An alleged feud between I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! contestant Kelly Brook and the show’s hosts Ant and Dec has resurfaced as the new series launched.
Model and radio DJ Brook is one of this year’s 10 campmates and, after she parachuted onto the show on Sunday (16 November), viewers recalled how she had once locked horns with Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly during her short-lived tenure on Britain’s Got Talent.
Brook was hired as a judge on the reality show in 2009, but was dropped just one week later.
While it was explained that Brook had been let go because adding a fourth judge had made things “too complicated”, the star suggested it was due to the fact that she had upset Ant and Dec by questioning their role on the series.
Donnelly, who previously admitted he had been “annoyed” about Brook being hired, reflected on the awkward encounter in his and McPartlin’s 2010 memoir Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story.
Writing about Brook’s first day on set, he said: “Kelly looked nervous, so I told her it was going to be great fun and to just relax. She nodded, then looked at me and said, ‘And what do you do on the show?’
“I looked at Simon, who was sat next to me. He turned to Kelly and said, ‘Kelly, you have seen the show, haven’t you?’ To which she replied, ‘Yeah... well, bits.’”
Donnelly continued: “I don’t want to sound like an egomaniac, but the last person who said, ‘And what do you do?’ was the Queen when I met her at the party for ITV’s 50th anniversary.”
Brook said that Ant and Dec “clearly didn’t want” her on the show despite “never being anything but pleasant” to her face.
She continued: “Their egos are such that they were saying to themselves: ‘How dare she think she can come on to our show?’ and since then they’ve been very vocal about their displeasure at me being there.”
She also said that, after leaving the show, “there was nothing I could do in this country” as “the people at ITV were telling me that I had upset Ant and Dec and that was it”.
In Ant and Dec’s autobiography, Donnelly questioned why Brook had been hired as a judge: “We had two questions: ‘Why is there a fourth judge?’ and ‘Why is it Kelly Brook?’ None of them could answer us.”
Explaining why they were so displeased, Donnelly said: “Obviously, as hosts of the show, we have to justify that kind of thing to the audience, and no one could give us a good reason why Kelly was on board.
“The simple answer was that Simon, without talking to anyone, had decided it was a good idea. We didn’t agree.”
Piers Morgan, who was a BGT judge at the time, confirmed that Brook blamed the hosts for her departure from the show after just two days of filming.
He wrote on Instagram just one day after I’m a Celebrity started: “As Kelly Brook goes into the I'm a Celebrity jungle, a throwback to when she very briefly appeared as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent.. for just two disastrous days!
“Be interesting to see how she interacts with Ant and Dec given she still blames them for being fired so fast and ruthlessly... which isn’t far from the truth.”
He added: “They weren’t happy they hadn’t been consulted by Simon Cowell about Kelly’s sudden hiring – and even less happy when she asked them what they did on the show...”
“Do people realise Kelly Brook & Ant and Dec have serious beef with each other?” one viral post on X/Twitter read during Sunday’s launch.
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