I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here 2018, review: Dec and Holly lack chemistry in uncompelling launch

According to the pre-publicity for I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! 2018, Anne Hegerty (The Governess from The Chase) was worried that her autism and being “faceblind” would make things tricky for her in the jungle. For some of us viewers too.

To be more honest than I ought to be, I’ve never been quite sure who Holly Willoughby is and, thanks to the recent troubled story of Ant McPartlin, I now know, by elimination, who Dec is.

Anyhow, Dec and Holly lack a certain chemistry, like a couple who’ve finally decided to get married, but realise a few months in that they might have made a terrible mistake, and miss their exes. (They being Ant and Philip Schofield, who should probably do a sort of wife swap gig presenting This Morning. A sobering thought).

I had heard of a few of the entrants – and who isn’t familiar with the cruel cockney humour and deflated football features of Harry Redknapp? – but even after being introduced to the usual washed up soap stars and yet to be washed up soap stars I doubt I could reliably put a name to the personality (where applicable).

For example, Emily Atack (ex star of near-soap comedy The Inbetweeners) and Rita Simons (ex EastEnder) have identical girly shrieks , while John Barrowman is only distinguishable from Nick Knowles because the irritatingly transatlantic one – Barrowman – sings his lines as if he was on stage in a musical. Plus, he’s the one who puts the camp into the camp, and he’s an MBE (Mad Bloody Exhibitionist). Something tells me Barrowman is going to have to consume a lot of marsupial offal in the coming episodes.

The challenges were as unscary as usual. A 12,000 foot skydive brought the delicious prospect of Emily and/or Malique Thompson-Dwyer (Hollyoaks) going to the great celeb fenced-off VIP area in heaven, but they were actually strapped to a qualified instructor. Same goes for the initial trip up a crane over a ravine for Sair Khan (Coronation Street) and Barrowman, where health and safety had fitted them with so many harnesses they could scarcely move).

If there was any chance of someone actually plunging to their death it would make I’m a Celeb... much more compelling viewing. Which reminds me, they say Noel Edmonds is coming in soon.

I felt sorriest for Hegerty. When her team had to get across a lake to get their kit, she sank the tiny canoe. No one was heartless enough to blame her but you do wonder what was going through theirs minds, and hers. At one point, she asked “what am I even doing here?” This isn’t the sort of tough question you get asked on The Chase. The answer, according to reports, is about £60,000 in her case, though even that didn’t seem much when she first found herself squatting among the leaves and the creatures that doth slither upon the earth in her team’s “basic” camp, to which they were assigned after her mini Titanic moment. She was exempted from the forthcoming viper pit challenge “on health grounds” though she looked disappointed to have been excluded, like she was letting the team down: Game, but fragile, The Governess.

“Basic camp” is right, I’d say, for this show, now in an inexplicable 18th season and still drawing in mass audiences. If your idea of an ideal Sunday night is to be in front of the telly with a glass of Pinot Grigio and some nibbles, watching an overweight woman in the early stages of a nervous breakdown then you’ve come to the right channel.

What has this country come to?