I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (ITV) | ITV Player
Babylon (C4) | 4oD
Confessions of a Copper (C4) | 4oD
“People are going to see the real, stripped-back real me,” announced Gemma Collins at the opening of this year’s I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! A noble sentiment, perhaps, but also a problematic statement. At least for me. For not only did I not know who the real Gemma Collins was, I was also completely unaware of the fake one.
It turned out that Collins owes her boundless renown to The Only Way Is Essex, of which I’m afraid I’ve been a less than assiduous watcher. But that information prompts the question: if the star of TOWIE has already exposed herself to the forensic attention of reality television, why the need to showcase the “real” her? What false understanding of Collins have TOWIE viewers been led to gain? Was she pretending to be an Essex girl while really being a Hampstead intellectual?
Maybe this is not the place for such complex ontological musings, any more than a helicopter is the place for Collins. For when the celebrities were whisked to the jungle by a chopper, Collins had a full-blown panic attack before the thing left the ground and was instead taken overland by four-wheel drive.
Whatever happened to the rules? She didn’t even say “I’m a celebrity. Get me out of here!” the show’s “safe” phrase for when the S&M games get too much. Then again, everything was too much for Collins. The helicopter ride, walking, porridge, the jungle, the outhouse. The real her, so it would seem, was someone who cried and moaned at every aspect of not being in Essex. If you could choose a slogan that least suited her character it would be “Keep calm and carry on”.
By contrast Carl “Foggy” Fogarty, the former World Superbike champion with nerves of steel and an expression like a hungry hawk, wouldn’t know how to get flustered if you strapped him in a hole with a sackful of liberated snakes. He sat in precisely that predicament for 12 minutes and looked as if he could have lasted another week without a peep.
Ant and Dec tried manfully or boyfully to inject some suspense into the proceedings, but there was more tension in Dec’s jacket, which looked a size too small for him, yet still failed to make him look any bigger.
Like some bizarre conceptual artwork, these two veterans, not yet 40, are slowly turning before our eyes into a miniature Eric and Ernie. There’s something fundamentally benign about the pair, which is presumably how they get away with laughing at people – albeit ridiculous attention-seekers – in states of advanced agitation.
But not at Foggy, who effectively ruled himself out of ever being voted to perform another task because he showed no sign of suffering. And the whole purpose of the endeavour is to demonstrate as much suffering as possible, while still agreeing to do it.
The jungle may be a place of extremes, but it is no place for the extremely fearful or the extremely fearless. Collins and Fogarty made themselves bystanders. Collins wisely walked out. “I’ve become a puppet of Gemma,” she explained. “I’m not the real me.”
Which has left the likes of Jimmy Bullard, the former Fulham and Hull midfielder; Michael Buerk, the Moral Maze presenter who can employ his superior scruples to work out what he’s doing there; and Kendra Wilkinson, whose great claim to fame is living in the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner. Even by the elastic standards of contemporary celebrity, that seemed like dubious qualification. Is now the right time to mention that David Byrne from Talking Heads once cycled alongside a cab I was taking in New York?
I’ll say right here and now that I fancy Bullard to win. He’s practically taken out a copyright on the description “cheeky cockney” and he’s game and nervous, or what he called “proper shaken up”. Boasting the kind of body that can cause sand to be kicked in its owner’s face, Bullard makes Phil Tufnell, a previous I’m a Celebrity winner, look like a consummate athlete.
In other words, forget the intrepid Buerk, who filed the first TV report on the 1980s Ethiopian famine, Bullard has all the makings of a great British hero, at least of the sort that are voted for on reality TV shows.
The pilot of Babylon, broadcast back in February, was a promising mess. A kind of satire on policing, set in the Met’s HQ, it tried to do too much and didn’t quite succeed in anything. The resulting series had its second episode last week and seems a little less frenetic, but not a great deal more coherent in tone.
The main action still centres on the press office, run by an ambitious American import (Brit Marling) who reports to the irate and distracted commissioner, Richard Miller (James Nesbitt). He has every right to be distracted, of course, what with his son abducted on another channel in The Missing.
But in this particular comedy-drama, we never get to see what he’s so irritated about. It’s just a satirical given that everyone is cynical, bitter and out to get everyone else. As a half-hour comedy, it could work a treat. The addition of some genuine moments of drama, however, make it a confusing hour.
In the heavily formulaic environment of TV, a little confusion should probably be applauded. So let’s applaud the ribald language and laugh at the policing set pieces. Or should it be the other way round? That’s the problem. It seems like only the film-makers know.
The joke in Babylon is aimed at modern media and the superficial news agenda it imposes. There were no such constraints back in the old days, before PCs were supposed to be PC, before, as Confessions of a Copper put it, “paperwork ran riot”.
Back then, a succession of former cops reminisced, you could plant evidence, beat suspects and fit people up at your discretion. As one former policeman proudly said: “Legality? What’s that got to do with it?”
People say lines like that all the time in Babylon. The difference here was that he really meant it.
