UK Edition
By the time you read this, Matt Hancock may have eaten a large pile of ostrich testicles. (Ostriches have testicles, right? I get confused about birds. If you ever wonder why I don’t crop up on shows like Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Pointless etc, it’s because of these pockets of intense ignorance. I can’t risk them being revealed in front of the general public, to whom I have successfully communicated the misconception over the years that I am not an idiot. Off-duty, off-camera, there I’ll often be: merrily burbling on about probability or W B Yeats, looking for all the world like an intellectual, until we suddenly reach a bend in the conversation where it becomes clear to everyone in the room that I don’t know my left and right or why gravity doesn’t work on the moon, or whether birds have testicles. Only a couple of months ago, on a Cornish beach, an anonymous media source had to explain to me what tides are.)
Anyway, if ostrich testicles exist, Matt Hancock may have spent this week gobbling them. Or perhaps he has dined on rotten lizard eggs (do lizards … lay … oh never mind), or croc faeces, or a list of the dreams and aspirations he had as a young man, chopped up and served to him in a sarcastic pie.
I don’t know because I had to stop watching I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! as soon as Matt Hancock arrived (his “surprise” late entry the worst-kept secret in showbiz since Freddie Mercury was in the closet).
I struggle to watch “Bushtucker Trials” at the best of times. I actually really like this sort of programme, but I’m in it for the curious human dynamics; the strange and hungry little conversations in the dead of night; the arguments, tensions, reassuring decency and all that’s revealed when performers are placed in isolation and filmed for 24 hours a day. I’m not there for torture.
This year, for example, I was gripped when Love Island star Olivia Attwood slammed the DJ Chris Moyles for “name-dropping” during an anecdote about Jamie Oliver. My popcorn is out in buckets for this content. But I don’t want to see the newsreader Charlene White crying because she misses her children, or anybody truly frightened.
(I didn’t know what to do with the bit where Celebrity Gogglebox’s Babatúndé Aléshé asked Mike Tindall – for all the world as if he hadn’t been begged to do this by the producers – “How did you meet your wife?”. In one way, it’s just chat. In another way, the horrendous social awkwardness of ambushing Mike Tindall with that question on camera is ghastlier than eating the witchetty grubs.)
Here’s the problem with Matt Hancock going on the show. Obviously he’ll get hell on there. If there’s one electorate guaranteed to deliver Matt Hancock a massive vote, it’s the viewers deciding who gets the next Bushtucker Trial.
I mean, everyone has a reason to hate Matt Hancock. It’s like Murder on the Orient Express. Pro-lockdowners hate him for delivering it too late. Anti-lockdowners hate him for delivering it at all. And both sides despise the hypocrisy of ushering in the rules and breaking them on the sly.
As it happens, I struggle to feel any of those things with much passion. I expect he did his best in a baffling and unprecedented situation – it proved clumsy, dangerous and wrong, but maybe it was his first snog.
Anyway, what I hate him for is the speed with which he appeared to slough off his wife and children to protect his image. I mean, it was immediate. No lip service paid to the idea of managing his departure from home gently and carefully in a way that best protected the woman he’d once promised to look after and the little chaps they’d conjured up together.
We were all a bit emotional about social bonds back then, weren’t we, and I admit I empathised so closely with that family’s shock and hurt that I cried real tears over it. I bet I’m not the only one. And then he didn’t even manage to protect his image! You utter wazzock, Hancock! At least Boris Johnson was good at it!
The nation’s hearts have ached for that family throughout his subsequent, relentless quest for the limelight, whether giving interviews about how “in love” he is now [vomiting emoji] or taking in Ukrainian refugees and boasting, “before going down this route, I checked obviously with the kids”. Ah yes, the kids’ welfare taking priority as always! Jesus, Matt, will you listen to yourself!
Thus, people will vote for him to be showered in earthworms, fed genitals and locked in coffins. But the more he is punished and demeaned, surely the worse it is for his children? They must yearn to be proud of him. They must hope for his well-being. It’s paradoxical: the reason he should be made to suffer is the reason he shouldn’t be made to suffer.
The best result, really, is that he wins. That he’s made King of the Jungle. That he’s so successful, he doesn’t bother going back into politics. Because his children deserve to be proud of him, but he doesn’t deserve to represent his constituents in Parliament. He’s just not a good enough man. And that really won’t be a problem if he’s a celebrity.
But why oh why oh why does anyone do this show? That part, I’ll never understand. People often ask if I’d do it myself. Man alive! I wouldn’t even do Celebrity Mastermind.
Why it would be best for us all if Matt Hancock became King of the Jungle
This week, Victoria has been watching I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!