He’s a celebrity – get him out of my Welsh quarry
ITV has cancelled Britain’s Got Talent 2021 owing to the difficulty of filming Covid-compliant auditions.
The news caused absurd hopes to curl round my heart which, all too soon, were dashed. The puerile I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, also featuring Ant and Dec, is scheduled still to go ahead.
No, it’s not harmless. It wastes precious time in which we could be reading John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent, learning how to play a woodwind instrument or studying the larval food plants of British macro-moths.
As part-time television reviewers on Gogglebox, Mary and I are puzzled by the enthusiasm, sometimes verging on hysteria, that is clearly experienced by many viewers of these formulaic elimination shows.
In the days of live audiences, we even wondered if some members had been spiked with amphetamines, so inexplicable were their excitement and lack of critical faculties when the evidence of mediocrity was not even hiding in plain sight.
More puzzling still was why so many of the acts in Britain’s Got Talent featured acrobats from places like Anatolia, who were no more British than Vladimir Putin.
We are not against ‘shiny floor’ programmes per se. On the contrary, we have been worn down by some shows – notably Strictly Come Dancing – in which various parables of the human condition can be observed playing out.
The parable of progress, for example. Initially unpromising contestants such as Bill Bailey can be seen to grow in stature, simply by virtue of putting in arduous weeks of practice, which in Bailey’s case coaxed out and refined his innate rhythmic ability and, hence, confidence.
And yet those we would have expected to be fluid movers – like vintage partygoer Susannah Constantine – are pushed across the dance floor like upright fridge freezers before their ritual humiliation by the judges. Social justice, you might call it.
Meanwhile, an academic friend points out that the shocking Naked Attraction has its roots in the folk memory of the massively popular freak shows that were a feature of taverns and fairgrounds between the 1840s and 1940s.
Even worse shocks are meted out in The Yorkshire Vet, a vehicle for gory and visceral veterinary procedures to teach a lesson to smarmy southerners, who don’t know where their meat comes from.
I see myself as something of a human shock absorber – most of it doesn’t stick.
I am, in that respect, like Tony Blair, Teflon Man. But when ITV saw fit to air graphic footage of I’m a Celebrity ‘star’ Jordan North vomiting in a Welsh limestone quarry before taking part in some stomach-churning abseiling trial, I knew my shock absorber needed upgrading.
Decades of happy memories had been defiled. This quarry, on the Isle of Anglesey, had been one of my personal haunts of ancient peace, as well as the haunt of peregrine falcons, fulmars and choughs. I know every inch of that location in as forensic detail as I know the back of my hand.
Some 50 years ago, my family sailed to this exact spot from our holiday cottage in Conwy on the Welsh mainland. A day of days, under a cloudless sky, when we caught a bucket of mackerel and barbecued them on the shore. Fast-forward 30 years and my mother and I botanised for bee orchids on the same quarry floor.
Surprisingly, the internet contained only a handful of complaints from emetophobes (those who are revolted by vomiting), declaring they didn’t feel in a safe space as there had been no warnings about the vomiting to come – even though there was a link to a showbiz story in the Mirror where, in a report by Nika Shakhnazarova, it was revealed that ‘ I’m a Celebrity star Jordan North’s mum Wendy predicts he’ll vomit on live TV.’
For the rest of the viewers, the vomiting was obviously considered par for the course. Perhaps they have been desensitised.
And what about the torture trials, wherein contestants were shut into glass-lidded boxes while thousands of insects such as maggots, spiders and earwigs were introduced by pipe?
I wonder if Carrie Symonds, like me, Chris Packham and the RSPCA, noted this unethical treatment of insects. After all, she had only to whisper ‘badger’ in Boris’s ear for the culling to be culled itself. Perhaps it will be Carrie, in the end, who pulls the plug on I’m a Celebrity.
It occurs to me that, as boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964), Mary and I are not only becoming living fossils, but also the second-last generation to retain the memories of the days when Britain was a reasonably decent place to live.
Those born after 1964 have little hands-on experience of this country being a place where the traditional British values of reserve, decorum, stiff upper lips, courtesy and fair play could be seen everywhere to prevail.
We boomers knocked down all the established institutions and customs, failed to replace them and now have only ourselves to blame, as Helen Andrews writes in her new book, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
After Brexit, when we should be selling our global brand, shows like this are sending the wrong message. The rest of the world likes the concept of the English Gentleman. It is, or was, our USP.
We would do well to revive the brand.