Don’t slate people who watch I’m a Celebrity

I've seen lots of po-faced commentators claiming that the IACGMOOH format was tired and past its sell-by-date and had, in desperation, been working on a raft of my own celebrity-infused reality show ideas to fill a potential gap in the TV scheduling.

Here they are: I'm a Celebrity…Pointlessly Teach Me to Do Something Else: a group of celebrities become even more famous for learning to do the kind of mundane, hollow-skulled rubbish that everyone else has been doing for years – not only are their lives better than yours, now they're able to do your job better than you can while looking more attractive than you do, rendering every viewer utterly pointless.

Celebrity Dances With Wolves on Ice: presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby pit man against beast in this light-hearted skate-to-the-death. Celebrities will don ice skates and suits made of bacon and take their turns to face a pack of wolves on the rink. The live grand final sees the two remaining celebrities, or two celebrities' remains, compete for the first slot on the nearest surgeon's operating table.

Celebrity Cojoined Twins: six stars agree to be spliced into a member of the public who will hilariously turn out to be the chalk to their cheese. Gillian McKeith will be sewn into the body of a morbidly obese teenager, Su Pollard will be grafted on to an agoraphobic chronic depressive and Britain's Got Talent's Steve Hewlett will be attached to Orville if the budget gets tight. Stars will be forced to share their lives, homes and major organs with a stranger for six weeks, after which time the public will text in to decide which sibling should die under the knife to save their twin.

There are more: Celebrity Traffic Island (celebrities live on a selection of traffic islands), Nasty Celebrity Antiques Roadshow (celebrities offer members of the public wildly inaccurate valuations on their precious things) and Strictly Come Dancing Horses (celebrities dance with horses in a ballroom).

But then I actually remembered that the format for I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here isn't dead at all and my ideas can be put on ice - with the wolves - until a later date. Hooray for celebrities drinking liquidised cockroaches and crying because they've been covered in scorpions! Hooray!

This year's celebrities are the usual blend of soap stars, reality TV stars, sports stars, pop stars, comedians and slightly random people like Jack Maynard, who is a vlogger and only visible to people under the age of 25 and Boris Johnson's dad, Stanley.

But frankly, it's not remotely important who goes into the jungle, because once you're on a z-bed in the middle of a monsoon with a snake nipping at your privates, the fact that you've got umpty-thousand followers on Twitter means precisely nothing. So what if you don't recognise some of the camp mates - if you watch I'm a Celebrity over the next few days, you'll quickly get to know them as 'the one who squeals when they see an ant' or 'the one who everyone talks about when they go to the loo'.

I'm a Celebrity is also about the viewers and the cold, hard fact that there is a medieval barbarity at the heart of the nation which will see us vote for the same people to endure great hardship time after time after time based solely on a collective desire to watch suffering from afar. Shame on us all.

It's easy to slate shows like I'm A Celebrity, but I don't like snobbish attitudes towards popular television (just get me on the subject of soap operas and see how long it takes me to use the phrase 'Shakespeare for the masses') or elitist claptrap that suggests watching reality shows leads to brain rot and the inevitable collapse of society.

I watch reality TV shows and I don't care who knows it.

I also watch arty stuff on BBC4 and Sky Arts, stuff with subtitles and subtexts and substantial plots, but frankly, I'd normally rather watch Boris Johnson's dad have his crown jewels stomped on by a lizard. There, I've said it. Onwards to the jungle, friends.