Back in the early days of reality TV, it was enough to merely tune in and watch people exist. Take the first season of Big Brother: launched at the optimistic dawn of the new millennium, it featured benevolent tasks for its housemates that included learning how to throw a clay pot or mastering semaphore. Millions of us tuned in to see how these supposedly ordinary folk went about their days, from brushing their teeth to getting drunk, and it was addictive.
As the century has progressed, the world seems to have lost some of its reality and gained that of television’s. Take Donald Trump, transitioning from head of a fictional boardroom in The Apprentice to head of one of the most powerful nations on Earth. Or the sun-soaked “glamour” of the Love Island aesthetic seeping into everyday life – or at least everyday Instagram. It’s as if we no longer need reality TV to give us new insights into the ways we live now – we can just scroll through our Insta feed for that, or get our shocking viewing from the news. But there is one show that, somehow, still surpasses real life to give us the reality fix we crave: I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here.
I’m A Celeb has cemented itself as one of the more vital touchstones of schadenfreude-fuelled escapism in the 17 years it has been on our screens. We have watched celebrity nutritionist Gillian McKeith fainting live on air, despite spending her career examining faeces in Tupperware, Antony Worrall-Thompson threatening to walk out after an argument over some sausages, and John Lydon’s enduring hatred of Peter Andre when they were both left in the jungle. The premise is simple and unchanged: gather celebrities who are either on the last legs of their careers, or those who have only just begun, put them in the Australian outback for a couple of weeks then leave them to compete for the right to food. Normal food, that is; there are plenty of gruesome, genitalia-based snacks on offer in the Bushtucker Trials, which we – responsible members of the public – vote for our least favourite celebrities to eat.
Here our basest desires are laid bare. When the world increasingly feels full of despair, why not take pleasure in making – not just watching – wealthy celebrities retch their way to a hopefully more lucrative career. It is a modern-day gladiator contest, except there is no emperor here to decide our participants’ fates – that’s up to us, the people. And it’s not all cruel either; the celebs are incentivised to stay in the jungle longer for ever increasing amounts of money. This is capitalism in microcosm; the more you debase yourself, the more cash you stand to make.
This year is already a vintage season. The celebs are, in fact, Celebrities, including former footballer Ian Wright, Girls Aloud star Nadine Coyle and the doyenne of America’s first reality family, Caitlyn Jenner. The Bushtucker Trials haven’t even begun but there have already been tears and tantrums – most notably Wright cradling the snivelling face of comedian Andrew Maxwell, softly entreating him to “don’t cry please” over their loss of a roast dinner, while former rugby player James Haskell has been accusing the show of rigging a trial by placing a crab that is too large into a box containing a winning star. It is life through the looking glass, filmed.
Hosts of this live chaos, Britain’s favourite cheeky chappies Ant and Dec, have also been reunited this season after Ant’s sojourn in rehab last year. It is a format they are perfectly suited to – less twee than Britain’s Got Talent, more focused than Saturday Night Takeaway – but, most perfectly, they barely disguise how they channel the viewers’ glee and disgust in watching on as the celebs undergo trials. Their giggling is our giggling, and their dry-heaving is ours, too.
With campaigning for the general election under way and political divisions at fever pitch, I’m A Celeb is the perfect conduit for our anguish at everything that is seemingly wrong in the world – a reality we can strangely understand. So, why not get voting for something you can influence: which celeb will be eating this year’s plate of bull’s testicles?
