King Harry, jungle gent who won all our hearts
That’s JAN MOIR’S verdict on the jungle lovebird who won the nation’s hearts
pool and England midfielder and now a football pundit, and Mark Redknapp, a model. During the Bushtucker Trials on the show, Harry, a solid meat and two veg man from Essex, who draws the exotic culinary line at calamari with tartar sauce, ate sheep’s brains and held beach worms, witchetty grubs and a giant burrowing cockroach in his mouth. ‘I didn’t want to let my grandchildren down,’ he said, knowing that they would be watching at home. The Redknapps’ marriage has survived Harry accidentally running over Sandra’s foot in his car (‘It really messed up her ankle’) and on another occasion, destroying her beloved flowerbeds with a jet-wash. It has also survived the many trials of being a football manager as well as his 2012 trial, in which he was found not guilty of tax evasion and receiving offshore bungs.
And how ironic that in the week that the hyped-up but brief relationship between Love Island (ITV) winners Jack Fincham and Dani Dyer has abruptly ended, it is Harry and Sandra Redknapp who have emerged as the lovebirds on the top of the reality show tree.
(Dani says she dumped Jack because of ‘pressures’ and the fact that he was indiscreet about their sex life.)
Meanwhile, Sandra has just had to put up with Harry telling the nation about the ‘big pants’ she used to wear when they started courting. ‘ They came right up to here,’ he said on Saturday night, indicating a point just below his chest.
One never got the sense that Harry entirely understood how I’m A Celebrity worked, or the burning ambition of many of his co-stars to make themselves popular and attract viewer votes.
In the end, he triumphed by just being himself, and not being afraid to speak about his wife, the most important person in his life. He loved to love her – and we loved him for it.