I come to, covered in my own drool, my beard longer than I last remembered it, hungry and confused. How long have I been out cold and why? Do I still have all my own organs? A brief perusal of the screen in front of me reveals everything I need to know. With 26 tabs open on my browser, I must have fallen down an internet hole.
Many of us will happily sink hours into consuming any old guff. YouTube videos of people having accidents, obscure Wikipedia pages, some hashtag game that involves replacing single words in movie titles with the names of citrus fruit. Hell, I’ll even stare at those people who stand at the corners of roads acrobatically flipping an advertisement board before realising I’m meant to be living a life.
It’s almost as if the single criterion for being watched these days is merely to exist – a sort of reverse quantum physics powered by tedium. And in trying to sum up I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (Channel 10), that’s the best I can say: it’s television that simply exists, therefore I’ll watch it.
For those who’ve fallen down a real hole (not an internet one) and are therefore clueless of the premise, I’m a Celeb involves dumping 10 minor celebrities in the South African jungle for reasons unknown. In the British original, they were shipped to the Australian rainforest – but therein lies another story.
By exposing these cosseted stars to the horrors of the wild, apparently we find out who they really are. It’s an odd line of thought to start with, that we are only truly ourselves when covered in ants and crapping into a pit. And personally, I’d rather that not be the hallmark of my true character. “I want to get to know the real you. Do you mind if I pour these locusts on your groin?”
There’s also the bizarre assumption we should care more about these “victims” because they are famous, as if us regular plebs would ruin a show like this by happily sleeping in the rain and regarding a turd-pit as a luxury. Despite being populated by regular Joe Schmoes, shows like Survivor put that theory to bed, successfully illustrating the strain of being stripped of your comforts.
But like the guy at the traffic junction flipping around his giant arrow, I’m a Celeb is very watchable. The hosts, Julia Morris and Chris Brown, make for pleasing company, doing an excellent job of breezing through a script whose humour rarely aims above the genitals. If the pun-hurdles were a sport, these two would be Olympians.
While Julia and Chris are presenting from their Ewok village set, the campers down below have to deal with non-celebrity things like starting a fire and figuring out how to use a long-drop toilet like the one I have in my house. To win a decent feed, they have to complete bush tucker trials, which are essentially variations on the theme of human v insect/rodent/reptile.
In the opening episode, Chrissie Swan was showered in cockroaches for our viewing entertainment. By the end of the ordeal, she lay prone and slathered in a variety of writhing fauna as if David Attenborough had decided to remake The Hostel. Chrissie even had offal poured directly on to her face, an apt metaphor for the experience of watching any reality TV these days.
In fact, offal isn’t a bad metaphor for this show either. It’s Big Brother meets Survivor meets all those things we love to watch on the internet, like celebrity meltdowns, close-ups of creepy-crawlies, and beautiful people bathing in a lake. None of it’s particularly good for us, yet it’s ground up into a paste and fed to us anyway, and we’ll keep consuming it. Because it’s there.
