THE REAL REASON WE'RE IN THE JUNGLE
The two comedians reveal revealwhat what it really took to make them eat insects and dive into tanks of eels
Peter Rowsthorn h was spending night after night staring at the ceiling, desperately worried about how he was going to pay off his “whack” of a tax bill, when he got the call asking him to go on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! It was perfect timing for the comedian, who could see no other way out of his debt.
“You know, we live in a beautiful country and I got behind on my payments. I got sick k of f staring at the h ceiling iling l going, ‘How am I going g to pay it?’ and I thought, ‘I’m 55, so why not have a go? If you get kicked off after two weeks eeks it doesn’t really matter, but if you win it, you’ve raised some ome money for a charity, you’ve ou’ve had an experience and I’ve e paid my tax bill off,’ ” laughs s Peter, best known for The Comedy omedy Company and playing g “pants man” Brett Craig in Kath & Kim. Despite Peter’s jokes es over his tax dramas, the father-offour – who won’t n’t reveal what he owes, only saying, “Different amounts unts from different accounts” unts” – admits it was the he only way to get his family back on their feet.
“I said to my y wife, ‘If you can think of a better way let me know, but I can’t,’” can’t,’ ” he tells, revealing ling that surviving on a single income, as well as wife Gabrielle providing round-the-clock care for her ailing mother, all contributed to his financial woes.
And with rumours of contestants like Bernard Tomic being offered a hefty $1 million to appear on the show, it certainly seems Peter’s money worries could be a thing of the past, whatever the jungle might throw at him.
“I’ve always got it in the back of my head that they can’t kill you on the show,” he adds with a twinkle in his eye. “But just in case, I’m insured up to the eyeballs and my wife is ready to sue!”
PETER ROWSTHORN I WAS BEING CHASED DOWN BY THE TAXMAN!
She was w given a seven sev per cent chance chan of survival and spent twoand-a half half-weeks in a coma in 2016, but after cheating d death and following a five-month five-mon stint in a Canberra rehab facility, facil comedian Fiona O’loughlin O’loughli hopes she’s finally beaten the alcohol addiction that had left le her “desperately unhappy” for the past decade. “My life feels like it was split into befo before and after [the coma],” says the 54-year-old mother-of-five, motherwho was knocked back from appearing on I’m A Celeb two years ago because becaus she wasn’t deemed mentally mental stable. “This is a new life for me and everything feels really re exciting.” Fiona Fion has made no secret of her battle with the bottle, or her failed suicide attempt in 2013, 201 explaining that her binge drinking started to spiral around the time her career as an international comedian comed took off. “I used us to get very anxious and dr drink before shows,” says th the funnywoman, ywo who admits she regularly gularly downed two small sma bottles tles of vodka before she sh went nt on stage. “For a long lon time me booze felt like the solution, solutio everything erything felt better, like, like I can n handle this. But over a long time... well, I was a runaway run ay train and I was a always ays going to hit something.” som ng.” The MelbourneMel urnebased star credits edits the support of her children, her ex-husband Chris and her sister Kate for getting her through her darkest moments.
And she jokes she’s ready for the deprivations of the jungle... thanks to her stint in rehab.
“That’s the one thing that has prepared me, because it was very intensive. We didn’t have TVS, telephones, internet. I lived in a room with three other women, we cooked for fo ourselves, we had chores… It’s like recalibrating your life, starting everything from scratch.”
FIONA O’LOUGHLIN I NEEDED TO SOBER UP