Another year of I’m a Celebrity is over and I find myself feeling increasingly sorry for the participants. I really do. It’s hard for them. A flood of unrecognisable know-nothings thrown in to face the heat of the jungle. Barely fed and packed in like sardines. Out of their comfort zone. Burning up in the stage lights. You think I’m talking about the celebrities? No, no, no – it’s the poor spiders I feel sorry for. I’m a Celebrity is more a show about spiders, and our attitude to them and their kind, than it is about seeing celebrities “beneath the makeup”.
The sight of The Only Way is Essex star Ferne McCann, in Sunday’s final, picking up a glass with a very alive and oh-so-large spider in it, and seeing her chug the whole desperately alive arachnid down, was a sight to behold. If ITV set out to shock, congratulations. It was shocking. McCann looked and sounded like David Bowie choking on a mouthful of electrified liquorice. At one point it looked almost like the half-dead spider might climb back out of her mouth. It was horrific, and this being ITV, there was no message or irony to it. Dress it up however you like, but I’m a Celebrity is hardly a subversive comment on the celebrity idyll. It’s about ratings and this show, after 15 years, still appears (inexplicably) to deliver an audience of millions.
So why did ITV deem it OK to give a celebrity the opportunity to eat a live spider? A living animal with eyes and a brain and all that … why is that OK? My feeling is that, after so many series, the producers knew that eating a live animal would add a level of thrill to proceedings (which it ultimately did). “Which animal is it acceptable to eat alive?” the execs asked. “Spiders?” someone had said in that meeting. Perfect. Spiders. No one likes spiders, they’d thought. Spiders disgust many of us. And they’re horrifying. Spiders were the chosen animal. And so … cheers! Down the hatch, Ferne.
ITV will have expected complaints, but 553? I was slightly heartened that there were so many. Sure, almost 10 million people watched the I’m a Celebrity final. But 553 people took the time to write to Ofcom to say that they found it horrifying, unjust, cruel, distasteful (stop that) and frankly ridiculous. They argued that it was morally wrong and indecent to pluck undomesticated animals from nature and quaff them alive like nature is some sort of perverse pick ’n’ mix. Some argued that it was cruel to the spider itself; that it might have felt unnecessary pain being smashed to bits in a woman’s mouth. I must confess that in the past I have been unsure about speculation on invertebrate feelings, but in fact there is a tiny bit of evidence that invertebrates register simple pain and might, to some degree, “suffer” as a result of, say, I don’t know, being smashed and squashed and shattered to bits in the jaws of a human being.
Regardless of your views on invertebrate pain, however, few people would be so bold as to argue that this spider wasn’t in some way distressed. It was definitely distressed. No doubt about that. Spiders normally quite like holes, but this spider was very keen to escape McCann’s gob, after all. So the question becomes: how do we feel about ITV monetising distress? Because it doesn’t matter if you have a backbone or not, distress is distress. The programme seized on the distress of an animal to maximise advertising revenue and social media buzz. And that made me, for one, pretty uncomfortable.
More than 500 people questioned ITV’s integrity on this issue by complaining, and I applaud every one of them. But I’m not so naive as to believe this will see the end of I’m a Celebrity. It’ll take a lot more than that. Arachnophobes are taught to take the power back from the spider and ignore their existence. Ironically, only action like this, aimed at I’m a Celebrity, by you and me and 10 million others, will see this tasteless show sent scurrying back to the cave from whence it came. Cut the spiders off at the source. And that source is advertising revenue.
