To the Australian jungle, where the most successful politician of his generation/seven-times-failed UK parliamentary candidate Nigel Farage is appearing on popular reality format I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! “As for little me,” stealth diva Nigel confided to the ITV cameras on Wednesday, “there is a lot of speculation after they lose the next election, maybe Nigel becomes leader of the Tory party one day – so there’s a lot of chatter about whether it’s going to happen. I have no idea.”
Thank you for sharing, dear old “little me” – and for that bonus reference to yourself in the third person. It’s rare to see a politician lay out their personal ambitions and the path towards them with quite such sledgehammer precision, and arguably rarer still to see it shortly after ITV has shown his naked arse in an outdoor shower. An earlier vignette had seen Little Me stagily disappointed not to be selected for the bushtucker trial. “If you do the challenges,” Farage explained sotto voce to fellow contestant Grace Dent, “it’s 25% of the airtime.”
As everyone knows, the only reason people do I’m a Celebrity is for more fame or more money or both. Little Me is no different, and at least we’ve been spared him spouting the usual reality TV fibs that it’s to challenge himself, or to grow as a person, or to find out what he’s capable of. Farage has, however, farted out the old chestnut about wanting people to see the real him. Many will believe they already know quite enough about the real Nigel – but if he does pull off his Conservative party leadership heist (intensely debatable), it won’t be because of his appearance on this show.
Nevertheless, a jungle stint offers revelatory moments the political programmes can’t reach. Farage initially appeared to be treating I’m a Celeb a bit like one of those, turning up with some meticulously scripted off-the-cuff lines. Encountering some snakes, he explained: “I dealt with some snakes in the European parliament!” Faced with having to eat some anus or other, he announced he’d “got the back end of this deal!” Several days in, you sense he’s down to his last supplies of joke-effect patter. After that, we’ll see.
Reality formats are by their nature exposing. It is simply not possible to game them completely. Sooner or later you get tired or hungry or bored or detached from reason, and keeping a lid on your authentic self becomes less possible. It doesn’t have to be some spectacular meltdown that ends up revealing you. Your authentic self might be – to pluck an example from the air – just a small, tetchy and emotionally necrotic little man who would sacrifice any dignity for a tilt at power, the wielding of which he’d be wildly unsuited to, on account of the personal smallness.
Then again, Farage is a harder nut to crack than most reality contestants, as he has essentially been on transmit since the 1990s. The period after that date has pretty much been one long media interview/speech/piece-to-camera, with Nigel much happier on the road, meeting his public and having proper-fucking-lunches, than being at home while one or other of his former wives did his emails and the children and all the other things chaps like him supposedly struggle with. Farage has zero hinterland. I once asked him about his favourite movie, and for an agonising stretch it was quite clear he couldn’t actually think of the names of any movies at all.
To watch him in the jungle is to watch an emotional black hole trying very hard not to come across as one. When another campmate cries or is distressed, Little Me is mesmerisingly out of his depth. The politician part of him knows he’s expected to comfort them in some way, but the human part of him doesn’t know how. Are you supposed to pat them ineffectually on the shoulder? What are the words? This is someone who experiences emotion only as the twitch of a phantom limb. It’s quite helpful knowing this about someone who apparently seeks to run the country.
Having said that, people see what they want to see, and while I now see a man maxing out on baths and showers because it guarantees an unspecified per cent of the airtime, others will see a man who simply believes cleanliness is next to godliness. Some will regard whining about tidying up as redolent of the blitz spirit.
Whatever your interpretation of the jungle Rorschach, though, the criticism ITV has drawn for even booking Farage is absurd. I can’t think of anything more patronising than the tacit implication that while the person decrying ITV sees through Farage all too well, the idiots who watch these kinds of shows don’t. As someone who does watch these kinds of shows, might I venture that the criticism is not a whole lot more than the paternalism of the bien pensants? Perhaps viewers should be allowed to make up their own minds.
Farage might not be the hanky-clutchers’ cup of tea, and he absolutely isn’t mine, politically speaking. (Good reality booking, though.) But who are they to think their sensibilities should always take preference over those of people with whom they disagree? Not to mention Brexit or anything, but this endless knowing-best springs from the same impulse that decided to call the campaign for a second referendum the People’s Vote. Had we not already had a people’s vote – or were the people who voted for the wrong result not really people at all?
As for the idea of “normalising” Farage, it seems axiomatic to have to point out that quite a lot of people think Farage is normal. While his haters are under no compunction to know them socially, I never really know precisely what “normalising” means, and I suspect those fond of using it don’t either. It always seems a very woolly term that oversimplifies far more complex currents and drives. These currents are part of the reason Farage got the call for the jungle. What makes a good reality booking is something in the ether – which is to say, it reflects a mood that is already out there, rather than creating it in the first place.
Yet the way some people have talked about Farage’s jungle booking suggests the mere fact of it is akin to whichever event in the 1930s they could muster three bullet points on. What overblown rubbish. If this country honestly has ceded control of its political destiny to the I’m a Celeb bookers, then – and I truly hate to break it to us – it’s just possible that we have already lost.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
