By otakuyassine3@gmail.com 
With one week left to go on this year’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, I’d like to think we can all agree on four words we never want to hear again. No, I don’t mean “Danny, grab the guitar” or “Coleen, tell us about…”. I’m talking about the four simple words that instantly tell you whether any I’m A Celebrity series has been a good one or not: “We’re eating well tonight.”
If you hear that self-satisfied boast too many times during any three week run, it’s not been a good series. It may still have been an okay series. It may still have been a perfectly watchable series. But it would not be troubling any all timer lists.
I knew the game was up this year the minute the previously hopeless Dean McCullough somehow managed to turn the form book on its head at the beginning of Week Two with that ten-star haul on Jack And The Screamstalk.
Since then it’s been stars, stars and more stars. Well, apart from a minor blip when a few gaps in Tulisa Contostavlos’s knowledge saw her grab only five out of twelve in Shock Around The Clock.
In the pop star’s defence, I think I would have struggled to name all those lists of twelve things — not least the round where she was asked to reel off the names of this year’s 12 campmates inside 60 seconds. I’d have needed at least two minutes to fire up Wikipedia for that one — and even then, “Him off Corrie” might have been marked as incorrect.
The problem with the campmates being so well fed is fairly obvious to anyone who has ever watched this show. They don’t get hungry. Which means they don’t get hangry. Which means they don’t have blazing rows over the slightest thing. Which means that unless your camp is filled with the most entertaining, most gregarious, most anecdote-packed celebrities in the world, it can all get very dull, very quickly.
Unfortunately, this year’s camp is not filled with those kinds of celebrities. Sure, they are a sweet-natured bunch, but if you were compiling your dream dinner party guest list then Richard “I haven’t felt like this since Amnesia in 1990” Coles would be the only one to get anywhere near it.
Unless of course, your dream dinner party would involve a sensible boy bander leading a sing song or Britain’s No.2 WAG re-revealing incredible tidbits from her life that she hasn’t talked about since she first revealed them in her much-publicised, much-serialised autobiography.
The fact that ITV has made (most of) the Bushtucker Trials staggeringly easy this year (Barry McGuigan’s latest was, literally, just a load of balls), and showered the campmates with more treats than cockroaches has merely added to the problem.
I’m A Celebrity has officially gone soft. We have reached an unacceptable state of affairs where it is harder to forfeit your Letter From Home than it is to win it. After the Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage years, I fully understand why ITV went for a quiet and uncontroversial vibe.
You have to feel sorry for the show’s hard-pressed editors though. Each day they must look at their footage reels and think “How the hell am I going to make some clickbait out of a bloke from Radio 1 not fetching enough water?”
With easy trials, lashings of home comforts and a glaring lack of conflict, there is very little chance of any of the campmates yelling the second half of the programme’s title — unless they’re doing it for attention.
In the beginning, the whole point of this show was that celebrities would be pushed to their limits. If you stop pushing them to their limits then you must accept that there is no longer any point to it — or at least have the decency to drop the “Get Me Out Of Here!!!” bit.
ITV has somehow brought us to a stage where Ant & Dec can no longer do their annual routine about how they are living it up in five-star luxury back at the hotel while the celebrities slum it in camp. Deep down, the duo’s instincts will be telling them that is not right. I can only assume they don’t have quite so much influence in the production office these days.
Hopefully, ITV will learn its lesson and mix things up a little next year. Maybe throw in Gregg Wallace with a few middle class ladies of a certain age?
As for this year, at least the fact that we have made it to the final week means we finally have something to look forward to: nightly evictions to add some spice, and the Celebrity Cyclone to provide some top quality entertainment.
Even then, the order of the evictions is fairly easy to predict, while I’m sure we can all confidently guess at least three of the four Celebrity Cyclonists. The only major issue still to be decided is whether Danny Jones is not in fact the clear winner he has clearly been since the very beginning.
Yeah, right. Unless someone enrages him by “accidentally” using his guitar for firewood, this final week will be a predictable procession to the McFly star’s inevitable accession to the jungle throne.
Which will mean I’m A Celebrity 2024 will be forever remembered thus: The year Reverend Richard’s socks caught fire, but the show never did.
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! airs nightly at 9pm on ITV1, and streams on ITVX.
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