FUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE!
Forget Buckingham Palace protocol – he’s on a mission to be the reality TV king
Mike Tindall is clearly mixing business with pleasure Down Under on the set of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! UK. The flirty former rugby player was snapped getting to grips with a crew member on the Gold Coast as production started on the reality show.
“Mike cheekily ran up behind the pretty crew member before swinging her around on the pontoon,” reveals an onlooker. “At one point, he pretended to push her over the edge.”
While Mike’s antics raised eyebrows, the fun-loving star has been spending his on-camera time gushing about his royal wife Zara, 41. The 44-year-old shocked his campmates when he opened up about the couple’s first date in Sydney in 2003 during England’s Rugby World Cup-winning campaign.
“First actual date, we just went out for lunch locally and ended up having quite a boozy one,” Mike recalled. “When we figured out that we both quite like getting smashed, it was a good start. I was at the World Cup. She was out watching. I got dropped from the semi-final. I was pissed off and so I went for a beer with another guy who got dropped… They’d met her before and they introduced us, and then we got chatting.” The rest is royal history!
The couple, who have been married for 11 years, now share three children, Mia, eight, Lena, four, and Lucas, 19 months, who have remained behind with Zara at home on her mother Princess Anne’s estate, Gatcombe Park.
While Mike claimed Zara told him to “go enjoy yourself and be yourself” in the TV jungle, the sports star’s playful nature has landed him in hot water in the past. Just six weeks after their wedding in July 2011, Zara was reportedly left “humiliated” after CCTV footage emerged of Mike getting close with a female fan on a boozy night out in Queenstown.
“They were getting flirty with each other and getting very touchy-feely,” said a spectator of the incident.