I'm A Celeb - Toxic

[TheDevil]

I have found I'm a Celebrity to be rather toxic this year.

If James and Ian aren't bullying Andrew... Then Ian and James are throwing around their toxic masculinity. Mansplaning things to the women, not allowing them to have a say and forcing them to go first with food or trials. Yes that could be seen as chivalry but it has been annoying Kate Garraway for one. She's not been allowed to have her say she's been told where she can participate and eat.

But if James and Ian aren't throwing around toxic masculinity, Ian Wright is being a pathetic little baby. When he did the task with James in pitch black, he was so annoyed at how poorly they did that he threw his helmet on the floor when the trial was over, ripped his goggles off and threw them. This is straight up vandalism right on our TV screens and if he was in a tennis match or a golf match, or any other sports match and displayed that juvenile behaviour and attitude he would be penalised. This man has a MBE and he's being a little ***.

But besides all that... If that isn't bad enough, James is mocking disabilities. When Ian went for a run in the camp, James said "Look at that clubfoot. Go on then, expend that energy." Off com received numerous complaints over the disability joke.

But we can put all of that aside, because none of that ruins kids dreams, but what does ruin kids dreams, is telling them Santa isn't real. This was last nights shocker, when Ian and James went on to explain to the camp how Santa isn't real and how far their parents went to make them believe that he was.

[andy-hughes]

This programme is the modern electronic equivalent of Roman games.

People undergo discomfort and humiliation for the entertainment of the masses - the same primeval notions that drove the Romans to seek this level of entertainment, still drives us today.

I am old enough to remember the late Clive James introducing us to the Japanese game show 'Endurance' where contestants did very similar things to IAC, and we all gawped and marveled, not only at what Japanese people will watch, but what people will go through to be on television.

And now, here we are 'civilized ' Westerners, doing and watching the same thing we mocked the Japanese for doing and watching.

These shows are based on deprivation, and the effects it has on people - usually not positive, which is what makes for what is rather amusingly referred to as 'good television'.

I personally feel that it is a less active - in the sense that it is beamed into our homes - equivalent of popping down to Bedlam on a Sunday to gawp at the lunatics through the bars.

Add to that the random and wholesale cruelty to dumb animals whose only fault is an absence of physical attraction, and the means to express pain and fear, and the whole thing loos less appealing the more you think about it.

We get the TV we deserve, and the ratings of this freak show say more about us as individuals, than any of the cash-seeking egotists who take part in such demeaning behaviour.

[TheDevil]

The episode after this thread, Ian wright admitted he had problems that he has to work through and that the jungle helped him realise that.

Those who have been watching and following the show will know that my thread is spot on.