[Red Moon]

Thumbs down as Rodney Marsh gets sinking feeling in the jungle

Mixed fortunes for Rodney Marsh in the opening exchanges of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! On the one hand, the weather closed in and cancelled the football pundit’s scheduled 1,000-feet bungee jump off the side of a helicopter. Marsh was almost convincing when he described himself as disappointed.

On the other hand, he lost the first public-appointed Bushtucker Trial of the 2007 series 9-8 to Janice Dickinson and the perceived indignity of being taken down by a surgically enhanced former American supermodel seemed to hit the Manchester City legend hard.

“I come from a mentality where second is not second,” Marsh, in self-punishing mode, explained afterwards. “It’s the first loser.”

Stirring stuff, although, as Ant and Dec were quick to point out, in this particular contest “there were only two of them”, meaning that, technically speaking, Marsh wasn’t “the first loser” but, more straightforwardly, “the loser”.

Still, however you frame it, this was a defeat – one suffered in a sinking Range Rover from which Marsh, armed only with a pair of goggles, was obliged to retrieve plastic stars. Going for his eighth, the maverick striker was under water a worrying length of time before bursting out through the sunroof, but as Marsh said, “If you’ve taken a penalty at Wembley in front of 100,000 people, why would you be afraid of getting drowned?”

Has Marsh taken a penalty at Wembley in front of 100,000 people? We can find no record of this moment. But we’ll take his word for it, merely adding that he might also have mentioned Gillette Soccer Saturday at this point. When you’ve spent as many hours as Marsh has interrupting Jeff Stelling with news of a squandered chance for Southampton at St Mary’s, there is nothing anyone can teach you about scrambling out of a floundering 4 x 4.

Those of us with much invested in a Marsh victory in Australia will note with concern that he is already suffering from the internal complications for which the world’s most important in-the-raw celebrity challenge is famous. Or, as Marsh put it: “I haven’t had an Eartha Kitt for seven days.” This announcement would have been alarming at any time, but was the more so for coming on just day three of Marsh’s jungle existence. One hates to sound all parental about it, but why didn’t he go before he came out?

Alternatively, could it be that the problem preceded his arrival in Australia? And should we attribute this inconvenient backing-up to nerves? Marsh conceded that he had been belatedly wondering whether following the likes of Tony Blackburn, Jordan and the bassist from Busted into the jungle was “a good idea”. He also reported how a disquieting dream had disturbed his sleep on the eve of the show in which he had bitten the head off a rat and spat it on the floor, only to realise that “it was Glenn Hoddle”.

But we feel confident that Marsh will settle. He can at least count himself lucky that he has been drawn to bed down amid relatively amicable co-contestants in Croc Creek rather than in Snake Rock, the opposing encampment, in which the professionally volatile Dickinson spends a lot of time threatening to stab people while they sleep and in which Lynne Franks periodically requires silence for her meditation routine.

Like so many of us, the award-winning publicist likes nothing better of a morning than to kick-start her biorhythms by chanting a passage of ancient Sanskrit. It seems to work, too. “I just remembered who I was,” Franks reported.

It’s encouraging to know that the problem of remembering who people are afflicts those on the inside of the camp, as well as those of us watching from the outside. It probably should be added, in this context, that the names on the backs of the jackets and undershirts aren’t always a reliable help. “Marc”, anyone? The chances are it will take more than one of Franks’s mantras before most of us remember who he is.

But, of course, we’re all still dizzy after Malcolm McLaren, who used to manage the Sex Pistols, set a world and Commonwealth record for quitting the show, walking out before it began. He then gave a press interview in which he sensationally revealed that, far from being utterly wild, there were cameramen all over that jungle clearing. “The public is being hoodwinked,” he declared.

Until then, I had no idea that cameras were involved at all in the broadcasting of I’m a Celebrity, being firmly under the impression that the action was provided in real time by a set of tiny figures scurrying around inside my television set. Now that I think about it, the advent of the flat-screen TV, with its limited rear cabin space, should probably have aroused my suspicions. But sometimes it takes the courage of a fearless whistle-blower to raise consciousness in these mystifying areas and advance us all to a state of enlightenment. Many thanks, Malcolm.

Source: The Times