ITV will be slightly peeved that X Factor hunk Jake Quickenden lost out to veteran motorbike champ Carl Fogarty.
After all, it was no accident that he was dropped in to the jungle after the departure of Craig Charles and Gemma Collins.
With the stars from the channel’s stellar shows Coronation Street and TOWIE gone, ITV needed someone to represent it and Simon Cowell’s ratings’ behemoth on their biggest programme of the year.
The strong favourite since the self-inflicted demise of Jimmy Bullard, Jake ticked all the boxes to go on and be crowned King of The Jungle: handsome, engaging, sweet natured, and safe: pretty and vacant. (Not only had he never heard of Edwina Currie, he beamed proudly ‘I don’t even know what politics is.’)
Carl Fogarty on the other hand was a more wizened, slightly jaundiced, old soul. Witness the early episodes when he had no qualms about resisting the idea of feeding the starving camp mates he had left behind in Jungle Jail, declaring bluntly: ‘wherever I go, the food goes.’ As he said he wasn’t really a team player. He also bore a distracting, disturbing resemblance to Catweazle.
No doubt Jake will still go on to reap all the rewards he would have if he had won: plenty of appearances on daytime television, some celebrity cooking, a Christmas record, and eventually, some adverts for Iceland.
Still, it will (if you’ll pardon the pun) bug him, ITV, and Simon Cowell that he didn’t win.
As to why Carl Fogarty won, it principally came down to final day’s trials.
The ordeal suffered by the strongest female candidate, Mel Sykes (searching for stars in cloudy water with a few eels etc) may have been popular with male viewers – nothing short of a wet t-shirt contest – but wasn’t daring or terrifying enough to carry her home, despite her claims about how much she hated going underwater.
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut !’ he smiled, not entirely joking.
Obviously, having 1500 cockroaches, 1500 crickets, 10 ‘burrowing cockroaches’, and 200 soldier crabs crawling around your head wasn’t fun, but most of them were scrambling up the sides to get and, asides from the odd nibble, Jake survived relatively painlessly.
None of the little critters did what is known on the show as ‘a Fatima Whitbread’ and went up his nose or down his ear.
I’m sure Foggy won a lot of last-minute votes because he was the celebrity undergoing the eating trial – which is the one we all want to see and the real reason we all watch IACGMOOH.
Having already downed a glass of deer’s blood and some other horrors in the Vile Vineyard challenge, Fogarty duly polished off a cup of mealworms (which were still alive), the anus of an ostrich (not alive), some baked tarantulas, three large cockroaches and a camel’s penis.
Yum. I mean, yuck.
He may have been the celebrities ‘Tarzan’ figure, a macho motor-biking icon, and the man who took care of the fire and other manly tasks, but you could see even Fogarty didn’t relish eating them.
Not as much as Freddie Starr had anyway. The fact he had to dance around as he swallowed them down proved that, practically pogoing at one point.
The tarantulas, he said memorably, tasted like ‘dog s**t wrapped in Kentucky,’ which probably rules out that sponsorship deal.
For those of you who are interested, he reported ‘the ostrich anus was ‘quite hard and chewy’ and the camel penis ‘had no taste to it.’
