when they're alone, they are like that all the time. They really are. They're crazy for each other. And just plain crazy. It's like a harmonic convergence of insanity.''

In an interview, Flav, 45, the onetime front man for the seminal rap act Public Enemy, says, ''The relationship I got with Brigitte is unique and real. It is nothing phony. Everything is all real.''

A few days later, Nielsen calls from a hotel in Manhattan.

''When I woke up this morning, I did not know what language to speak,'' says the jet-lagged celebrity, who was once married to Sylvester Stallone. Nielsen has fashioned an unlikely second career from reality shows. ''Strange Love'' is her fifth, including series in Denmark, Italy and Britain.

This one is a hit by basic-cable standards, averaging 1.4 million viewers a week in January. Most of them fall within VH1's target audience of 18- to 49-year-olds. Flav and Nielsen presumably would resonate most with viewers on the upper end of that range, since their appeal is largely nostalgic. ''Fear of a Black Planet,'' Public Enemy's most popular album, came out in 1990, and Nielsen's biggest film, ''Beverly Hills Cop II,'' was released in 1987.

The couple have flown in, he from Los Angeles, she from Germany, to do publicity for ''Strange Love,'' which was shot in October. The reunion isn't going well.

''I told him early this morning it's over,'' says the actress, 41. ''I will always love him and respect him, but I can't handle him.''

A publicist calls back a few hours later, advising the reporter to disregard Nielsen's comments. She had a tiff with Flav the night before and angrily told him off. But the two have made up in the interim. In fact, the publicist says she can see them kissing and snuggling on the monitor as they shoot a segment for Fox's ''Good Day Live.''

Obviously, the catalyst for this couple is the camera.

They met last year as participants in the third season of ''The Surreal Life,'' VH1's has-beens-in-a-house reality show. It had Brigitte and Flav living in close quarters with Charo, Dave Coulier of ''Full House,'' Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block, and Ryan Starr, an early reject from ''American Idol.''

There was some initial sparring, and then the twosome, after the obligatory hot-tub scene, ended up in bed together.

What in the world did they see in each other?

''Yo, the thing that connected me to her was her realness,'' Flav says. ''She was honest.''

''The fact that I understood him,'' Nielsen responds. ''He is a very misunderstood person. The more I got to know him, the more I saw that.''

Cronin, who produced ''The Surreal Life,'' puts a different spin on it.

''I think the two of them calculated a little bit'' to maximize their camera time, he says. ''She was physically aggressive with him in the beginning and he says he was scared. So he started flirting with her as a way to deal with that.

''From her point of view, I think she is into any and all flirtation from any male of the species. So they bonded.''

After the 12-day ''Surreal Life'' shoot, Nielsen and Flav got a room. ''We stayed for four days at the Mondrian Hotel and partied,'' Flav says. ''A lot of people was bummed to see us together. Hey, listen, God put us all on this Earth to share it. Who is to say people of certain types and sizes can't be together?''

Then Flav returned to New York and she flew back to her 26-year-old fiance in Milan, Italy. Nielsen met him last year in Switzerland, where he was working as a waiter and where she went to get a divorce from husband No. 4, race-car driver Raoul Meyer.

According to Flav - who is working on a solo album scheduled for release next month - he has never asked her about former romances (including onetime New York Jets star Mark Gastineau) or marriages. ''That don't put money in my pocket. I don't care about her past. I care about her future.''

Living on different continents would have effectively ended the curious liaison between Flav and Nielsen. Except the folks at VH1 thought that with a little prodding, the pair had the makings of a spinoff series. So they bought Flav a plane ticket to Milan.

Getting him there with a film crew was ''the only artifice,'' says Cronin who describes ''Strange Love'' as ''organic but produced.''

''On his own,'' he adds, ''I don't think Flav knows how to dial his phone internationally.''

With the cameras rolling, the relationship was quickly rekindled, to the bafflement of Nielsen's fiance, Mattia Dessi, whose existence Flav impressively disregards. In the Feb. 13 installment, the fifth of 10 episodes, Flav meets and cooks dinner ("FFC - Flav Fried Chicken'') for three of her four sons, and persuades her to fly to New York with him.

Making a series with this pair was a real adventure. It's apparent from how late both of them were for interviews that their schedules are at best guesstimates.

''They live by their own clock, so we had to be really flexible,'' Cronin says. ''But when you sign up for the gig of following these crazy people around, you have to embrace that.''