A little more than seven million people spent a major chunk of Sunday night watching the first show in this season’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!. This, it turns out, is the smallest audience for a season opener since the series began in 2002, and was two million fewer than last year.
But that’s not the remarkable thing; it’s the fact that, still, seven million people didn’t have anything better to do with their Sunday night than watch one of Britain’s most divisive individuals and a maddeningly annoying young YouTuber (whatever that is) stick their heads in a box full of snakes.
At this point, I should concede that I’m A Celeb has for some time been one of my guiltiest pleasures, a hardy annual that brightens winter evenings by turning into entertainment some of our baser instincts, like voyeurism, sadism, and schadenfreude, for example. The programme, expertly curated and cleverly produced, has revived careers, rehabilitated reputations, made heroes of hitherto unknown figures, and is ITV’s biggest show of the year… but Nigel Farage and Nella Rose and the snakes? Give us a break. Even I may have reached peak I’m A Celeb.
Farage is reportedly being paid £1.5m for his appearance in the jungle, and given that there’s hardly any other person in this year’s line-up we either know or care about, and a publicly-acknowledged villain is a must-have for the cast list, it’s hardly surprising that he’s been able to dictate terms. There wouldn’t be a show this year without Farage. But what does that say about I’m A Celeb, and about those of us who tune in?
The plot line is easy enough to predict. Farage will be selected by the public to undertake all manner of nasty trials – he has already had his encounter with snakes, and has been forced to eat four types of animal genitalia – but he will play the lovable rogue for all it’s worth, and make suckers of us all. He’s not such a terrible geezer, after all, we’ll conclude. He’s a good sport – look at him eat that cow’s arse. And compared with Ms Rose and her asinine shrieking and pathological attention-seeking, he’s a model of thoughtfulness.
He won’t win, but he’ll be kept in the jungle long enough for ITV to feel they’ve had value for money. And meanwhile this whole process – established last year by Matt Hancock – is nauseating. By this device, we will briefly forget that Farage poisoned the body politic, introduced xenophobia into the mainstream, demonised immigrants, gave us Brexit, and succumb to his blokeish charm (such as it is). I even found myself being manipulated in this way on Sunday night, and felt sick as a result.
It’s already started. The restaurant critic Grace Dent, a serious person, was to be found hugging Farage on Tuesday night’s episode. “He’s a complete lunatic,” she said. “I respect that.”
For his part, Farage has a more calculating approach than some of the guileless ingenues on display. He wants, he says, “to reach the whole nation” and has worked out that if you are selected for the trials, you have “25 per cent of the air time”. Ah, the hubris of a politician, who believes the more we see them, the more we’ll like them. I have news for you, Nigel – the very opposite is true.
It’s been an astonishing feat of longevity for I’m A Celeb still to be on our screens, and with very few format changes, 21 years after Tony Blackburn became the first King of the Jungle. Ant and Dec are still good value, but there’s something in their demeanour this time round which makes me think that when they shout in unison at the top of the show “get me out of here”, they may now mean it.
How many more times can they, can we, can anyone, watch a disgraced politician eat a sheep’s udder? Enough, already.