I'm a legend. Get me out of here!

The nation is gripped by a group of washed-up celebs stranded in the Australian jungle. But what if some real superstars had answered the call? John Walsh finds out

"I will try to somehow get in touch with nature," Uri Geller told the television camera in an earnest whisper, "because, let's face it, after all, it's a jungle..." Yes indeed, Uri, it certainly is a jungle out there in the, you know, jungle. I think it was at this moment, during the early interviews, that we knew that Carlton had a sure-fire hit on its hands with I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!. The prospect of watching eight slightly washed-up people exchanging pompous banalities and bitchy mutterings for a week was irresistible.

But the jungle setting has been working a strange alchemy on the contestants. Forced to endure the mud-streaked, sweaty-haired, bug-scoffing realities of life without luxuries, limos or en-suite lavatories, they've transformed themselves into types: Tarzan (Darren Day); Jane (Nell McAndrew); the Jungle Mystic (Uri Geller); the Tribal Mother (Christine Hamilton); the gentle-giant chieftain (Nigel Benn); the fault-finding lady anthropologist (Rhona Cameron); the judicious peace-keeper (Tony Blackburn) – while Tara Palmer-Tomkinson has reinvented herself as the sex-maddened good-time girl played by Jean Harlow in Red Dust.

The programme began to resemble one of those "balloon debates" in which rival speakers impersonate historical figures and argue their own worth and importance. They can be figures from any historical period, from fiction or real life. And you can't help wondering: how would, say, Goliath, Queen Victoria, Rasputin, Virginia Woolf, Moses, Marilyn Monroe, Nancy Cunard and the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist fare in the jungle? Would their experience be different from Uri and Tara's? Or might it, in fact, be strangely familiar?

DAY ONE

The survivors meet in a jungle clearing, somewhere in Queensland. We discover an elderly lady in a black crepe gown and a bumptious youth in a top hat, quarrelling about appropriate jungle wear.

Queen Victoria (for it is she): Kindly desist, young man, from these impertinent suggestions. We have no intention of donning abbreviated culottes under any circumstances. We know nothing of this Gore-Tex of which you speak.

The Artful Dodger (forcefully): You don't unnerstand, mate. You can't go wearing frocks in the jungle. Everyone knows that, mate. It's the heat, right? And black, that just conducts it more. What you need is shorts, mate. If you'd bin arahnd as much as I 'ave, mate, you'd know more abaht life.

Victoria: Been arind? Of course we have been arind. We have travelled extensively in our colonies and dominions. We are quite sure we have travelled a great deal further afield than any of our subjects, especially [she looks at him coldly] the lowest of the low.

Dodger: Yeah, but it's the conditions, innit? Posh bint like you, never 'ad to slum it, like the likes of me. Cause I'm street, I am. Totally street.

Victoria: Your speech is elliptical in the extreme. How can you possibly be a street? In what way are you a public thoroughfare?

Dodger: Nah, you don't get my meanin'. I'm a survivor, right? 'Ard Knocks College, University o' Life. I'm a little bit whoa. I'm a little bit whay. I'm a...

Enter GOLIATH. He is 8ft tall; he wears a loincloth and an expression of fathomless stupidity.

Goliath: They tell me, go over there, sit down, make friends, try not to crush anybody. Is there anything to eat?

Victoria: I have rung my little bell twice, but the maids are very slow in arriving with the tea things today. [Looks around vaguely.] Do you know whose gardens these are? They remind one of Blenheim.

Dodger: 'Allo, mate. I'm the Dodger, professional cockney wide-boy and scam artist. This is Vicky, 'oo is dead posh and regal.

Victoria: My my, you are a large boy, aren't you?

Cut to STUDIO

Ant: Wey-hey, things were hotting oop nicely on the first day of Jungle Icons...

Dec: But by Day Three, the cracks were beginning to show...

DAY THREE

In densely packed foliage, a-swarm with noisome insects, flesh-eating spiders and predatory snakes, MARILYN MONROE is standing under a tree looking nervous in a clinging white frock. She has been unanimously selected by the TV audience to undergo horrible experiences involving creepy-crawlies in her underwear and slithery predators in her knickers.

Marilyn (to camera): I guess I was born unlucky. I always seem to get the fuzzy end of the lolli-pwop.

Studio (off camera): Ready for your bush-tucker trial, Marilyn?

Marilyn: I'm telling you. I've met a few snakes in my time. They were usually saxophonists. And I was once engaged to a baseball player, a real slug called...

A huge bucket of slithery, multi-legged invertebrates cascades down upon her. She shrieks.

Enter RASPUTIN, a hairy visionary with mad, staring eyes.

Rasputin: Do not be afraid, my child. I will save you. Let me pick some of these maggots off your deliciously innocent white flesh...

Marilyn: Thanks, mister. They told me all this stuff was for charity and I went along with it, but I'm beginning to get kinda disillusioned.

Rasputin: I believe you once did a naked photo-shoot for Playboy. How was that? Did you feel sinful, to have your young body exposed, opened up like a lovely fig, with all your secret places laid bare?

Marilyn: Just watch where you're putting your hands there, buster

Rasputin: You have nothing to fear from me, my child. I am famous holy man. Once held position at court of Russian Tsar Nicholas II. I know my hands to be healing hands...

Marilyn: Yeah, yeah. You and 50 million other guys.

DAY FIVE

A row has broken out. NANCY CUNARD, legendary socialite, has broken the group's only teapot.

Nancy: It's not my fault... I am not clumsy. I'm just not used to making tea for perfectly horrid, low-life people like you. If my manservant Crichton were here, he would mend it in a jiffy.

Victoria: The trouble with her is, she's never done a day's work in her life.

Nancy: I heard that, you two-faced old cow. If I get excited, she shushes me. If I break something, she says I'm stupid. I hate her. I hate you all.

Victoria: Well that's charming, I must say.

Dodger: Leave it out, Nance. Just let it go, mate.

Nancy: Right. That's it. I'm absolutely finished with you. Whatever we once meant to each other, it's over, you bastard. I'm not going to be there for you any more.

The group look at each other. They had no idea that Nancy and the Dodger had been lovers. Nancy storms off to bed, knocking over, as she goes, a tumbler containing the last of the group's 12-year-old Lagavulin malt whisky.

DAY SIX

VIRGINIA WOOLF, celebrated writer and occasional bisexual, has gone with MOSES, lawgiver and patriarch, to find the metal casket that contains the group's provision of food for the day. They get lost. Virginia sits on a hillock and weeps. Moses stays standing, his eyes on the far horizon.

Virginia: Islands of light are swimming on the grass. The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him. I hear only the sound of the bee, booming in my ear.

Moses: My people starve. They look to me for sustenance, like hungry sheep that look to the shepherd and are not fed. Yet I shall not fail them. Yonder lies the promised land. We must put our trust in the Lord, for He shall provide.

Silence.

Virginia: I'm bloody starving.

Moses: Me too.

Cut to STUDIO

Ant: Things are ganging a bit intense-like aroond the campfire, as nobody had eaten anythin' for, like, deeze following the Virginia an' Moses debackle.

Dec: We've still got search parties roamin' the bush lookin' for them. The cracks are definitely beginnin' ta show, as the followin' makes cleee-ah, like.

DAY SEVEN

Queen Victoria (in the Bush Telegraph room): We do not think Rasputin is pulling his weight. He has performed no tasks. He seems incapable of conversation. He just stands there in front of us like a village idiot, stroking his long, big beard, staring at us in a most disconcerting fashion, and suggesting that we remove our clothing and join him in an attitude of prayer. I fear he may be quite off his head. And for some reason quite beyond me, that dreadful Dodger person keeps calling us 'mate'. Can nothing be done to get rid of them both?

Goliath (at the campfire): Is not fair. Five, six, seven days now, I am the one has to do all the tasks. Build shelter, carry logs, stay all night in jungle, chase piglets. Everybody say, get Goliath do everything, because is big bloke. But big blokes, they have feelings too. Is not fair.

Marilyn: Gee, you're really sensitive. Here's me thinking you were just this big lummox, and all the time you really feel things, don't you?

Goliath: Tell you truth, Marilyn, feel taken for granted.

Marilyn: I know honey. Men – they can be such brutes.

Goliath: Do this, do that, never kind word...

Marilyn: You know, I could really go for a sensitive guy like you. Tell me, are you artistic at all?

Goliath: Not really. Bit of a Philistine.

Nancy (lying in camp bed at dusk, turning the pages of a copy of Vogue and wiping her eyes with Sainsbury's pastel tissues): I am not a victim... I am not a victim. I am not a clumsy person. They are all just horrid, ignorant peasants who have never had a newspaper column or owned a Cartier watch in their lives. They are not my friends. I want to ring Binky. I want to ring Nicky. I want a telephone right this minute...

Enter Rasputin.

Rasputin: Good evening. So you are having the little lie-down, yes? Always the lying down. Always in the bed.

Nancy: Go away. I don't want to see anyone.

Rasputin: Do not be negative, child. I can help you. I celebrated holy saint-type person with incredible gift of healing.

Nancy: Oh, do stop it, you tiresome man. You sound like some Bond Street mountebank.

Rasputin: You must put yourself in my power, my dear. Together we shall pray for you. You shut your eyes, I lie here in bed beside you and...

Nancy: Oh no you don't. [She beats him on the head with shards of broken Spode teapot.]

Cut to STUDIO

Ant: Weeeaayy-hah, and there we must leave our celebri'y icons, orguin' and figh'in' and 'aving the tame o' their lives, man.

Dec: Coom back at nine o'clock to see if you, the voters, have decided to send Queen Victoria or Rasputin to the dustbin of history. And remember – all the anger, the madness, the rows and the psychic damage, it's awwww in the pursuit of entertainment, like.

'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!' is on ITV 1 every night until the final episode on Sunday at 9pm