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News from the I’m a Celebrity jungle: goodness thrives in strange places

I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here
I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here: ‘Harry Redknapp was endlessly kind to his fellow contestants, and talked lovingly about his family.’ Photograph: James Gourley/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

It is natural, in these testing times, that we should all seek moments of escape. Given the nonstop disaster movie that is the news, a bottle of wine and a bubble bath doesn’t cut it – and sometimes a full purging of the brain is in order. And so we turn to TV, specifically the wilfully shallow, disposable kind in which, say, celebrities are rolled in glitter and thrust on to a dancefloor in front of hatchet-faced judges; or catapulted to the Australian jungle to feast on meal worms; or in which unfeasibly beautiful people are required to lounge around in microscopic bikinis and engage in strange coupling rituals.

As coping mechanisms go, it is ridiculous – and ridiculously effective

As coping mechanisms go, it is ridiculous – and ridiculously effective. It’s also a format in which we get the opportunity to vote for people we admire and can perhaps even imagine having a pint with. Which, I think we can all agree, is something of a novelty.

Traditionally, reality TV is seen as the home of the terminally idiotic. It is, as the whingers have it, a debasing of the notion of entertainment, not to say the nation’s collective IQ. I am often one of these whingers, because part of my job requires me watch these shows (yes, I know: call that a job?) and I am frequently left slack-jawed by the shamelessness, the fatuousness, the sheer paucity of ideas on display. But it’s also true that a handful of these programmes shine a light on human behaviour and have something to tell us about the times we live in. They suggest that, as a species, we are perhaps not so awful after all.

This year’s I’m a Celebrity … was won by Harry Redknapp, a former football manager who distinguished himself by being endlessly kind to his fellow contestants and talking lovingly about his family. As lore would have it, reality TV is populated by the coldly ambitious and morally dubious, but Redknapp – who had never watched the show before appearing in it – is a far cry from the unscrupulous cads we have grown to expect. Indeed, the whole series, which has previously delighted in stirring up discord, was notable for the warmth, camaraderie, humility and humanity shown by its participants. Who, honestly, could have predicted the sheer soppy joy of watching Nick Knowles handing over his pillow for another contestant to sleep on, or of listening to Redknapp waxing lyrical about his wife Sandra’s jam roly-polys (not a euphemism)?

I’m a Celebrity … isn’t the only show to have brought out the best in people – or, in the public, a keen sense of fair play. Love Island, the sun-baked idyll allegedly populated by nincompoops and narcissists, not only yielded a heart-warming romance between winners Dani Dyer, big-hearted offspring of the actor-turned-Brexit analyst Danny, and Jack Fincham, an upstanding pen salesman from Kent; it also called out love rats, educated viewers on gaslighting and exposed racial prejudice – witness the fury at the repeated sidelining of one of the few black women, Samira Mighty, who eventually chose to leave the show.

Note also how the country heaved its bosom at the Strictly contestant Seann Walsh after he was filmed kissing his married dance partner, Katya Jones. Justice was served when the pair plummeted to the bottom of the leader board and were eventually voted off the show.

And of course we have Bake Off, a competition in which participants cheer each other on and in which this year’s winner, Rahul Mandal, was a shy research scientist who began baking to help him overcome loneliness. For all its brashness, reality TV can’t resist an underdog.

It’s significant too that this year brought the axing of Big Brother, a show that blazed a trail for the marquee reality shows of today and yet, over the years, has curdled into pantomime ghastliness. The X Factor’s dwindling ratings also suggest the public has little patience for shows characterised by ill-disguised manipulation and visibly bored judges.

It has long been acknowledged that reality TV has little in common with actual reality, moulded as it is by the interventions of producers, script editors and directors with an eye on the ratings. But no amount of meddling can anticipate how the public will react to individuals, or how they will choose to vote. This year’s crop of shows has revealed a warmth and wholesomeness among viewers, and the people they have chosen to champion.

It’s all rather heartening, and proof that goodness and decency can reside in the most unlikely cockroach-infested places. Reality TV is, ultimately, an alternative reality in which good deeds are rewarded and bad behaviour called out, all the while blotting out the white noise of everyday life. Despite the artifice, it is also, curiously, one of our more democratic institutions, one that is shaped and reshaped according to voter preferences. There must be a lesson in there somewhere, but I can’t imagine what it is.

• Fiona Sturges is a freelance arts writer