Famous lost words
They're having a spelling test on Celebrity Love Island (ITV1). Calum Best has been given the word celebrities to spell. That shouldn't be hard, he is one after all. "C, E, L, E... " he begins, promisingly. Then he breaks with tradition and comes straight in with an I.
But Calum realises he's done something wrong, possibly because the better spellers among the others have their heads in their hands. "No, wait, let me start that again," he says.
He does get there in the end, mainly because the others are drawing big Bs and Rs in the air for Calum, terrified they're going to be turned into celeities. On Celeity Love Island. But then Calum comes a cropper on foie gras, which he turns into foi grous.
Calum's own claim to celeity is that his father is an ex-footballer. Some of the others actually used to be something themselves - there are a few ex-soap stars in there, an ex-footballer, a current footballer's ex-girlfriend. I have no idea who Fran Cosgrove is or ever was, except that he used to be on another celebrity reality TV show.
And that's the thing, these people have become a whole new species. They're people who possibly once did something - appeared in a soap opera, or shagged someone - and now they drift around from one celebrity reality show to another. Abi Titmuss, who's reportedly being paid £100,000 to be on this one, was in Gordon's kitchen; before that she got jiggy with a disgraced TV presenter. Isabella Hervey used to be an It girl, then she put a tracksuit on and did The Games. Rebecca Loos claims she had an affair with a footballer, then she went down on The Farm where she had a pop at a footballer but ended up giving manual relief to a pig.
The Farm, incidentally, is also running at the moment, back for a second series. So if you get bored of the love island you can switch to Five to see what's going on down there. But how do you top a footballer's self-proclaimed ex-girlfriend tossing off a pig? Well, last time I looked, the ex-wife of the son of a former prime minister was blowing turkey semen down a straw into the back of a girl turkey. I get really cross when people say TV is all rubbish these days and there's nothing to watch.
Anyway, back to the love action in Fiji. The idea of this show is clearly to get people to try to combine their old careers (in the case of the shaggers) with their new ones - being on celebrity reality shows. What they want is the first on-screen celebrity shag. So two of them get voted into the love shack every couple of days. First in are Paul, who used to be in Hollyoaks, and Isabella, who used to go to parties.
"Oh look," shouts Paul when he sees the beautiful, exclusive part of the hotel he and Isabella have got all to themselves for 48 hours.
"Wicked," squeals Isabella.
"Yeah man. Oh my God."
"How nice is this?"
"It's like we're in the love shack man, you know. Oh babe, let's have some champagne. Cheers, darling."
"Cheers."
"Wicked."
"We've got the whole place to ourselves."
And then there's a slight pause as the horror of their situation sinks in: they've only got each other for company, and neither of them has got a single interesting thing to say about anything. It's going to be a very long 48 hours if they don't have that shag.
The highlight of the whole thing so far for me was when a paparazzi boat appeared on the horizon. All of them pretended to be outraged while jostling for the best position to be photographed in and touching up their hair. Paul said that Tony Blair or whoever's in charge at the moment (FYI, it is Tony Blair, Paul) should do something to protect the privacy of people like them. I love that - you go on a reality TV show, where there are cameras everywhere, even in the loveshack where they're hoping for the first on-screen celebrity shag. And you moan about privacy. You stupid little twerp.
The only good news in the celebrity/reality world is that ITV has got a new show called Celebrity Shark Bait later this summer. Presumably it's all the same ex-soap stars and shaggers, but this time they get lowered in a cage into the sea off South Africa for face-to-face encounters with great white sharks. Only one question: why bother with the cage?
guardian