A cockroach shampoo and rat sauna: Yours for £200k!
... just add your very own C-list stars. I’m A Celebrity sells jungle ordeals to world’s TV
A COCKROACH shampoo, followed by a snake massage, rat sauna and green ant manicure are not the sort of treatments most people would want to pay £200,000 for.
Yet the success of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! means that foreign broadcasters are clamouring to fork out such sixfigure sums to have their own version of the show.
And as part of the deal, TV chiefs get to pick which bug-based challenges they want to include, choosing from a bizarre menu of revolting bushtucker trials and Celebrity Chest ordeals, such as the stomachturning ‘beauty salon’, which includes the cockroach, rat and snake ‘treatments’ mentioned above.
All the overseas broadcaster must do is provide the C-list stars to be humiliated, and programme-makers ITV Studios will do the rest.
Three options are on offer. The bronze package includes 18 torments – 12 small challenges, including the creepy-crawly ‘beauty salon’, five medium ones and one large – and is priced at £200,000.
There’s also a £300,000 silver version with more of the bigger stunts, or a £410,000 gold package for the worst celebrity ordeals.
On the menu are ordeals such as the Bad Pitt, which involves being blindfolded and lowered face-down into a snake pit; Deathly Burrows, where celebrities must burrow through a termite hill into a network of narrow tunnels; and Bug Burial – which is probably self-explanatory. Fortunately for the celebrities who sign up, the price includes a healthand-safety assessment.
The UK version, which is filmed in the Springbrook National Park, near Brisbane in Australia, regularly attracts more than 11million viewers. And the success of foreign sales means ITV has had to build a second set near the town of Nelspruit in South Africa, where production costs are lower, to cope with the demand.
The Australian, Hungarian and Romanian versions are filmed in South Africa, while several countries have made their own series in other locations. Holland launched a version of the show in the Amazon rainforest in Suriname, home to the green anaconda, alligators, electric eels, jaguars, piranhas and poison dart frogs. And India, Sweden and Hungary have filmed their shows in the snake-infested jungle of Taman Negara, Malaysia.
ITV Studios offers foreign broad- casters a package for 21 episodes. A spokeswoman said: ‘All international versions will differ slightly given the cultural differences for each country.’
When asked how much the global I’m A Celebrity brand was worth, she added: ‘We would never reveal this figure, as it is commercially sensitive.’