Why we’re all in love with this true gent of the jungle
TO the surprise and delight of millions of viewers, football boss Harry Redknapp is fast becoming the unlikely hero of this year’s I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!
When the new series began a week ago, the replacement of Ant McPartlin by daytime’s Holly Willoughby was supposed to be the big talking point. Phwwwep! Stop play. Red card right there.
The remarkable thing was that when Harry met Holly down on the small screen, everyone started talking about him, not her. How so? She is a gorgeous blonde with volcanic charm, short skirts and an increasing confidence in her new role.
He is a bloodhound-faced geezer who looks like a nan in a fleece; in a good light, he could be an OAP shopper hot on the trail of bargain packs of Yorkshire teabags at Tesco. Yet everyone is just wild about Harry, we simply can’t get enough of him. Why? WHY? Let me count the ways.
Firstly, Harry is a true gent, the kind of old-school dude who always puts the ladies first. When sharing shower time with some of the younger women from the ITV1 reality show’s jungle camp, including X Factor’s Fleur East and EastEnders actress Rita Simons, the 71-year-old turned his back on their ablutions to give them some privacy.
Never mind that the cameras, as the girls very well knew, were trained on their every soapy curve and beaming those vote-winning bikini images back home. Darling Harry wanted to be respectful; to do the right thing not just by the women in front of him, but also by the women in his own life. And there was something very, very touching about that. Top lad!
This is particularly important as Harry clearly doesn’t quite understand how I’m A Celebrity works, or the burning ambition of many of his co-stars who fully grasp the showbiz realpolitik of every single star-spangled moment. From a line-up that includes Noel Edmonds, Nick Knowles, John Barrowman and Anne Hegerty – or ‘the brainy lady off The Chase’ as Harry calls her – he is already emerging as a potential king of the jungle.
While they are red-clawed in determination, barbecued with the thick smoke of aspiration, Harry just doesn’t give a damn. And this is a huge part of his charm.
Indeed, since day one of this 18th series, his good-natured bafflement has been an utter joy for I’m A Celeb aficionados like me. ‘I don’t have any idea of what I am in for really. Who is going to wash my pants?’ he wondered, before he went into the jungle. His wife Sandra urged him to watch the show on catch-up, but Harry doesn’t know how that works either. ‘To be honest, the only catch-up I know comes in a bottle,’ he said. What sauce.
Once actually in the camp, he professed his surprise at the spartan conditions – how we all guffawed – and was appalled when he and his campmates were supplied with a hunk of raw emu meat for their first dinner.
‘I honestly thought there would be a caravan round the back doing bacon sandwiches,’ he lightly moaned. Afterwards, someone asked him if he would ever eat emu again. ‘Yes,’ Harry deadpanned, while looking at a pan of the dread dead. ‘I’m going to ask my butcher if he can do it for Christmas lunch.’
I laughed at that almost as much as I laughed at his joke about the Russian football player Roman Pavlyuchenko – too rude to repeat here, but surely one of the funniest moments in this show’s long and chequered history.
And despite being a solid meat and two veg man from London’s East End, someone who draws the exotic culinary line at calamari with tartare sauce, Harry did his bit in the Bushtucker Trials.
To win food for his campmates – and not to let down his grandchildren watching at home – he ate sheep’s brains and held beach worms, witchety grubs and a giant burrowing cockroach in his mouth.
Even more bravely, he did the Floss dance with Fleur, and asked to go to loo halfway through a trial. No one has ever, ever done that before.
All fabulous stuff, although it was the way he candidly talked about his love for his wife Sandra that melted most hearts. ‘She is my life,’ he told his campmates. ‘I only want to be with her. I can never wait to see her.’
He revealed that despite being married for 51 years, he still calls Sandra ten times a day and likened their relationship to ‘winning the lottery’. As we discovered, their marriage has survived him accidentally running her over in his car, and then destroying her beloved flowerbeds with a jet-wash.
How often do we hear men tenderly and unselfconsciously talking about women in such a lovely way, on reality shows, in the news or even in popular dramas? Hardly ever, and it was both thrilling and cheering to hear.
In addition, Harry has blended in surprising ways. He takes cold showers a few times a day anyway, ‘because it makes me feel better’, and he offered to be the official camp toilet cleaner because he has ‘no sense of smell’. Bless him!
I love that he misses jam rolypoly and custard almost as much as he misses his wife.
He is a sweet man, a diamond geezer with a flutter of hilarity and a solid bent for being a gent.
Football fans have known this for years, but it is news to the rest of us.
Former England star Michael Owen tweeted this week that he was not surprised Redknapp had been a hit. ‘I knew that Harry Redknapp would be brilliant. He is the funniest man ever,’ he said.
No argument from me.