I’m A Celebrity has been enjoyably dull

The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained politicians, and they were two particularly hot – in the potato sense – politicians. Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage carried baggage with them into the camp. In Hancock’s case, radioactive baggage.

None of that this year. Ant and Dec opined last year that they were a little sick of politicians on the show, and ratings took a small tumble. There was a feeling that Celeb was a place viewers went to escape from the sturm und drang of current affairs, and that it needed to return to drama between the standard variety of reality TV bigheads – pop stars, presenters and models.

It can be dangerous listening to this sort of feedback. When I worked in TV soaps, audience research often came back with similar findings, viewers clamouring for a bit of quiet, for nice things to happen to their favourites and for the villains to be written out.