Pat Kane: I’m A Celeb tells us more about society than you might think

But we’ve just come out of an American election where the combatants were a phalanx of A-listers on one side, and the ultimate orange-hued celebrity candidate (and his new-listers of podcast stars) on the other.

These are times when the adage from the Obama aide Paul Begala – that “politics is showbusiness for ugly people” – has never rung truer. So it might be time to consider the power of celebrity more elementally. And I’m A Celebrity maybe gives us something substantial to (as it were) chew upon.

It’s fun to think about the different explanatory timelines here. Anthropologists will tell you that our appetite for celebrity is very deeply wired in evolution.

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Other mammals establish a social hierarchy through force. Human mammals instead, and for the bulk of their existence, have often conferred status on the highly skilled – say, someone who hunts, gathers, or parents well, or is expert in rituals.

And we’ve admired or emulated them because doing so made us adaptive, improved our own chances of survival.

Granting someone “prestige” is how these scholars describe the evolutionary roots of our attitude to celebrity. This thesis immediately illuminates the ITV show. The contestants are literally going back to the jungle, competing among each other to show off their survival skills, both physical and relational.

Whether they be ex-boxer or social media personality, footballer’s wife or hard-nosed columnist, these are humans in their element: performing to a camp-fire of digital millions, who interactively confer (or reserve) prestige and status, by voting on their apps.

The anthropologists venture further into this undergrowth of the human condition. Celebrity is similar, they suggest, to the way food manufacturers exploit our ancient appetite for rarely available sweetness – by creating sucrose-heavy junk food in the here and now.

Our ancestral appetite for prestige focussed on the person as a whole – and that may bring other, less-useful behaviours and tics along with the useful ones. This is the primal basis for celebrity endorsement – the situation where the hairstyle, the clothing, the choice of car becomes an attractive aspect of the singer, actor, sportsperson (or TikTokker). Junk media.

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Some of the undeniable brilliance of I’m A Celebrity is that it intentionally strips such self-enhancing elements of celebrity away. These stars have constructed themselves through attire and grooming, on carefully edited video performances, via media platforms on which they have the final cut.

But returned to the jungle, the watching audience is invited to see the backstage personality of the celebrity (depending, of course, how much of it is constructed by the programme makers themselves). The entertainment offered here is in seeing how emotionally disjunct the stars might be from their public image.

As the sociologist of celebrity Chris Rojek notes, that disjunct is likely to be large. Celebrities have rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and mental health problems that are considerably above the average. Particularly as a result of living out a fake personality construct for a good chunk of their lives.

So as you watch the show, you’re waiting for the crack-up. The truly weird aspect of I’m A Celebrity is how psychologically aggressive the show is in provoking it. I know you’re all probably used to it, but the various trials are – to this late-in-the-day viewer – strongly taboo-breaking, the stuff of actual nightmares.

Hurtling their bodies out of helicopters. Dangerous, wriggling, insectoid creatures on their skin, in their orifices, chewed upon and swallowed. Physically constricted in tiny spaces, overwhelmed with water and mud …

To some extent, that’s the evolutionary heritage being tapped into again: humans will have an ancient memory of having this direct, wrestling, defensive relationship with nature. Those who show nature as superable and masterable will reap the awards for their reputation.

The rising tide of complaint about the abuse and stress that animals undergo is understandable. There is no harvesting or cultivation – never mind ecological balance – in any of this.

But it’s also difficult not to reel at the stench of resentment and punishment that arises from this show. Rojek’s current thinking is that celebrity answers an ultra-modern sense of daily inadequacy, generated by our secular and capitalist society.

There’s no God around any more, to show you what a complete and coherent being could look like. And there’s so much everyday competition and performance, to remind you all too easily of your failings and limitations.

If gazing upon celebrities is some of the glue holding all that modern grief and stress together, it doesn’t surprise me that the mental negativity involved can be exploited on a weekend entertainment show.

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Yet if this is how our modern life works, it also doesn’t surprise me that people actively return to the sacred and the religious, looking for an anchor of meaning in the everyday.

This may provide an insight into the last US election. Kamala’s “freedom and joy” message was amplified by a starry firmament of liberally-minded celebrities.

But their bright and shiny capability may have generated just exhausted resentment, more than they might have fired up primal mechanisms to emulate or admire their “prestige”. Add to that the Christian religiosity and moral tribalism of the Maga millions, clear and pure about their culture and its limits.

But where does that situate Donald Trump himself, surely the ultimate beneficiary of the institutions and practices of celebrity?

There were enough liberal attempts, using his history of racism and sexism, to point out the distinction between backstage and frontstage Trump. The ethical abyss behind his aspiration to be president.

Yet perhaps Trump’s infernal genius is to elide the difference between backstage and frontstage, between inner psyche and public role. In this way, he allows collective resentments and anxieties to surface themselves. Part of his constituency surely sees the exceedingly crooked timber of his humanity, and recognises in it their own turbulent process.

Wasn’t it an I’m A Celebrity moment par excellence when Trump started talking in his presidential debate about Haitian immigrants to the US, and them “eating the cats and dogs”?

This is a challenge to progressives – the degree to which their messaging strategies go to these visceral depths. Zones where the truth isn’t factual, but it is mythic and socio-biological.

(The Democrats attempted it, haphazardly, when Tim Walz started to label Trump and Vance as “weird”. This gained Walz the prize of Harris’s VP candidate – though the strategy was buried as the campaign went on.)

Yet if I’m A Celebrity is beginning to wane, perhaps that’s an indication that there are some new emotional deals to be struck between audience, celebs and their media enablers. Many historians note that the term “celebrity” comes into usage about 200 years ago.

The history shows a continuity with the present. Then, our societies were also in commercial upheaval, where atomised workers look to luminaries for models of coherence, using the all new media of the day (mass printing, photographs, the propinquity of city life).

But there’s also a discontinuity – in that the celebrities initially celebrated were philosophers, scientists, military leaders, writers, great performers. This answers more exactly the evolutionary demand for “prestigious” figures, whose life stories and achievements might be admired and learned from.

Can we get back to that mode of celebrity? Observing various Radio 1 DJs, YouTubers and soap-stars writhing and reeling in their various bush-tucker trials, the hope is fainter than it should be.

Maybe we start to gaze upon each other, as we are, for meaning and purpose. Not up there, at the endless tinsel show.