Barrowman’s a Celeb... get him out of there!
I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here VMT1/UTV, all week The X Factor VMT1/UTV, Sunday Dynasties BBC One, Sunday Condor Universal, Monday Last Week Tonight Sky Atlantic, Monday
WHEN you’re raised Catholic, you are encouraged from early childhood to use your imagination and create your own vision of Hell, usually a seething cesspit of tormented souls gnashing and wailing as flames lick them for eternity. Well, that vision now has been supplanted in my own imagination – Hell for me would be any protracted length of time spent in the company of John Barrowman. The Dr Who and Torchwood star is one of the contestants in this year’s I’m A Celebrity, and he’s always ‘on’, a human Duracell bunny if a bunny could laugh like a drain all day and intersperse conversations with showtunes. Unlike the bunny, though, Barrowman doesn’t appear to come with an off switch, and I imagine life for his fellow celebs in the jungle must be utterly unbearable.
Even more so now that the unctuous Noel Edmonds has arrived into the camp as emperor, telling the unhappy minions what to do. Unsurprisingly, the first clash was with Barrowman, who Edmonds chastised for scratching his groin. The look that flashed across Barrowman’s face suggested he would much rather be in Lord Of The Flies and serve Edmonds up with rice and beans.
This year’s show is well cast, and already I have a few favourites. X Factor alumna Fleur East has proved herself pretty fierce in all the tasks assigned to her, and Emily Atack has provided a lot of the laughs. She’s game for anything, but her screams when she was nipped on the finger by a snake were hilarious. Hats off to her, though – spiders and bugs don’t bother me, but if a snake so much as hissed at me, you’d be reading an obituary here, not a TV review.
As always, though, there’s one person in camp you find yourself willing on, and this time it’s Anne Hegerty, best known as The Governess on The Chase. Hegerty was diagnosed in her forties with Asperger syndrome and decided to do this show to normalise the condition to a wide audience. That indeed is brave, but watching her getting upset as she struggles to cope with sensory overload has been tough.
Of course, the big news of this year’s I’m A Celeb is the absence of Anthony McPartlin, leaving Declan Donnelly to present with Holly Willoughby. Ant and Dec are so synonymous with this show, to the point where the entire artifice exists only to feed material to them for jokes, it was quite a gamble to proceed at all. But after a nervous start that saw her basically just laugh at Dec’s jokes, Willoughby has found her feet and, once again, a strong format will always withstand change. The same cannot be said for The
X Factor, which limps along like a kitten with a thorn in its paw, and with all the attendant shrieking. I know all the One Direction fans love him, but Louis Tomlinson sets me on edge. When he calls an older contestant ‘lad’, I want to reach into the television and tell him I have underpants older than he is. To be fair, he got three of his four acts into the semi-finals this weekend, though Scouse Anthony has long since outlived his usefulness. Our own Brendan Murray has a terrific voice, but he’s a one-trick pony who seems unable to sing anything with even a mildly up tempo beat. If he ever brings out an album, I’ll add it to my Spotify playlist, but I’ll listen only when I have difficulty sleeping.
Promos in the breaks are soliciting auditionees for next year, but honestly, it’s time to admit the show has had its day (sometime around the Jedward era, to be fair), and kill it off for good.
Penguins made an appearance on David Attenborough’s Dynasties, and proved themselves far from the cuddly little cuties we’ve come to know and love. Females who hadn’t found males to mate with tried to elbow out love rivals, males who had no eggs to mind just stole them, and all tried to force others out of their way so they wouldn’t be at the back of the huddle when savage winter storms hit, leaving the unlucky ones to die.
There was heartbreaking footage of a group stranded in a gully. Faced with the choice, one mother saved herself and left her chick to die, which rather put a downer on my weekend. Though camera crews are not supposed to intervene, I think we all cheered when we learned the team cut steps into the gully and helped the animals escape. Just like us at home, they surely had enough of the carnage.
If you’re not watching Condor on Universal, I urge you to catch up on the player. While Max Irons ostensibly is the star, the show is stolen by Leem Lubany, the actress who plays an Arab-Israeli assassin called Gabrielle Joubert. Already, she is one of television’s most memorable characters, a sociopathic, psychopathic nymphomaniac who kills for pleasure. If only they could get her into the Australian jungle, she surely would liven up proceedings immeasurably.
Finally, the current run of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver came to an end with a stark warning about the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, the US, Brazil and the Philippines. In Manila, a woman in the street asked why the media there concentrated on the extrajudicial killings of drug dealers that have been ordered by President Duterte ‘when he has done so much good, like infrastructure’.
In the best line of the week, Oliver quipped: ‘That might be the only woman in the world who, when told about death squads throwing criminals off bridges, would go: “Bridge, you say? Tell me more about this wonderful piece of infrastructure”.’