Remote Control - Saturday November 22, 2014

In the opening moments of this year’s I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here (ITV, every day), Gemma Collins was seen to pronounce: ‘People are going to see the real me –I might be like Bear Grylls, you never know.’

Well, we might have got the former, but she’s definitely no expert on the survivalist front. Although once she was safely back in a luxury hotel, she might have had more in common with Bear than you’d first think – the adventurer famously took time out from one of his supposed daredevil trips to go and stay in a hotel.

A mere three days into this IACGMOOH, Collins, a The Only Way is Essex refugee, had already had enough and walked out. However, it’s good to know that, according to her manager, the self-professed ‘drama queen’ will only get a small proportion of her full fee for the show.

The writing was on the wall from the moment she failed to even cope with a helicopter ride to the jungle. Mixing her metaphors and creating some interesting new fables along the way she explained: ‘Yeah all right, I’ve cracked at the first hurdle.

‘But it’s like the turtle and the slug or the horse and the rabbit, I can’t remember what it was, but the slowest one won it in the end.’

So, after three days of crying, screaming, and mangling English, the Essex girl walked, proclaiming: ‘People who murder get treated better than this. That’s the truth. Even a murderer gets fed three times a day.’

Anyway, this storm in a teacup aside, it’s business as usual for this 14th series, where 10 definition redefining ‘celebrities’ get to annoy the Australian wildlife for a few weeks.

These cheeky Geordie chappies Ant and Dec are still on hand to trot out the same old jokes. ‘10 famous faces, one jungle,’ they pronounced in the show’s opening episode, stretching credibility.

It’s a rum bunch, the line-up includes once-capped England midfielder Jimmy Bullard, full-time grump and journalist Michael Burke, rapper Tinchy Strider and someone apparently best known for sleeping with a wrinkly old man – ex-girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, 
Kendra Wilkinson.

Even the once infamous bush tucker trials appear to be recycled – once you’ve seen one has-been or never-was chewing on a kangaroo’s knackers, you’ve seen all you’ll ever need to see, right?

Along with the X Factor, this is another show well past its sell by date.

Chris Broom