Wot, no Matt? Last night’s opening episode of the 22nd series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! was very much a scene-setter, bigging up the two, high-profile likely fan favourites, Boy George and Mike Tindall, and keeping the obvious hate figure, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, in reserve. We have to wait at least until tonight (Monday), maybe even later, before we begin the process of voting repeatedly for Matt to chomp his way through bucketloads of marsupial penile gristle. Boo. Talk about delayed gratification.
Back in Australia after two years in Wales, this increasingly questionable and reductive franchise relies on a familiar mix of A, D and Y-list celebrities, and a policy of divide and rule. This year’s gaggle were introduced as two groups of five at sumptuous waterside locations in Queensland’s Gold Coast. Then two pairs of VIPs – “very isolated personalities,” giggled hosts Ant and Dec – were immediately split off before everyone made their gradual way to camp.
The first brace of VIPs, Love Island’s Olivia Attwood (who has presumably been designated this year’s waterfall bikini totty) and DJ Chris Moyles were bundled out of a helicopter at 10,000 feet, a by-now tiresome initiation rite of entry. Attwood expressed a wish to land “in one piece: both boobs and all the [dental] veneers [intact]”.
She showed rather more wit and self-awareness than Moyles, whose habitually sardonic on-air persona seems to have soured even as his profile and his weight has waned. Now super-slim, he moans that he’ll probably be remembered as “that fat bloke on Radio One”, rather than a pioneering broadcaster. Well, them’s the breaks, Chris.
Meanwhile, the other VIPs, TV presenter Scarlette Douglas and Boy George, were merely required to row a dinghy ashore from a yacht. Special treatment? It’s been reported that 80s icon George is the highest-paid contestant this year, on a fee of £879,000; that he’s been allowed to tart up his camp outfit “because he asked”; and that, as a vegetarian, he won’t have to nosh on anything sentient. Just saying.
Meanwhile, the other contestants were competing for the group’s first night supper, and the initial challenges sorted the wheat from the chaff. Former England lioness Jill Scott and TV presenter Charlene White steeled themselves to let go of a rope at the end of a gangplank atop a skyscraper. Comedian BabatuÌndeÌ AleÌsheÌ bottled it. No criticism: I’d have done the same.
The other threesome were sent down the river in a puttering boat to face horrors, like a low-rent version of Apocalypse Now. Rugby star Mike Tindall, who as Princess Anne’s son-in-law qualifies as a sort-of royal, thrust his bald head into an upturned boat full of spiders to win a star that represented vittles. Corrie actress Sue Cleaver rooted for fish eyes in bran tubs full of guts and insects for another.
Owen Warner, off of Hollyoaks – the youngest contender and seemingly a pec-flashing pretty-boy, who had clearly been set up to run away screaming from every challenge – delved into a waste pipe full of bugs to win a third. He, Tindall and Cleaver already have a workable, profane camaraderie going.
The original and remaining delight of this show is the way it creates unlikely friendships and casts jaded, forgotten or naff celebs in a new light. Who’d have bet on Tony Blackburn or Stacey Solomon as winners? Katie Price’s appearance in 2004 may come to be regarded as the highlight of her career, even if her jungle romance with Peter Andre didn’t last.
Of this year’s crew, Boy George is obviously the standout personality, and his acid commentary will be ratings gold in the to-camera diary monologues. But he and Douglas are the only ones whose mettle was untested last night, and who knows how he will cope with camp life (stop sniggering at the back).
Tindall and Scott, who both seem to have had their MBE’s grafted to their names in the credit sequence, clearly share an athlete’s toughness and strong will. They both seem clubbable and genial too: team players. Cleaver and White are clearly game. Moyles’s baked-in snark may not play well with the public. Attwood and Warner, on the evidence of last night’s show, could surprise us.
The VIPs face their first challenge tonight (Monday) and will enter the camp after that. Hancock’s introduction is unlikely to be easy, whenever it happens. He’s there as a whipping boy for the public’s anger against politicians, however he’s squared the decision to appear (and the reported £350,000 fee, “some” of which will be donated to charity) with his own ego. It has been rumoured that Hancock’s fellow love-cheat, comedian Seann Walsh, might also be a late entrant.
I’m a Celebrity… remains a consistent ratings winner for ITV two decades after its launch. An episode of the 2021 series that was disrupted by Storm Arwen, when the show was relocated to Wales during Covid, still got 33 per cent of that evening’s terrestrial audience in its timeslot.
Despite being a devotee of the early series, I’ve always been troubled by the format, though. Once you’ve seen one celeb gag on a witchetty grub you’ve seen them all. The casting is always cynical, though it can throw up surprises. And it’s lame that the winner’s prize is to sit in the camp alone, until called out for a larky debrief with Ant and Dec.
And now, with the cost of living crisis biting and the COP 27 climate talks underway, other questions intrude. Is it right or fun that a bunch of mostly already-rich people get flown across the world, then ferried around in speedboats and Rolls Royces, before cosplaying the life of the world’s poorest? With so much cruelty in the world, do we need confected sadism masquerading as entertainment?
Such matters will, I acknowledge, fade away the moment Matt Hancock enters the jungle camp with his “Hi Guys” grin and Teflon lack of shame or embarrassment. The challenges he’ll be put through will be an unedifying but irresistible piece of car-crash TV. Even Nadine Dorries – former culture secretary, 2012 contestant, and therefore the woman to beat in the Tory anus-gnawing stakes – is ghoulishly watching, according to her Twitter feed. God help Matt Hancock. Actually, don’t.
