I’m A Celebrity star Martin Roberts hammers it home and is one of the few entertaining stars… but it makes me yearn for more Lady C

DOWN in the Australian jungle last week, a couple of the thicker blokes were taking an eternity to get their heads round a Morse code task.

“XDUUZ?” queried someone called Joel Dommett.

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“It makes no sense at all,” added someone else called Adam Thomas.

Unless, of course, you think of the lists ITV used to book this year’s contestants on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, a series which began with host Ant McPartlin optimistically wondering if anyone fancied: “A good laugh?”

I did.

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By that time, however, expectations were already managed, as I’d seen the contestant roster and noticed that, given the choice of every dysfunctional, and short-tempered sports-person on the planet (Hello? Ryan Lochte?), they’d picked the pretty-but-dull-and-attached one, Sam Quek, from the British women’s hockey team.

She wasn’t the only mistake either.

They’d also managed to select the wrong member of Diversity (Jordan), the wrong member of the Thomas acting dynasty (Adam), the wrong member of the Jordan family (Ola), the wrong soap star (Larry) and even the wrong model.

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To find someone, from that industry, as sweet-natured and ill-suited to the format as Lisa Snowdon, actually takes a bit of doing.

To double the error up, though, with a man from the world of comedy, which is filled with the world’s most poisonous sociopaths, who’s as nice as Joel Dommett? Well that takes a level of incompetence which I thought was beyond even ITV’s booker.

So I’m going to ignore them and concentrate on the few they got right. Danny Baker and manchild Martin Roberts were both clearly born to be on this show.

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But I’m also fascinated by Carol Vorderman who fishes for male compliments in the same way the Japanese whaling fleet hunts minkes. With a rictus grin and no mercy.

There’s some entertainment to be had too from the list of unlikely explanations ITV colleagues volunteer to explain Carol’s unusually “taut” expression, which is topped, at the moment, by This Morning’s Ferne McCann attributing it to: “Fruit juice.”

Yeah, pass the Tropicana, Cazza.

As highly and tightly as Vorderman’s now strung, though, she didn’t contribute much in the way of entertainment to a desperate first week.

According to my notes: On Monday, “Larry did some sit-ups.” Wednesday, “Larry flossed his teeth.” Thursday, “Larry did some more sit-ups.”

And if it had gone on like that, all weekend, I’d probably have given up by Saturday.

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By that point, though, they’d thrown in the genuinely funny Danny Baker and Homes Under the Hammer presenter Martin Roberts, who’s officially 53 but behaves more like a seven-year-old boy.

Prone to tears and incapable of reading anyone else’s emotions, Martin’s without doubt the most colossal bell-end since Lady C single-handedly saved last year’s I’m A Celebrity and, I suppose, ITV does deserve some credit for finding him.

Not too much, though, because, if the bookers were doing their job properly and putting the viewers first, they’d have made Lady C the blueprint for four or five contestants this year.

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Instead, though, the network put itself first and offered us Gogglebox’s Scarlett Moffatt, who’s a funnier and far more endearing version of last year’s winner, Vicky Pattison, and just as certain to end up on ITV’s pay-roll.

The obvious irony is Scarlett would’ve shone even more if ITV had replaced some of those duller contestants with “livewires” like Louise Mensch or Mike Hookem MEP, but they simply don’t seem to understand what makes their own show tick.

So as Danny Baker said, pointing to Scarlett, the moment he arrived: “Everyone can go home. She’s won.” A shame.

Grand Tour triumphs

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THE Grand Tour’s nice PR man lost me at “Fire stick”. By the time I read Amazon’s accompanying bumf about “accessing the unit’s HDMI port” (Huh?) I was almost ready to give Chris Evans’ Top Gear another chance on the grounds that at least I’d know where to find the off button.

I’m grateful, then, to an adult friend and his eye-rolling teenager who sorted “grandad” out and allowed me to watch episode one of The Grand Tour, which was quite the most beautiful piece of fire stick I’ve ever seen.

Underneath all the self-indulgence, there’s a very good television show as well, although six weeks of Evans’ Top Gear initially blinded me to The Grand Tour’s flaws.

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Episode one was at least 15 minutes too long, dorkishly repetitive in places and marred by some very clunky stand-up. As ITV viewers are currently discovering, Carol Vorderman is also not to be encouraged in any way, even if she is faking her own death.

These are trivial issues, though, compared to the ones infecting the BBC where they’re now burdened with the remains of Top Gear and institutionalised political-correctness which will probably prevent them ever making a funny show about cars again.

Faced with such an easy choice, I shall of course be embracing every episode of The Grand Tour and its wretched bloody fire stick thing, while silently cursing the day Ceefax was ever born.

TV name of the week: From Eurosport’s coverage of the women’s under-20 World Cup, French reserve goalkeeper Jade Lebastard, who’s distantly related, on her father’s side, to Young Ones legend, Harry the Bastard.

Special? That's a bit 'Thik

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BY all means, pick your own moment you realised this was a really duff series of The Apprentice (and I’ll accept anything from episode one’s opening credits onwards).

Mine, though, arrived on week four. That was the handbags and the lost rags episode set inside a famous London department store, where the production team went to endless lengths to plug their upmarket host but made almost no effort to explain the actual task.

Since then, the only real reason to keep watching has been an aspiring little mega-twat called Karthik Nagesan who seemed to have stepped out of an old Mind Your Language episode and referred to himself, among other flattering titles, as: “The Emperor of Business.”

Karthik had big plans, of course. The best Apprentice egomaniacs always do. But they unravelled spectacularly at the end of last week’s boat show task when it was revealed he’d project-managed his team to defeat by the trifling sum of £40,000.

Not only did this get him instantly fired by Sugar, without any of the usual pleasantries, it also earned Karthik a proper and very funny mauling from Rhod Gilbert, over on BBC2.

“You said at the beginning people could call you ‘K’, ‘Special K’, ‘The Big K’. After this loss, can we now call you ‘lost by over 40K’?”

Or is “Little Unt” still leader in the clubhouse?