Disclaimer:  These may or may not be the views of anyone.

Episode 1 is best summed up as that first date you had with Sarah/Jim from Accounts, who you’ve been lusting after all year. You put so much effort in to the prep that the date itself seemed like an anticlimax.

The show starts with stark reminders that at least ten film-, sound- and production-crew are in a better place than a cold, dark and wet Blighty. The utter sadists behind this year’s production taunt us with a mini-montage of forthcoming highlights:

• almost impossibly blue seas
• helicopters
• bugs raining down
• people falling out of helicopters
• boats
• water
• even more helicopters
• people falling in to water
• limos
• more water
• still more bugs and then, horror of horrors…
• Ant or Dec

Yes, Australia, the land of Ayers Rock (oh wait, you have to say Uluru now, don’t you?), Castlemaine XXXX, Swan, Fosters and other equally undrinkable brews (Ayers R-Uluru isn’t an undrinkable brew, Ed. Want to bet? It’s easier to get down your neck than a tube of Fosters!) has been reduced to a 40-second slapstick edit of utter predictability.

On Day 1, our slebs look fantastic. Except Gillian McKeith, obv. As they leave their limos and head for the air-conditioned goodness of the four star hotel, this happy band of campers telegraph megawatt-level smiles and immaculately coiffeured hair. And that’s just the boys.

The slebs gather awkwardly around a table of soft drinks. They chat, nervously, trying to remember where they’ve seen that vaguely familiar face. Stacey Solomon declares that she wants to race Linford Christie. At least I think that’s what she said. The only other possibility is that I’ve slipped through a wormhole and have materialised in PornWorld™.

Back on Planet Earth, I think I’m developing a crush on Stacey. And possibly Nigel Havers.

Anyway.

Now that we’ve met the Slebritists - and let’s face it, we knew who they were going to be almost a week ago – Ant or Dec navigate their way through an excruciatingly unfunny link. While the MILFy girls from a downtempo supermarket chain try to flog us some nosh, here in Chez Jones, we change seats and refresh our glasses.

And we’re back in three, two, one…

This year’s celeb-fodder is to be split in to two teams; boys and girls (as Ant or Dec put it, in a wholly unpatronising way).

The boys are to live in (get ready for this) ‘Camp Bruce’. And the girls are to stay in (you’ll never guess!)… ‘Camp Sheila’.

Marvellous.

And to reinforce gender-stereotyping to a completely unnecessary depth, the furniture, fixtures and fittings of Camp Bruce are all blue, whilst everything in Camp Sheila is pink.

At this point I’m forced to remind myself that assertively spiky, but hyper-intelligent, right-on feminist, Dr Germaine Greer has been on this show. Have ITV learned nothing from having her around?

Ant or Dec tells us that this year it’s all going to be different. Not so far, you Geordie shor-tarses.

But wait! For the first time in the show’s history (good grief, they actually used that line on us?), all of the ‘slebs’ are to face a Bushtucker Challenge *before* they even get to their camps. W00t!

I’m not too sure about the whole Bushtucker Challenge gig. There is the faint possibility that those little creatures could, you know, actually get hurt. And for a fleeting second, the image of Gillian McKeith, brandishing an 8″ Bowie knife, chasing Ant or Dec around the campsite, crosses my mind.

I smirk.

Our gang of intrepid explorers digests the news that they could be up to their necks in smelly things, less easily than than they might digest a raw Koala’s anus.

Kayla shares with us the advice that she was given before she left home; ‘My Mom said I should just put it in my mouth, not chew and just swallow it’.

The entire male viewership punches the air.

Both teams bear up surprisingly well during the first Bushtucker’s Challenge:

• Lembit and Kayla stick their hands in small, moist holes
• Shaun and Gillian have what appears to be four pints of bulls semen poured on their heads and end up looking like extras in a Japanese bukkake scene
• Nigel and Sheryl are forced to sing a karaoke version of Summer Lovin‘ off of ‘Grease’. This must surely be the worst thing anyone can endure?
• Aggro and Stacey are forced to eat a Kangaroo penis. Each. And Stacey complains about the size of Aggro’s penis. I smirk again. When a girl says ‘your penis is smaller than mine’, that’s something he’s not going to be able to live down in a hurry, right? Stacey wins this one. There’s a joke in my head that uses the words ‘not the first time’, and ‘Stacey’s mouth’ and ‘penis’, but I’m too much of a gentleman to make it.
• Linford and Britt take part in a spoof of Mastermind that is so mind-numbingly tedious, I feel aggrieved Ant or Dec don’t give us the correct answers to the questions L or B got wrong. Somewhere in ITV-land there’s a show planner who doesn’t understand that a television quiz based on television quizzes, is a non-starter.

At the end of a hard day in the jungle, grrl pwrr wins out. The Sheilas are packed off to the four star hotel, whilst the Bruces make their way to the nearest bit of one star jungle accommodation.

A piece of comedy gold occurs when the boys, led by Aggro, try to fan a flint-induced spark to burst in to life so they can cook their cockroaches; Shaun Ryder takes a fag out of his shirt pocket, ignites it with his lighter, and coolly continues watching the failed Boy Scouts not set light to anything.

Meanwhile back in the hotel Gillian McKeith is already winding up her comrades in arms, by taking three days to eat each mouthful of food. ‘I like to connect with my food’, she tells us. You could cut the tension with a wet haddock.

The next day dawns bright and beautiful, and our junglists begin their trip in to the deep outback.

Some of the girls and boys are ferried off to helicopters where they’re whisked up to 12,000ft and then get pushed out! Attached to parachutes, obv.

Respect is due.

Linford and Shaun are the boys, Stacey and Kayla are the girls.

The former pair do their very best just to get on with hurtling towards the ground without too many histrionics in a ‘butch but really, really scared’ kind of way. Of the latter pair, Stacey is clearly shitting herself and Kayla shrieks ‘Oh my God!’ so many times I wonder if she’s having continuous orgasms. I try not to look at Stacey’s cameltoe too often.

As the parachutists touch down, the production team gives us some musical accompaniment from Elbow. Jesus. Elbow? When the creative thinkers of ITV got together for this production the one thing they left behind was… creativity.

Meanwhile, back in Oz, the rest of the girls and boys are canoed to their campsites by, erm, canoes. As a result of a messy dismount (oo-er, Missus!) by Lembit, Nigel gets a ducking and promises revenge. Pillow fights in the dorm? Tarantula in his Y-Fronts? I try not to hope too much.

As soon as the shiny girls occupy Camp Sheila, Gillian starts to tell everyone that she has a complete phobia about bugs.

Bummer!

No-one stops to wonder why a complete arsehole arachnophobic bug-hater would volunteer for active duty in the Australian outback. This is, I feel, a bit of a social faux pas.

As soon as the Sheilas hit camp, the Alpha Female discussions are had. Britt and Gillian choose, as their battle ground, the domestic arrangements. Yep, well done everyone, you’ve pushed the boundaries of feminism back thirty years by arguing over the cooking. Fantastic. Is there a social anthropologist in the house?

Meanwhile, in Camp Bruce (now I have a scary mental image of an even-more-effeminate host of ‘Strictly’), Aggro stuns everyone by demonstrating that he knows the entire musical back-catalogue of The Cheeky Girls.

While the girls and boys have been settling into their new jungle habitats, the punters back home have been giving money to ITV by voting on who we get to see humiliated in the inaugural ordeal. And here are the gruesome details:

A male and a female will each get placed in to a coffin-shaped crate, buried underground. They will be shackled there. They will have bugs, creepy-crawlies, rats and Ant or Dec released into their crates. They have to escape (but they will have the keys to the shackles, obv).

We know that Gillian has a screaming terror of anything that runs, crawls, slimes or Ant or Decs across the face of this planet, so it’s an absolute cert that the public will put her in. But who will her male counterpart be? Of course, there could be just one candidate.

Tomorrow evening we find out how our intrepid explorers have got on in their cosy little underground tasks. Me, I’m going to put the kettle on and try not to laugh too loudly.

So that was Episode 1. The team dynamics have barely begun to surface, the boys are still shaven-jawed and steely-eyed, the girls are still lip-glossed and gorgeous (except Gillian McKeith, obv), and Ant or Dec are still being unfunny. No one has hit their rhythm and we’re all still a little bit nervous.

Yep, that sums up my first date with Sarah/Jim from Accounts. How was it for you?

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