Michael Buerk on the pain and torture of I'm a Celebrity, what it was really like in the jungle— and why he's glad he did it
The news reader hated the thought of going on the show — but despite suffering sleep deprivation, starvation and isolation, he doesn't regret a thing...
They starved us – quite deliberately. The diet was a couple of mouthfuls of unseasoned rice and beans twice a day, with just boiled water to drink. I lost 8kg in three weeks. From time to time we were allowed small amounts of always exotic, mostly unpalatable other morsels if someone had done well in the “trials” and “challenges” (torture sessions dressed up as games).
What made it worse was that the production crew – there were more than 700 of them – were fed like kings by, apparently superb, “location catering”. You could see them getting visibly fatter every time they took us off, ever thinner, to be ill-treated. At nights you could hear them belching and farting behind the papier-mâché cliffs that hemmed us in.
We were interrogated by faceless men and women all the time. They pretended to be nice, and may indeed have been so – but even the Spanish Inquisition reckoned to be concerned about its victims. It went on deep into the small hours (as far as I could tell), and in no time at all a disembodied voice over the tannoy would be shouting: “Celebrities! It’s time to get up!” Sleep deprivation was part of the programme.
Where are human rights when you need them? If we were treating serial killers like this, Jeremy Corbyn would have been demonstrating outside the prison gates years ago.
We could give up, but not escape. One step outside our half-acre of rainforest, and shadowy ex-SAS men in full sniper camouflage would emerge from the trees and turn us back. They never spoke. We were taken off for our “trials” in blacked-out 4x4s, not allowed even a glimpse of the world outside.
I only had myself to blame, of course, and it wasn’t all bad. The production team were decent and caring, the most politically correct of torturers. I bet the KGB never had to fill out a four-page health and safety checklist before attaching their electrodes to your private parts.
And my campmates proved not to be the emotionally stunted gang of nuclear egos I had imagined. Some of us had actually done something, though it was all a long time ago and the rest of us couldn’t quite put our finger on it. It’s true that nobody would confuse us with a Mensa awayday, or even a pub quiz team. Spelling and counting were trials in themselves.
Nobody knew who Edwina Currie was when she arrived among us, like the Holy Ghost with a shopping bag; still less that she had been one half of one of the most jaw-dropping, illicit love affairs of the 20th century. They might have found difficulty placing the other half, even though John Major later became prime minister. They were keen on sex (and football) all right, but (with the exception of Edwina) were somewhat adrift when it came to those kinds of current affairs.
Nearly a year’s gone by now, and like many ghastly experiences it doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect. The nightmares have stopped and I may soon be able to do without counselling.
I still don’t like reality television, though. It’s not real, for a start. If it isn’t actually false, it’s contrived and exaggerated. I’m a Celebrity... was pretty fair, on the whole, but the show’s success depends on banging up a very carefully chosen group of passingly recognisable oddballs, putting them under a dozen different kinds of pressure and then watching them squirm. The trick is to extract little narratives from the tedium between the acts of cruelty, to sharpen up a tiny flirtation or a passing spat with ruthless editing into something that will look like real-life soap opera.
Maybe, as some say, they are modern-day morality tales. The enormous audience, including a surprisingly high proportion of the young, the bright and the educated, seems to relate what it sees to its own experiences and values, and comes to moral conclusions about human behaviour. Or maybe it’s just a good laugh at the expense of stuck-up “celebrities”.
As for me, after half a century on television I’ve found myself famous overnight. For no good reason (which after all is the main qualification these days), I am, apparently, a “celebrity”. I have landed on Planet Fame – become something, someone, I have long affected to despise. Even worse, I am rather enjoying it.
I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here begins on Sunday 15th of November on at 9pm on ITV
