'I'm a Celebrity is turning into the Coleen and Dean show'

We’re a full week into this year’s I’m a Celebrity, and I think it’s safe to say we and ITV have been reminded of what happens when you fill the jungle with lots of nice and non-confrontational celebrities: You get a nice, but boring, camp.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s still a perfectly enjoyable way to spend an hour each evening. I’ll happily put up with hours of media-trained, #BeKind, jungle dullness if it means I also get to watch something as joyfully silly as Oti Mabuse and GK Barry’s blindfolded driving task on Sunday night.

Likewise, if it means I’m offered the opportunity to watch Ant & Dec giving a presenting masterclass every night. So far this year, the Geordie geniuses have been as colourful and bouncy as Donnelly's new look hair. McPartlin in particular appears to have got his mojo back — to the extent that he's now comfortable with making jokes about other people's bad driving.

The steady yet unremarkable viewing figures would also suggest there is a market for the happy-clappy, Ging Gang Goolie around the campfire vibe.

Sadly, for those of us who can still remember the show’s golden days it’s simply a reminder of what we’ve lost. I'm A Celebrity is always at its best when the campmates are forced to suffer a little. Them being given their luxury items early, being allowed to double up on trials to help out Dean McCullough or receiving fast food buffets they haven’t really earned just does not sit right with me.

The main problem with a drama-free camp though, is that the producers and editors have to get involved, either by making mountains out of molehills or by, ahem, helping the story along.

Which brings us to our liveliest campmate, radio presenter McCullough. In the absence of a genuine argumentative pain-in-the-backside figure, McCullough has become this year’s go-to argumentative pain-in-the-backside figure in the eyes of the baying public.

Now, I will accept that he hasn’t exactly done himself many favours in that regard. Him referring to himself in the third person was an early red flag for me, and the more and more trials he does, the less and less I believe in the spontaneity of his screaming.

However, let's be honest here. That disagreement McCullough had with 'Wee Tyrone From Coronation Street' over firewood duties was blown way out of proportion. It was so not that big a deal that ITV had to take some of the fighting talk McCullough muttered later in the Bush Telegraph and edit it into the recap to make it seem like he’d said to Wee Tyrone it during the actual non-event.

Some bloodthirsty viewers have even tried suggesting that the “wee Tyrone” line was utterly disrespectful to Alan Halsall. There may be something in that, but I prefer the more understandable explanation: he’d simply forgotten Halsall’s name in the same way that, until the wood-based dispute blew up, most viewers had forgotten Halsall was even in the camp.

The Corrie star’s not alone in that, by the way. I’ve already reached the stage where I’ll be watching the show and then someone suddenly speaks and I go “Oh, are they still here?”

And then I’ll start scratching my head and wonder how a pair of potentially brilliant campmates like Maura Higgins and Richard Coles have been allowed to fade into the flora and fauna of main camp so quickly.

Wee McCullough From Radio 1 will probably get the blame for that as well, although it’s not his fault that ITV has decided to turn it into the Coleen and Dean show.

I know Ant McPartlin has become so fed up with McCullough doing the trials that he has publicly begged the public to vote for someone else, but he’s been in this game long enough to know that his pleas are likely to have the exact opposite effect.

Perhaps the producers are simply hoping that Coleen and Dean’s rhyming names will inspire Wayne Rooney to write another of his fabled poems. Or perhaps ITV is just getting its money’s worth out of this year’s big money signing while it can.

Here we must accept that Rooney becoming the first person to rumble Higgins and Coles’s secret luxury camp was simply an organic storyline development that, as luck would have it, allowed ITV to run with the “Wagatha Christie strikes again!” line. I’m not saying it didn’t happen that way, but we know enough by now about how reality shows are edited.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that other campmates had voiced their doubts before Rooney did, but those doubts had, sadly, not made the final edit.

Similarly, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the words “Here, why not ask Coleen about the time she and Wayne met Donald Trump in the White House?” may have been whispered to one of her campmates by an off-camera production assistant during a non-broadcast conversation in the Bush Telegraph.

Again, I’m not saying that did happen. I just feel it pays to have a healthy cynicism about these things. Let’s just say Coleen strikes me as the sort of person who would only give you a juicy anecdote if you dragged it out of her. That’s not a criticism of Mrs Rooney, by the way. Who knows, the "multi-millionaire wag who’s just a normal Liverpool lass at heart" story arc may even take her all the way to the jungle throne next month.

Her rise to camp prominence towards the end of the first week will certainly be viewed as a success by whoever has been running Operation Squash The Red Hot Favourite in the I’m A Celebrity production office. Rooney has suddenly jumped from rank outsider to second in the betting odds.

Unfortunately, if the fact that he just won the Camp Leader public vote alongside Barry McGuigan is anything to go by, it looks like said red hot favourite Danny Jones will still take some beating.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. Before the coronation there’s the small matter of working out the order of the evictions. Who’s first out? Well, with so many anonymous wallflowers in there, that’s a really tricky one.

All I know is there’s no point in either you or Ant McPartlin getting your hopes up: It won’t be Dean.

I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here airs nightly on ITV1 at 9pm, and streams on ITVX.