On Sunday’s I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! (Virgin Media One), a man sticks his head inside a box full of rats. The word “Orwellian” gets overused these days, so I’m going with “Orwelly”. It’s very Orwelly.
Unlike in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Winston Smith was terrified by the prospect of having his head shoved into a box of rats, the affable social-media star Angry Ginge seems to quite like it on I’m a Celeb.
The rat box is just one in a series of critter-filled containers that Angry Ginge sticks his head in over the course of several minutes. Give Angry Ginge a mysterious box and he’ll stick his noggin in. He’s reliable that way.
Unlike Winston Smith, Angry Ginge isn’t being psychologically manipulated into a totalitarian mindset by this box of rats. No, Angry Ginge is tasked with rotating plastic stars with his tongue inside a box of rats so that celebrities can eat delicious crocodile feet.
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“I shouldn’t have bothered,” Orwell’s ghost says on reading that sentence. “I shouldn’t have bothered writing books. I don’t want to be an adjective any more.”
Anyway, I think Angry Ginge’s task is a metaphor for “capitalism”, although it is also a literal reality.
There are other differences between Winston Smith and Angry Ginge. Winston Smith was being tortured by the suspiciously Hibernian “O’Brien” in the name of social control. Angry Ginge is being tormented by Ant and Dec, the groomed Troll dolls/Love Is… characters who reign from their jungle panopticon in the name of light entertainment.
Imagine a cheeky wink on a shiny jungle floor, forever (so Orwelly). That’s Ant and Dec’s ideology.
Anyway, in our particular dystopia, if you’re a celebrity who needs a career boost the best thing you can do is go to Australia and eat kangaroo glands while being chortled at and chided by these two elderly Geordie boys.
The United States dealt with its corn-syrup surplus by putting it into all of its food. The UK manages its glut of celebrities by siphoning them into reality-TV shows. It’s like conscription. Every celebrity’s number comes up eventually – Sally Rooney, Big Ted from Play School, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Sooty, Keir Starmer, Sinitta, R2D2. Mark my words, they too will darken the eternal jungle of Ant and Dec when the time comes.
Does Ireland’s own Vogue Williams need a career boost? Sister of Good Housekeeping, the Economist and Mojo, Vogue has been a reality-TV star since she appeared on RTÉ’s scripted reality series Fade Street back in the innocent, pre-fascist noughties. (You can still watch it on RTÉ Player.)
Back then she was but a Teen Vogue. Her podcasting, television-presenting and influencing career was but nascent, and her dalliances with the defrocked Boyzone star Brian “Bryan” McFadden and her now husband, the renegade Made in Chelsea posho Spencer Matthews, were far in the future.
It was clear from the start (I just rewatched an episode of Fade Street) that she was scripting her own reality. And now she is a successful Irish export, like Kerrygold, Bono and passive-aggressive alcoholism.
There’s also the delightful Celebs Go Dating star Tom Read Wilson, who has the refined manner of talking crockery in a Disney film, the hereditary celeb Jack Osbourne, offspring of the late Ozzy, and Lisa Riley, from the agricultural drama Emmerdale, who enables her new friend Ruby Wax OBE (this is an imperial endeavour) in her lust for a sullen crew member who lives in an ice-cream van. (Jackie Collins novels have been built on less.)
On Sunday, Martin Kemp, from the well-moisturised yuppie beat combo Spandau Ballet, gives an account of the conception of his son Roman Kemp. This insight into the Kemp production process comes unprompted, and it’s genuinely quite moving (though I have heard that, if you play the footage backwards, Roman might be unkemped).
The rapper Aitch is here too. He shortened his first name, Harrison, to H to maximise efficiency, but he then let himself down by spelling it phonetically, and inaccurately, as “Aitch”. This feels like a process failure to me, and I want to write a very long McKinsey-style report about it.
Nonetheless, by Tuesday’s episode Aitch is named king of the jungle (a title with real executive power) and Angry Ginge becomes his enforcer, clearly none the worse for the rat box of which we spoke in paragraph one. In fact he’s glowing. Rat boxes are good for the skin, clearly. (That’s the rumour I’ve been spreading on Instagram.) Those little details don’t come through so much in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Aitch is then whisked off to be covered in cockroaches, mealworms, snakes and spiders while Ant and Dec gurgle and simper in delight. Ruby Wax and Lisa Riley seek items inside various pots of gunk and goo. Ant and Dec whistle and womp-womp in glee.
Four more weeping celebrities are placed in an oversized cot, like giant babies, and have more insects doused on them (“One is nibbling my testicle,” says Tom Read Wilson, which is, of course, a Seamus Heaney quote), because that’s where life has brought us at the arse end of civilisation.
Ant and Dec warble and wibble with joy. (They are not normal men.) Ah, the celebrities of the field: see how they gambol. How free they are. How covered in insects.
If you’re a typical Irish Times intellectual who dislikes pop culture and the fads beloved by the common clay, you have probably been reading this column and relating to Carol (Rhea Seehorn), the protagonist of Pluribus (Apple TV), Vince Gilligan’s excellent new sci-fi series.
She is one of only a handful of people on Earth not co-opted by an alien hive mind, a blissfully happy collective consciousness from outer space. (You know the sort of thing. You’ve seen it in Galway.)
No doubt that’s what Irish Times readers feel like whenever everyone else wants to discuss I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and all they want to do is have a deep discussion about geopolitics or experimental jazz or Sartre or whatever (nerds).
Pluribus is melancholy and odd and philosophical, and it’s also extremely niche sci-fi of a sort that only a big company such as Apple can get away with making, because they seem to run a television arm as a money-losing hobby.
It’s great. Carol’s world is a lonely and frightening one. In fact, sometimes it makes one hanker for the simple communal pleasures of eating insects in a celebrity jungle or sticking one’s head in a rat box. It’s very Orwelly.
