Every reality TV show loves an Irish contestant, and the fame is instant - but it takes balls, writes Rosita Boland.
Who's Fran Cosgrove? Well, he's male, for a start, should you be confused about the Fran bit. He's also Irish, and is one of the people currently residing in a clump of vegetation not far from Brisbane. It's the setting for the fourth series of ITV's I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, which kicked off last Sunday. The correct title for this show should of course be I Think I'm A Celebrity . . . But Nobody Knows Who I Am!.
One of the stock "personalities" on British reality television shows is an Irish person. Irish participants are dependable when it comes to straight talking, usually on for everything, and often refreshingly less precious than other contestants.
Dubliner Cosgrove fits the bill. Aged 26, he was once a bouncer for Westlife and met all sorts of fascinating people in this line of work. His claim to celebrity is that he was at one point engaged to an Atomic Kitten, Natasha Hamilton. They never made it to the altar, but they do have a son called Josh.
Cosgrove now owns a club called Trap in London. He's in I'm A Celebrity because, according to himself, "I decided to do the show because I have shied away from stuff like this before".
Cosgrove says he is "very, very single. I never look for romance, but if romance is out there looking for me, knocking on that door, I always open the door". Going into the rainforest - sorry, jungle - he revealed he hadn't had sex in three months and was hoping his fellow contestants would be glamour models.
He also vowed that he would "eat everything - even kangaroo balls" in the jungle. Word must have got out among the jungle critters. As the first contestant in the new series to take part in a bush tucker trial, he was staked to the ground and a variety of jungle wildlife were thrown on top of him.
These included yabbies, an Australian shellfish delicacy which looked exactly like small lobsters, complete with great big claws.
One camera-shy yabbie instantly disappeared up Cosgrove's shorts in the direction of the human version of the same area of the anatomy that he so confidently predicted he would eat, should they belong to a kangaroo. Only a measly four meals were won, because poor Fran brought the bush tucker trial to a speedy end when the yabbie started exercising its claws without compunction.
The ITV show also airs on TV3, which pulled in 307,000 viewers on the first night, a figure that has gone up to 340,000 on subsequent evenings.
So, Fran Cosgrove now has at least 340,000 more people in Ireland who know who he is.