Celebrity

Stewart Lee’s column on Nigel Farage taking part in I’m A Celebrity is devastating, required reading

Poke Staff. Updated November 28th, 2023

ITV apparently spent a long time trying to get Nigel Farage on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and now it’s beginning to look as if it might not have been worth all the effort (and a reported £1.5 million appearance fee).

Because latest viewing figures aren’t exactly pulling any trees up, with the latest series of the reality show more talked about than watched. Long way to go and all that, though.

We mention it because the show – and Farage’s participation – were the focus of the great Stewart Lee’s latest column for the Observer and it makes for devastating, required reading.

Here’s just a little bit of how it starts.

In 2011, Nigel Farage co-chaired the Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping with Italy’s Francesco Speroni, who described the Norwegian white supremacist mass murderer and unlikely celebrity Top Gear fan Anders Behring Breivik as someone whose “ideas are in defence of western civilisation”.

‘Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Do Ant and Dec believe Breivik’s July 2011 shooting of 69 people, most of them teenagers, on the island of Utøya represented a defence of western civilisation?

‘Do Ant and Dec, like Breivik, think Top Gear is “one of the funniest shows on TV… and one of the very few programmes at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing”, or do they prefer Bill Burr’s new anti-woke movie, Old Dads?’

You can read the whole thing here.

And here are just a few of the things people were saying about it.

Read the column in full here!

Source The Guardian/Observer H/T @gnickodonnell