Ant and dec drag itv’s bush back to life with a haunted hall-of-fame cast
ITV never let the campfire go cold. Barely four months after the last cockroach hit the cutting-room floor, I'm a Celebrity… South Africa drops Monday night with a twist that smells of panic and nostalgia in equal measure: every contestant has already survived this circus once.
The ghosts of jungle past clock in at 9 p.m. sharp
Harry Redknapp, the football granddad who charmed 2018 into submission, leads a parade of former finalists—Adam Thomas, David Haye, Georgia Toffolo—flown to a new biome where the snakes are real but the drama is pre-cooked. No live ants under the bum, no satellite delay; the whole series was shot months ago in Kruger’s heat, edited like a thriller, then locked in a vault until ITV needed a ratings defibrillator.
That need is now. Advertisers have sprinted away from linear TV faster than a celeb chasing a Dingo Dollar, and the broadcaster’s share price has coughed twice since Christmas. Wheeling back proven faces is cheaper than grooming new ones, and the South African tax rebate doesn’t hurt either.
Episodes run nightly—weeknights only—each length tweaked to squeeze the last drop of ad inventory. The finale on 24 April goes live from a London studio, a logistical pirouette that spares ITV the cost of beaming Ant and Dec to the southern hemisphere twice in one year.
Viewer fatigue? Maybe. But the format’s real enemy is its own success: every trial feels recycled, every tear-jerking letter from home arrives on schedule like a Southern Rail delay. Still, the marketing department bets that memory is shorter than a witchetty grub and that Britain will once again gather to watch famous people fail at basic camping.
They’re probably right. We keep pretending we’re above it, then find ourselves shouting at a former royal butler trying to thread a spider with his teeth. Redknapp already won; now he must win again, older, slower, richer. That arc—victory stripped of stakes—turns the show into a gladiator reboot where the lions have been declawed and the crowd knows the ending.
Yet we’ll watch, because schadenfreude ages well and because nothing else on the schedule this week promises a politician eating an anus. ITV bets the house on that simple, sour truth. The jungle always wins; the only change is the passport stamp.