From the jungle to the gutter

Many years ago, in the interests of journalism, I spent a week living in a large luxury hotel. Not as a registered guest in my own lavish suite though, dear me, no. My assignment was to sneak in and illicitly roam the corridors, living a strictly feral existence by scavenging blue-bottle-covered scraps from trolleys left outside the rooms, sleeping in unlocked broom cupboards, and giving myself the occasional all-over wash with a carelessly discarded Femfresh tissue.

I even earned a little pocket money in tips by pretending to be a lift attendant (a ruse that also enabled me to urinate and perform other bodily functions in the privacy of the lift shaft), and for kicks I'd occasionally knock on the doors of impressionable female guests, lean toward the spy hole, and announce "Hi, it's Barry Manilow." I knew full well that, when viewed through the fisheye lens of a hotel room door's spy hole, everyone looks like Manilow.

My brief career as an insect-eating scavenger occurred during the late Eighties, before media executives had realised that contestants (not to mention audiences) are prepared to swallow just about anything in the name of reality television. The Word and TFI Friday's Freak or Unique were the first to persuade the proles to chomp on bugs in return for 15 seconds of fame, and now ITV1's I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! is proving that even the marginally famous will eat humble pie (and much worse) if it returns them fleetingly to the public consciousness.

Located in the sociological hinterland where nonentity meets celebrity, this annual fortnight of hardship and humiliation in the Australian outback allows us to see that the slightly well-known are really no better than the rest of us, and in many cases worse. For what could be less palatable to our refined sensibilities than the sight of a "Bush Tucker Trial" involving a bunch of maggot-ingesting has-beens, C-list celebs mouthing C-words for the amusement of a C2 audience?

Last night was the night when their self-obsessed island world finally ended, not with a bang (as the lovelorn and whining Peter Andre had been hoping), but with a whimper. Forgive my vulgarity, but I long ago tired of his lascivious snivelling and meaningless apothegms, such as "winning is the icing on the cake but the cake has been eaten" (I mean, if I really wanted to hear an arsehole, I'd fart).

And as for the already-departed object of his unrequited lust, all one can say about Jordan is that she has something between her breasts that most women her age don't have (her knees). Gone too were Mike "make a wish" Read (well what else do you do when you see a falling star?), the drear wife of Billy Two Livers, the aristocratic fraudster, and some woman whose sole talent was an ability to run quite fast. Oh, and Mr Jonathan Rotten walked off, though not before indulging in an episode of anarchic swearing so obviously staged and stylised that, if you thought it was genuine, then you probably think professional wrestling is genuine, too.

"We've come to the end of an epic journey full of twists and turns," declared that double act with two straight men, Ant and Dec (and I mean straight in every sense - both have girlfriends you know), as they introduced the final trials for the three remaining contestants. Despite reassuring worried viewers that two cute goldfish seen earlier in the series were still unharmed, no such concern was expressed for less photogenic little creatures, such as the five poor buggers that disappeared in no uncertain manner down the throat of Jennie Bond, the former BBC royal correspondent who has been heartily loathed by Lord Brocket (no wonder, given that aristos despise the royals and the lower middle classes, and she ticks both boxes). By the end, several million voters had reached their final decision with Hutton-like skill and objectivity, allowing Ant and Dec to chorus "and the winner is ... Kerry McFadden", but they were wrong. Because the only winners in reality television are the TV executives, BT ("only 50p a call") and the format holders, who grow steadily richer by dragging British television ever further into the gutter.

True, the show is readymade for the newspapers (not just the tabloids, but what's left of the broadsheets too), and consistently attracts an audience of 10 million (that's not 50 million of Britain's TV set owners), but it's hollow at its centre. Famehungry celebrities are fake enough when they're at the height of their fame, but they're even more transparently fraudulent when they're making themselves artificially vulnerable and accessible, in a desperate attempt to kick-start their flagging careers.

As for the claims of danger, there's no genuine peril here (even the poisonous spiders have been de-stinged) because real survivalist excitement could only occur in an authentic life-or-death situation. So next time, why don't the makers stage Celebrity Aircrash instead, beginning with a stewardess ordering her slightly famous passengers to "assume the crash position by putting your head between your legs," after which they'd all be left stranded on a mountain top, and have to work out the order in which they'd eat each other. Hang on though, that format wouldn't work with male celebrities - if a man could put his head between his legs, he'd never leave his house, let alone get on a plane.