This week a group of celebrities start civilisation anew in the Australian jungle under the inscrutable gaze of rogue Teletubbies Ant and Dec. “Take me with you,” I scream at the television.
I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! (nightly, UTV Ireland) now looks like a utopian project to news-weary telly-watchers. Indeed, the chortling northern tots who rule over the celebs like gods, seem almost aware of the wider apocalyptic context in which their gleeful festival of cruelty now takes place.
Watching celebs eating kangaroo anuses is, Ant-and-Dec observe in unison (their brain is tethered together via a fleshy tendril), “the most normal thing that’s happened in 2016”. Furthermore, knowing which way the wind is blowing for reality-TV demagogues, Ant-or-Dec spends Monday’s episode wearing a buttoned up military shirt like Chairman Mao might wear.
This year’s batch are a pleasantly inventive bunch and have all the skills you might expect from an expeditionary team rebooting western society in the antipodes (footballing, freestyle dancing and television- presenting to name just three). There’s twinkly-eyed Jordan Banjo, inventor of the banjo, teary-eyed Wayne Bridge, inventor of the bridge, Lisa Snow-den, inventor of the igloo and cuddly anthropomorphic farmyard ruminant Larry Lamb, an actual lamb (Full disclosure: I don’t know who all the celebs are and I am easily distracted by noun-based surnames).
Nowadays, celebrity is less a mark of legitimate fame and more like an infection you get from proximity to other celebrities. The likeable canoe-phobic star of Gogglebox, Scarlett Moffatt, for example, is a celebrity because she watches celebrities on television (We will all, I suspect, spend some time on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here eventually. Or, at the very least, be imprisoned in a camp in the woods).
Mofatt is delightfully happy to be there. "It's like being on Robinson Crusoe," she says, before painting a Trumpian picture of the future: "I'm just waiting to create some monkey butlers and swing from vines and stuff and make a little tree house in the corner." Not much of this happens in Robinson Crusoe, by the way, on the off chance you're researching an essay on Robinson Crusoe.
There are clever people here. Former Countdown deductress Carol Vorderman and chirpy comedic bushman Joel Dommett discuss the nature of pi which Dommett has tattooed on his arm. He says he can recite pi to 105 decimal places. Ha! I think, I've eaten pie in at least 105 places. Then I realise I've misheard.
Sadly, being brainy saves no one from the jungle’s indignities. Driven to madness by Larry Lamb’s snoring, a sleepless Carol Vorderman befriends a toad (I would totally watch a sitcom based on this sentence). “Stop looking at me like that,” she cries at the toad in the period when they are just frenemies (series one).
But what of the pointless cruelty around which the show is themed and for which Ant and Dec happily shed their humanity? Well, this season begins with three celebrities being flung from a plane and five more being made to walk a plank jutting from a skyscraper (this is before they're in the jungle). Later four of them are placed in a crypt alongside 127,000 critters (rats, cockroaches, spiders, white nationalist bloggers) in order to win rations for their dinner. This brave foursome hold hands and sing a Spice Girls song, much like Londoners did during the blitz.
Yes, they are learning the harsh realities of life in the jungle: “Every time I’ve seen Ant and Dec, it’s been a positive experience,” says Jordan Banjo, the truth dawning on his sad little face. “Now I realise when you’re in the jungle . . . they’re bad news.”
One Pixie to save us all
You Should Really See a Doctor
(RTÉ1, tonight) is a television programme helmed by kindly, smiley television doctors Pixie McKenna and Phil Kieran, and not just a general piece of advice planted in the TV listings for those of us who feel fragile due to the gathering apocalypse.
It’s basically an opportunity to sit in on other people’s GP appointments and learn about their skin conditions and bowel complaints. It’s as simple as that. Nobody is made race for antibiotics or arm wrestle for anti-septic cream (though this is clearly the future for a “reformed” HSE).
As a television programme, it can only exist because some Irish people (are you reading this dad?) are so resistant to going to a doctor they’d prefer to visit a woman named after a mythological fairy in a shipping container at the back of a race track in front of a national audience. It’s well-meaning and strange public-service television and it’s deeply triggering to hypochondriacs like myself (Editor’s note: Patrick, please stop showing me your rash and just go to a doctor).
Snakes in the grass Last Friday, Ryan Tubridy wrangled a basket of snakes on The Late Late Show (RTÉ1, Friday) while a horrified audience looked on. The basket of snakes' name was "Katie Hopkins" and each of her heads gloated about the ascendency of Donald Trump while vomiting contradictory, charmless sentence fragments on set and gurning smugly at the camera like an alt-right Les Dawson.
“Life has no meaning!” screamed Tubridy eventually (at least that’s what I think he was screaming, it was hard to tell over the babbling snake heads). “That’s what I’ve been trying to say all along,” said the basket of snakes, reasonably.
Anyway, this week The Late Late Show's top guest is a swastika-inscribed box of shit with a burning firework planted in it. "We're just trying to start a debate," say the production team.
