Name: Lady Colin Campbell.
Age: 66.
Appearance: Long flowing hair, red fleece gilet.
And she’s an aristocrat, is she? Yes, a bit tenuously. She spent a year in the 70s married to someone called Lord Colin Ivar Campbell, since when she’s continued to style herself “Lady” and call herself “Colin”.
How innovative. Who doesn’t love a dotty aristocrat, eh? Tony Hadley. He and Lady Colin are both currently appearing in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and they’ve fallen out after he mistakenly nominated her as one of the laziest members of the camp. “I have five tiaras and I turned down one of the richest men on Earth,” she declared during her rebuttal.
I thought posh people were supposed to enjoy their tiaras quietly? We all are really, but Lady Colin isn’t too hung up on politeness. She is most famous for writing Diana in Private, the salacious book that first claimed Princess Diana had extramarital affairs and suffered from bulimia. Since then, in other books, she’s made some fairly wild claims about parentage in the royal family.
That sounds like a fun career. How did she get into it? She was born into a grand family in Jamaica and, as a result of a genital defect, mistakenly raised as a boy called George until she was a teenager. Following corrective surgery, she lived as Georgia instead, began modelling, married Lord Colin, had some high-society flings, worked in Harrods, and now owns the knackered Castle Goring in Sussex. And she needs money.
The standard route then. Pretty much. It’s also given her a very unusual accent: part-Jamaican, part-posh-Scots. In the end, she sounds like Rastamouse pretending to be Irish.
I think I understand why the producers of I’m a Celebrity included her. “[I have been] roped in to be sport for the oiks,” Lady Colin says, which gets it about right.
But how will she cope with all those horrid, yucky things she will have to do? Really rather well, as it happens. For her first bushtucker trial she was required to eat live crickets, beach worms, a turkey testicle, camel lips and a pig’s eyeball, and demolished them gleefully with a knife and fork.
The benefits of boarding school, eh? Something like that.
Do say: TV has a new superstar!
Don’t say: For a week.
