The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained politicians, and they were two particularly hot – in the potato sense – politicians. Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage carried baggage with them into the camp. In Hancock’s case, radioactive baggage.
None of that this year. Ant and Dec opined last year that they were a little sick of politicians on the show, and ratings took a small tumble. There was a feeling that Celeb was a place viewers went to escape from the sturm und drang of current affairs, and that it needed to return to drama between the standard variety of reality TV bigheads – pop stars, presenters and models.
In 2025, I want to watch the jungle burn
It can be dangerous listening to this sort of feedback. When I worked in TV soaps, audience research often came back with similar findings, viewers clamouring for a bit of quiet, for nice things to happen to their favourites and for the villains to be written out. Viewers think they want that, but give it to them and they switch off pretty damn quick.
So I was worried that this year’s I’m A Celebrity might be dull, and there have been occasions when it has been dull. You often, with previous series, got the feeling that the producers have had to pare down the footage and leave out some great bits because of an embarrassment of riches, bulging at the seams of the slot. But this year some extremely minor dramas – Melvin making a mild remark about Dean possibly not being fully committed to his chores, or Jane being cheesed off by the washing-up, a bit – have made the cut. They have even made the ‘coming up!’ reel at the beginning of the show. In the main body of the episodes we are also seeing the time-killing dullness of camp life, often described in their exit interviews by previous contestants, but never actually put before us until now: games of I Spy and I Went To The Shops.
None of the campmates is an extreme personality. They are all calibrated within the same, pretty narrow temperamental range. Even DJ Dean McCullough, who was styled as the livewire, is at heart very ordinary. One Boy George or Dr Gillian McKeith would’ve sent the balloon up, but there was nobody with that level of edge.
There is no grotesquely obvious shirker, nobody awkward or reserved or spiky. The older campmates–- Barry McGuigan, Jane Moore and the Rev Richard Coles – have settled in nicely. Perhaps significantly there is only one campmate under 30, influencer GK Barry, who despite her bluff tone and slightly eccentric take on the world is an eminently sensible soul. She does think world war two happened in the 1960s, but that’s our education system for you and she can hardly be blamed.
Much of the sniping drama and madness of previous runs was supplied by older contestants, so this doesn’t necessarily count for anything. One might have expected columnist Jane Moore or singer Tulisa Contostavlos to generate sparks, and in different surroundings they might well do, but there was nothing much to create friction here.
It is unusual not to feel interested in the results of the trials or the evictions. Nobody stands out positively or negatively. They are all fine, and you’d be happy for any one of them to win it.
That sounds like a disaster, but it’s been a bit of a tonic. It’s been quite nice to see people getting along with each other, but – thank God – not nice in a twinkly, sickly way.
I may not be selling this very well. But in an age where every news cycle brings with it a fresh outrage that would’ve stopped the country in its tracks for days back in 1994, the camp has been a little oasis. Oh yes, you think, people can be okay, we can rub pretty amiably along. I didn’t think we British could still do that.
Next year, though, I want to see the place erupt. The ranks of reality shows have been, disappointingly, not filled yet by defenestrated Tory MPs. Surely Michael Fabricant at least would’ve been a shoo-in for this run, if it hadn’t instituted a ‘no politicians’ rule? In fact, I’d like to see an all-politician/public figure version of Celeb next time. John Bercow, Dr David Starkey, Anna Soubry, Dominic Cummings, Sue Gray, Penny Mordaunt, Louise Haigh, Jolyon Maugham and Carol Vorderman. Set them all loose in the camp for 2025 and watch that jungle burn.
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