Life is filled with questions: "Why are we here?"; "Who or what made the universe?"; "What is the good life?"; "Why am I watching failed X-Factor contestant Jake Quickenden transporting pig testicles in his mouth while covered in insects?"
This week I’ll try answering the most difficult of these questions.
Many years ago a bunch of executives came up with some television concepts to see them through the noughties. The working titles were: “poor people crying”, “rich people crying”, “fat people crying”, “children crying” and “celebrities crying”. They even had one called “the audience at home crying”. For that, they just sent everyone a mirror so we could look into our own, black, soulless eyes and weep.
“Celebrities crying” was particular popular, and for good reason. By the early 21st century there was a dangerous celebrity surplus. An explosion of cable stations, reality shows and a lot of lead in the water resulted in our cities being overrun by “singer-slash-models”, scripted- reality “personalities” and “girlfriend/boyfriend ofs”. These damned souls wandered our streets clutching champagne glasses, hoping to be “papped” or “kiss-and-telled”.
The most humane thing to do was, clearly, to cull them, but it was felt that this would be an awful waste of delicious celebrity tears. So, in 2002, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here ("celebrities crying") was launched. Now, each year, 12 celebrities are transported to a squalid jungle camp resembling the one in 1980s POW drama Tenko, where they are gently starved and humiliated by terrifying two-headed, light-entertainment hydra Ant-&-Dec.
This year's candidates include French resistance fighter Vicki Michelle (from 'Allo 'Allo!), war reporter and foot-in-mouth-sufferer Michael Buerk, and diminutive walking-enthusiast Tinchy Stryder.
When not being actively tormented, the contestants are bored and listless, like depressed polar bears at the zoo. Ex-football player Jimmy Bullard enlivens proceedings by hiding a piece of fruit. The fruit is found. “Classic Bullard bants,” observes the chillingly chucklesome Ant-&-Dec.
Jake Quickenden, who dislikes wearing shirts, bides his time flirting with singer-slash-model Nadia Forde and former Hugh Hefner girlfriend Kendra Wilkinson. “You smell like Bigfoot’s dick,” he says to Wilkinson, before likening her to “a feral dog”. (I know. He had me at “Bigfoot’s dick”.)
Some celebrities are summoned to a hollowed-out rock by the sound of a kookaburra (you know the way yourself) and given secret tasks to perform. Later, everyone jumps in the pond, where Bullard lifts up ex-Tory MP Edwina Currie while shouting "Politics! Politics!" This is how Bullard thinks politics works. And, as politicos are well aware, it is how politics works.
“Bushtucker trial” is Ant-&-Dec’s phrase for ritual humiliation. Wilkinson is driven to tears retrieving stars from lizard-filled skulls and defaced paintings. But Melanie Sykes thrives while deflecting rats and carrying rotten meat in her bare hands.
Due to Sykes’s “triumph” (words lose meaning here) the prisoners get treats. Buerk, who’s been to warzones, is almost moved to tears by some cashew nuts. Nadia Forde is sent a childhood doll, which she will presumably be clutching when the monstrous Ant-&-Dec rob the last of her sanity.
Then Ant-&-Dec turns to Quickenden and says: “Let’s get you into the cube.” This sentence has never heralded anything good. In the “Critter Cube”, Quickenden performs Sisyphean feats of pointlessness while besieged by insects, eels and reptiles. Each task is first demonstrated by a large, silver-masked, entity called “the body”, who I like to think of as “Ant-&-Dec’s freakish child”. First Quickenden must stack plastic cylinders while covered in green ants (but not green Decs). “[It’s like] being stung with nettles,” he says.
“Yes, that’s what it feels like,” says Ant-&-Dec, despite not actually having feelings.
Quickenden also plays a balancing game while wearing a snake, counts eels in a tank and transfers balls from a box of crabs to a box of scorpions. It’s basically the Smurfit School’s MBA programme.
Later some celebrities are imprisoned in a “shed of dread” (the TCD MBA programme?) and Wilkinson and Currie argue about the nature of the self. “I come from the reality world,” explains an emotional Wilkinson, who has spent most of her life on television. Out in the unreality world, I stare into my mirror and weep delicious salty tears.
