Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. Most of the celebrities summoned together for I’m a Celebrity… South Africa, the school reunion from hell, look remarkably chipper a decade or two after their first appearances. Paul Burrell (Diana), Helen Flanagan (Corrie), Fatima Whitbread (Olympics), Carol Vorderman (TV brain box), Amir Khan (boxing), Jordan Banjo (dancer), Phil Tufnell (cricketer), and Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays) are all instantly recognisable, and likeable. Janice Dickinson, being the only American on the scene, cheerfully embarrasses all concerned when she asks most of them, basically, who on earth they are. Flanagan explains that she was an actor on Coronation Street – “Oh, I’ve heard of that” – and Tufnell has a go at explaining cricket. Poor Whitbread is asked “are you Italian?”, as if it’s a job. Dickinson also has the annoying habit of speaking without any volume control, as if she’s Brian Blessed addressing a public meeting at the Albert Hall. I suspect she’ll be making an early exit.
Ant and Dec, who have a preternatural tendency to immature with age, describe the get-together as “the best are back”, but I can’t help feeling that it might be more a question of which celebs have a little more time on their hands these days. Still, as Ryder observes in the Bush Telegraph, they’re all “dead natural, down to earth… don’t seem to be any knobheads”. That’s fair enough, but sadly his happy assessment of those who’ll be keeping him close company for the next few weeks is shattered by the arrival of a late addition to the cast, Gillian McKeith. You may remember her for her pseudoscientific televised studies of poo some years ago.
The last time McKeith and Ryder met each other in the jungle, they ended up behaving like a couple of chimps at the zoo chucking their bodily waste at each other. The pair, with such an ugly history, have obviously been added to provide guaranteed friction and stress to the proceedings. Poor old Ryder has a face on him like he’s been constipated for a fortnight when he sees McKeith emerge from a giant trunk, which seems appropriate given her semi-professional interest in colonic irrigation. It’s a sadistic and pointless match, obviously, but then again the whole show is as sadistic and pointless as ever too, and just as dull.
If the celebs are ageing well, the same cannot be said for the show. The format for this pre-recorded spin-off is a little different – there’s no phone-in or online voting, and the celebrities are competing with each other to stay in through success in their tests – but it’s still tediously familiar. There are the usual creepy crawlies, rodents, snakes, a bit of screaming, some ritualised displays of fear, the routine 50-metre bungee jump and of course the campsite and its unsatisfactory sanitary arrangements, albeit a slightly posher set-up than they’ve inhabited before.
A high point is probably when Burrell declares himself surprised to be invited to “put my hand into a hole”, a line delivered in commendable deadpan fashion, with just the tiniest hint of camp in his voice. There is also some nonsense with some giant red balloons, again designed to maximise the scope for puerile, but not very good, banter. As ever, Ant and Dec labour their appallingly scripted, unfunny, smutty remarks (“who’s going to go head first into the bush?”). Even the breathtaking scenery and thumping incidental music can’t mitigate the sense that everyone’s just going through the motions again. Especially Gillian McKeith.
