Saints fans will finally have their revenge on Redknapp
If Harry thought eating emu in the jungle was bad, just wait until voting starts for Bushtucker Trials, writes Jim White
There was no chance of signing Niko Kranjcar to take his place, it really was a jungle
For a moment you could only feel sorry for Harry Redknapp. After his first night in the I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! jungle clearing, there was a look on his face of a sort previously restricted to Conservative MPS reading the small print in the Brexit agreement. It was a look of fearful realisation of what he had signed up to. This really was worse than anything he could have imagined.
It was the erstwhile football manager’s agent who put him up for television’s annual orgy of payback on the famous. And while he had never seen the programme, it was a triffic little earner, so of course he was up for it.
Besides, he had once taken a visiting team to the New Den and been obliged to negotiate his annual transfer budget with Daniel Levy. What was there to fear?
It did not take long to find out. Here he was, sitting on a camp bed in a jungle clearing, wearing a waistcoat with his name on the back, finally appreciating what he had let himself in for: he really was about to eat fried emu.
Harry clearly had no idea of the show’s sadistic undertow. As he admitted to his camp mates, he had supposed there was a catering truck round the back of the set, supplying everyone with a nice bacon sarnie once the cameras had stopped rolling.
He had assumed the whole thing was a con, a fiction, that the gap between what was said and reality was wider than the empty space between the ears of his last centre-forward. You know, that it was all a bit like one of his managerial press conferences.
Instead, he had been suddenly confronted with genuine jeopardy. And there was no chance of signing Niko Kranjcar to take his place, no chance of Kevin Bond arriving in the Range Rover to drive him back to Sandbanks. It really was a jungle out there.
Worse, for Harry this is only the start. Thanks to the efforts of his camp mates, who won the first of the internecine feuds that the programme producers serve up to foster division among the contestants, on his first night he actually had some food, albeit of unexpected provenance.
More to the point, the victory precluded him and the rest of his team from the public vote to see who should take part in the first Bushtucker Trial.
Because you know that the moment that he is eligible for the nightly plebiscite to decide who is required to shove a bucket of rats down their pants, the majority of those calling in will choose Harry.
And if he did not know that you could actually eat emu, just wait until he is obliged to chow down on kangaroo anus. Because there is one thing about football fans: they never forget. And in Southampton, they have been waiting a long time for this. Never mind that it is now 13 years since he walked out on their club to return to manage the hated enemy down the road at Portsmouth, a very cold, rather sick dish of revenge is about to be served up.
Never before in the programme’s history will the voting pattern have revealed such a regional concentration. You imagine every night over the next two weeks, every single season ticket-holder at St Mary’s will have their finger poised ready to dial in their vote. There will be nothing saintly about this rush of Saints supporters keen to see Harry elbow deep in scorpions, or Harry swimming through pig’s offal, or Harry sticking an arm into a pit of snakes.
With every call likely to count, this promises to get properly personal. And for the rest of us, properly entertaining.