It often feels tricky to discuss reality television shows in print.
That’s because each episode is designed to be the telly equivalent of shovelling snow, already well out of date by the time the next episode comes around.
Booking Matt Hancock
In its 20th anniversary year, though, the new series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (STV) managed to break free from the usual round of gossipy water cooler moments (are enough people back in the office for water cooler moments?) by booking MP and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Not only that, the Tim from The Office wannabe made it all the way to the final (Hancock also had a famous office romance, and the post of Gareth in the current Cabinet’s occupied by Grant Shapps)
It seemed unthinkable he’d actually win the thing, but his survival seems obvious in hindsight.
He was boring, well-mannered and all too ready to muck in and complete whichever filthy task came his way.
Perfect credentials for a career in British politics these days, right?
Anyway, of course he didn’t win, with down-to-earth England international footballer Jill Scott (the eventual champion) and charmingly geezerish Hollyoaks actor Owen Warner ahead of him.
On the night, viewers got to ‘enjoy’ seeing Scott smothered as she unscrewed a series of prizewinning stars using just her tongue and Warner scoffing the usual procession of grim offal.
“Don’t balls it up,” chirped Ant or Dec, before the oddly unphased actor scoffed a camel’s testicle.
Orwell’s 1984 rewritten
Hancock, meanwhile, endured five minutes with his head encased in a tank of water stuffed with frenzied live eels and crabs.
If George Orwell’s 1984 were rewritten in 2022, rats in cages would be replaced by aquatic pondlife in an Australian wood as a means of political re-education.
“I’m just so grateful,” oozed Hancock, hand on heart. “People think they know me, but actually they don’t. They know Matt Hancock from television.”
That’ll be the one who scrambles around in animal guts looking for redemption. At time of writing he’s lost the Conservative whip, but he’ll probably be the new PM by spring.
Simon Schama’s History of Now
Amid all this literal and metaphorical cultural mess, Simon Schama remains defiant.
“Their words, their painting, their music has given me an abiding faith in the moving force of culture,” he said of his featured group of artists during the first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now (BBC Two), a brave attempt to chart the political impact of culture during his lifetime.
He was born in 1945, during the Blitz of London, although his tale began a little earlier, with Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, which depicts the bombing of its title village during the Spanish Civil War.
He also looked at George Orwell’s participation in that conflict, and how his comrades’ denouncing and execution on Stalin’s orders inspired 1984’s creation.
Genial and inquisitive as ever, Schama spoke to Orwell’s son and the grandson of Boris Pasternak, whose Soviet-denounced Doctor Zhivago led him to Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova.
She tells him “art is a great tool of mastering people’s minds without any sort of violence.”
The whole thing was fascinating and deeply felt, but I wonder what Schama made of I’m a Celebrity?
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