I'm a Celeb 2015: Lady C’s grumble in the jungle takes me back as class reemerges as an issue

It’s been six years since I was on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and I admit to feeling a little nostalgic when it’s on. I had a fabulous time in there. I found it curiously relaxing to be totally cut off from normal life – it was like extreme rehab on hallucinogenics.

I know, I know, none of you watch this terrible programme and it’s responsible for the decline and fall of Western civilisation … except it isn’t. The thing I love about the show is that good will eventually out, and it restores your faith in the UK viewing public.

This year we have had what, at first, looked like a motley bunch. A footballer, a boxer, an old pop singer, some reality spin-offs, bikini birds and … a white Jamaican semi-aristocrat who was raised as a boy but was actually a girl. This was “Lady” Colin Campbell, the undoubted star of the show. Apart from insisting on sporting a string of pearls, you wouldn’t have guessed that she was posh (except for the fact that she kept on telling you). In fact, she spent most of her time in the jungle looking and behaving more like somebody who’d end up living in a van in your front garden.

She was ferociously rude and unleashed most of her venom on Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, and Duncan Bannatyne, a self-made millionaire who shatters fellow entrepreneurs’ dreams on Dragons’ Den.

With an astonishing lack of self-awareness, her main beef with Hadley seemed to be that he was self-obsessed (pretty much de rigueur if you want to be a successful “celeb”) and boring. At one stage she called him a “jumped-up little oik” and wanted to hear no more of his “dull working-class stories”. Tony, who appears to be a very avuncular figure (although now looking more like a jovial butcher than a pop star) wants to be loved and so couldn’t really handle these vicious verbal assaults.

Bannatyne on the other hand, “a vain old goat” according to Lady C, was less obviously concerned but, as ITV had made the brave decision not to subtitle the dour Scot, I could have been mistaken. Unbelievably Lady C managed to assemble a little entourage – Kieron Dyer, (a footballer) and Chris Eubank (a show pony). Quite what they saw in Lady C was not clear but all was eventually settled when first Eubank was booted off of the show and then Lady C walked out of the jungle for “medical” reasons.

What was fascinating this year was the re-emergence of class as an issue. Normally, everyone does their best to ignore this thorny topic but Lady C appeared not to have received the memo. It was sad that the other token posho – Spencer from Made In Chelsea – was brutally airbrushed out of the show just before he entered the main camp. I feel confident he would have sided with the “oiks” since they make up most of his viewing public. Sadly, we shall never know because it turned out that he was addicted to steroids after trying to beef up for a charity boxing match.

It’s good to be alive in these times.