Matt Hancock burrows in the dankness, sniffing out treats amid the vermin. He also does this on I’m a Celebrity

This week Ant & Dec clawed their way up from hell (Britain) once more and emerged spitting earth in the Australian jungle. Ant & Dec are the chortling cherubs of chaos who stand near celebrities eating animal genitalia or drowning in spiders on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! (Virgin Media One, daily).

Ant & Dec really hate celebrities, possibly because together Ant & Dec constitute just one single celebrity. Catholic readers will know about the indivisibility of Ant & Dec – two persons in one broadcaster. And science boffins now tell us that Ant & Dec have just one soul, like twins or all the wasps. They are nothing without each other. Alone they would each stand there bantering vaguely at the empty Newcastle air, just “Ant &” or “& Dec”, a vestigial ampersand implying an absence. Together, however, they are the premier light-entertainment host of their generation.

Britain is short of nurses. It is not short of celebrities. They have a celebrity surplus, a vast celebrity mountain that deflates in value as more celebrities are heaped on top of it

Children often ask me: “Patrick, what is the difference between the hobbit humourists Ant & Dec? How would I differentiate one from the other if I were, perchance, at a high-society function and wished to converse with them?”

Well, the differences are subtle. Ant is the big one, and above his wide smile lies a large forehead furrowed with worry for the lot of man. Above this he has a tuft of hair like the Muppet Bert. In contrast, Dec has the twinkling eyes and simple demeanour of a precious child, like Baby Jesus or the best Olsen twin or the guileless Bert-spouse Ernie. Together, Ant & Dec’s combination of innocence and experience puts them at the forefront of youth broadcasting, even though I think these Tyneside tykes have been on telly since the 1950s.

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In days of yore, celebrities had an aloof glamour and were presumed to have lives of great and exotic mystery. They wore ball gowns and took cruises and told urbane anecdotes. Now they eat insects for money on television and squabble over the best way to carry a bucket of human excrement. The celebrity market has been deregulated and oversaturated. Celebrities these days are an industrial byproduct of mass-media entertainment, and they are everywhere. Britain is short of nurses. It is not short of celebrities. They have a celebrity surplus, a vast celebrity mountain that deflates in value as more celebrities are heaped on top of it.

[ Patrick Freyne on Ireland’s Fittest Family: Screaming at people to be better used to be known as parenting ]

So I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! is a haven for celebrities in reduced circumstances, a sort of modern-day debtors’ prison where they go to rebrand. After an interlude in which some of them are forced to parachute and leap off buildings, they all sleep on little beds and hammocks around a campfire in the woods like the medieval terrorist Robin Hood. They are all given red trousers, presumably to make them more visible to predators. (This year Olivia Attwood from Love Island disappeared after just one episode, whisked away, I believe, by a hungry bear.) They are fed each day from a sort of receptacle literally lowered from the sky. This raises all sorts of questions about the nature of this jungle. Is the food lowered by Ant & Dec astride a gantry above the forest canopy or is this a naturally occurring phenomenon? Does this jungle have a roof? Is being fed by a bucket lowered to you on a rope going to become “all the rage”?

Let’s go to the experts. Love Island’s Attwood has opinions about the natural world that she gets to express before the bear gets her. “Rats,” she says. “I feel like I’m all right with them. Their tails are nasty, aren’t they? If you cut the tail off – I’m not suggesting you do that – it’s a hamster, isn’t it?” She pauses before adding thoughtfully: “But it can bite you.”

The comedian Babatunde Aléshé has judgmental thoughts about spiders, who have “more legs than they need”, although he should probably have been more terrified of his natural enemy, “the ground”, when he is sent by a whimsical general public to wander about on high scaffolding in the pouring rain. The great British public are, reliably, a bunch of b******s.

[ Patrick Freyne: Nurses! They think they’re so great, healing the sick and comforting the dying ]

The Hollyoaks hunk Owen Warner is my favourite nature expert. He is a sweet and innocent child in the mould of previous reality-television saints like Joey Essex. He is too good for this world. He tells us about his worst fear: “a snake running”.

You may think two different things on hearing Owen’s thoughts on snakes: (a) he doesn’t know what a snake is or (b) I’ve been wrong about snakes my whole life.

I’m going with (b). Because if Owen is wrong I don’t want to be right. Indeed, when the TV presenter Scarlette Douglas beholds a snake cross the camp in the dead of night, I think we can all agree that it was running on its little snake legs and that the soothing snake song it sang was “Owen is riiiight about snaaaaakes!”

Owen is the best person on this show. Watching him somehow triumph over an aquatic word puzzle with the champion footballer Jill Scott, I felt prouder of him than I do of my relatively disappointing nephews.

Sadly, as well as attracting sweet angelic beings like Owen, I’m a Celebrity is also in the git-laundering business. Watching the inaccurately named pop star Boy George zenly chanting on prime-time television, you’d never suspect he was once jailed for false imprisonment and assault. So much for karma (chameleon). And for much of this first week everyone was waiting for Shit Godot, aka the former UK minister for health Matt Hancock. Yes, disgraced politicians are “celebrities” now too. They’re usually content to join the boards of oil companies or advise autocrats. But if they’re still serving MPs they prefer reality TV.

[ I’m a Celebrity: Matt Hancock arrives to stunned looks. Buckle up. There’s no telling how weird this could get ]

Hancock very recently mishandled the issuing of PPE contracts, an entire pandemic and then one of his advisers (from the perspective of his wife). He was so bad at his ministerial job that he was tossed from a clown car full of inept adulterers for being a clownishly inept adulterer. He was too crap for the Tory party, who have to be dressed by their valets and spontaneously combust when left unattended. I’d think gargling sheep’s eyes and kangaroo penises were good enough for him, if I didn’t suspect he’d enjoy it.

Anyway, Hancock burrows in a dank tunnel, sniffing out treats amid the vermin and filth. And he also does this on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! It’s his first challenge on Wednesday night’s programme. He is then tasked with misleading the camp, which he does very well. Everyone is unsettled by his presence. A walking PowerPoint presentation, he manages to make even the royal spouse Mike Tindall seem like an in-touch man of the people. Sweet, kind Owen is baffled by the new arrival, presumably fearful about how it runs. The craggy-faced DJ Chris Moyles sums up the thoughts of a nation: “I can’t help feeling he should be at work.” Luckily, Hancock is a Conservative Party politician with an intuitive understanding of the people’s will. He thinks it’s all going great.