To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the memory of Nigel Farage lying in a pit of snakes. For me, that was one of the most delicious moments ever in the long history of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, although the thought of Nadine Dorries getting her laughing gear around an ostrich anus in a Bushtucker Trial also makes me grin.
People you love to hate being made to do terrible things is one of the joys of the series, now entering its 24th season, but I’m worried about this year’s line-up. There’s usually a good mix of nice and nasty, but the cast of this series is too full of people who seem really decent and won’t enable me to use my overactive schadenfreude gene. Seeing people like Barry McGuigan, Alan Halsall and Oti Mabuse having a horrible time with mud, the nastier parts of animals and some big insects doesn’t quite work for me. Like a pantomime, I’m a Celeb needs a good villain.
So will this year’s series be too boring to be of any interest? Perhaps not. I have a sneaking suspicion that Coleen Rooney will bring a bit of grit to the oyster and provide some memorable moments.
There’s always been a sense of quiet power about her, which really came out in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ case when Coleen sued fellow footballer’s wife Rebekah Vardy for leaking stories from her Instagram account to the press. Rooney’s quiet detective work – writing fake posts on her Insta account to see if they were leaked, then revealing her discoveries on Twitter – was a work of genius, and it took some nerve to sue Vardy for libel, a type of case which is notoriously difficult to win.
Coleen Rooney has already won within the down-and-dirty (and very public) world of the law, and this shows she’s got the strength she needs to get through I’m a Celeb. But she’s also a bit of a lioness in her private life, too. She comes from a strong and loving Liverpool family. Her parents adopted her younger sister Rosie at age two after learning she suffered from the genetic disease Rhett syndrome. Until she died in 2013 at age 14, the girls were very close, with Coleen very protective of her sister. She and husband Wayne support several children’s charities.
And Coleen is a mum of four and a good cook, so there’s a very good chance she could end up as the matriarch of the camp. ‘Nice Mummies’ like Giovanna Fletcher and Stacey Solomon have won before, a good sign for a woman who, despite living a comfortable life, takes her motherly duties seriously and has left the family with a ton of instructions as to what to do whilst she’s in the Australian jungle.
Another point in her favour is that she’s lived through a tabloid nightmare in her early days of being in the public eye, when Wayne admitted to visiting prostitutes. If you can come out of an experience like that with your head high and your marriage and family together, then, frankly, you can do anything. I’m hoping that Coleen will bring out the confessional in some of the other campmates, as I reckon she’s got something of the agony aunt about her, so people could say more than they really intended. Things could get juicy…
Coleen Rooney is a smart, sassy woman who wants to reclaim a bit of herself by doing the show and letting the world know what she’s really like. She may surprise herself – and us – by what she gets up to on I’m a Celeb. The snakes should watch out.
