‘Jungle lab rats cancelled for failing to denounce Hancock’

Fortunately, most of us now have the technology that enables us to be outraged by both. Until Wednesday night it did feel as though I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here should be retitled Waiting for Hancock.Pre-Matt, Mike Tindall was the stand-out star, a man who can both rap and pick up enormous spiders. As for the rest – a little of Boy George’s Buddhist chanting goes a long way and every time Chris Moyles opened his mouth he sounded like the man you least wanted to be stuck in a lift with.His pledge to amuse himself by telling colossal fibs to the gullible boy from Hollyoaks wasn’t clever or funny.The rest were perfectly nice, especially the Lioness lady.Sure there were tears and hugs – as is compulsory – but the real terror of camp life is not the insects but the terminal boredom of spending three weeks sitting on a log making semi-polite conversation. It may not be Matt Hancock who comes out of this experiment badly but Ant and Dec and ITV itself (Image: ITV)When the former health secretary arrived, accompanied by the comedian who laughs at his own jokes, the temperature in the tropics plummeted.The campmates extended a welcome that was both shocked and frosty.The request for him to say “next slide please” didn’t break any ice at all.Boy George, who did time some years ago for handcuffing a man to a radiator and hitting him with a chain, retreated to the high moral ground, shed a few tears about being unable to see his mum during Covid and wondered if he should walk away.Asked why he had come on the show, Matt offered the “honest truth” though that didn’t seem to include his rumoured fee of £400,000. By the time you read this his pledge to raise awareness of dyslexia may have been realised but I wouldn’t bank on it.It felt very uncomfortable and also queasily fascinating, as though the worlds of inane reality TV and life-or-death politics had collided.Many people hold Hancock personally responsible for two years of Covid misery. That’s not going to be forgiven and forgotten.The happy campers were immediately aware of what an awkward position ITV had put them in. How would it play in the outside world if they were seen being nice to him?Would they fly back to the UK to find they had been cancelled for the crime of failing to denounce Matt? The point of reality TV is to turn participants into lab rats and this turn of events confirmed that brutally.If they all decided to walk away few would blame them. It may not be Matt Hancock who comes out of this experiment badly but Ant and Dec and ITV itself.The best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman and his singer wife Amanda Palmer say that after 11 years and one child their open marriage is at an end.This Earth shattering announcement was made – as it would be – on their individual websites and on social media, complete with a mournful picture of them walking through a field hand-in-hand with their son.In the past they made much of the fact that theirs was an open marriage. Said Amanda: “There are lots of varieties of open relationships.”We’re not interested in having big, multiple relationships; we’re just slutty, but compassionately so.”At one point the slutty but compassionate pair agreed to give each other space which meant Amanda stayed in New Zealand while Neil travelled 11,000 miles to live on the Isle of Skye.That’s quite a lot of space. But, as it turned out, not enough.The cause of their break-up is unclear. “Amanda is full of grand gestures,” said Neil once.”She throws surprise parties; she dresses up as living statues in public for a birthday surprise; she sprang a fake wedding ceremony on the streets of New Orleans for us…”There could be some clues there. No marriage can withstand too many surprises.Whitehall departments spent half a million pounds in the past year on bedtime stories for civil servants. A variety of apps offering soothing noises and meditation sessions is available to stressed-out pen pushers, many of whom are still said to be working from home in their pyjamas.The Department for Levelling Up spent more than £45,000 on a subscription to Calm. Calm’s website purrs: “Our library of Sleep Stories, soundscapes, music, and other audio-guided content is designed to help you fall asleep fast every night”.Chris Advansun, its head of sleep stories (yes, really), said this facility “gives permission to grown-ups to return to what was one of the most comfortable, soothing experiences they’d had as children”.Yes, it’s nice to be read to. Which is why the world is awash with audiobooks and podcasts at a cost most civil servants could surely afford. And here’s another tip. You can listen to Radio Four’s Book at Bedtime for precisely nothing.The National Trust, when it isn’t guilt-tripping visitors about the slave trade or LGBT stuff, has determined to “put more emphasis on play”. Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire reopened recently as the first “Children’s Country House” complete with dressing-up boxes and neon signs inviting young visitors to “party like it’s 1699”.I was talking to an NT volunteer recently and he, like many of his colleagues who give so much of their time, detests both the politicisation of the trust and the wilful dumbing down implied by “more emphasis on play”.If everywhere is your designated playroom how do you ever grow up? I’m rather nostalgic for the solemnity of museums and country houses, the dustiness, the silence, the roped-off areas, the Do Not Touch signs. Surely even today’s children want to be awed and to feel the weight of history. And then go to the gift shop afterwards.An antiquarian bookseller called Brian Lake began collecting books with weird titles and humorously inappropriate authors back in the 1980s.Gems include Motorcycling For Beginners by Geoff Carless or Frog Raising For Pleasure and Profit.Brian has a new book out called Librorum Ridiculorum: A Compendium Of Bizarre Books which could be a handy Christmas stocking filler.Another of his finds was The New Radiation Recipe Book which rang a bell with me. My mother had a copy and the highly unfortunate title referred to the Radiation New World gas cookers produced in the 1930s, before the word radiation became synonymous with glowing in the dark and death.As a child of the atomic age I lived in terror of this book, imagining plutonium fritters, mashed uranium and isotope ice cream.