Feelgood goes out of fashion with I’m a Celebrity’s nauseous contestant choice set to segue into Fifa’s Qatar disgrace via IrishTimesBiz
No human has died in the making of the first tactical monstrosity, but that shouldn’t be the height of the bar to cross. I’m a Celebrity has, since 2002, been a bastion of winter amusement. Stripped nightly across the ITV schedules, it is presented in a cheery haze of geniality and light satire by Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, and is loved by viewers and advertisers alike. Last year, its finale was the most-watched non-sporting programme on Virgin Media Television, its Irish broadcaster.
Predictably, the voting public is selecting Hancock for every trial and, equally as predictably, the ritual tortures are reinterpreted by him as opportunities for heroism, the attention only feeding the gormless narcissism and self-serving delusion that was the hallmark of his political career. Bitten by scorpions, hissed at by snakes, he is loving every minute.
After spending last year’s series ripping into Partygate to sharp effect, Ant and Dec can do no more than laugh with non-committal vagueness, unable to fully articulate either viewers’ motivations or those of their producers. I mean, who’s going to be on next year? Suella Braverman? Sepp Blatter? This series on Fifa corruption has four hour-long parts – an example of content determining form. It begins with Blatter’s forerunners in the 1970s, a decade in which Fifa was also no stranger to dictators, and traces how football’s world governing authority arrived at the theatre of bad dreams that is Qatar. The short answer is greed, but let’s throw in venality and megalomania while we’re here.
Then there is Qatar’s criminalisation of same-sex relationships, another horror that Fifa simply does not care about. Let’s not rehash how a World Cup ambassador, former Qatari footballer Khalid Salman, described being gay last week, but safe to say it was not the sort of message that Fifa sponsors Adidas, Coca-Cola and Visa, among others, usually endorse.
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