First Night: I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! ITV1, 9pm

Humiliation, hunger and insect-eating, but not much jungle fever

(ITV/REX)

Ah, yes. How could we forget? Squeezed between The X Factor's heavy lashes and the glowing tans of Strictly: I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! – plonked, unseasonably, upon the Christmas schedule like last year's resolutions remembered too late. Hot from the Australian sun, fat from too few ribbons cut, our celebrities waddled in waiting to revive their souls (and, ostensibly, their careers) through ritual humiliation, hunger and insect consumption.

"I have a serious phobia of anything that moves," declared Gillian McKeith, helpfully. Goodness, she's going to have a problem with Linford Christie. The poo doctor and the runner were joined by the usual motley crew – as well as poor Stacey Solomon, who appears to have leapt from the beginning of her career to the end in a single year (after all it was less than 12 months ago she giggled her way off The X Factor).

Ant and Dec were there too, of course, cracking the same old jokes to the same old sound of a producer laughing. Ten years on, the format is showing its age. Just 14 minutes later our celebrities were tasked with their first "Bushtooker trials".

The task, at least, was lively enough: one-on-one contests, incongruously situated inside a television. "Terrorvision," Ant (or, quite possibly, Dec) announced gleefully. Gillian bailed early, once discovering that insects were involved: "I have a serious phobia!" she squealed, rather prompting the question of what, precisely, she was expecting.

Nigel Havers and Sheryl Gascoigne proved themselves good sports, gamely singing karaoke to Grease's "Summer Nights". A little ritual kangaroo penis-consumption was thrown in too, with Stacey chomping faster than Aggro Santos ("pop star," apparently, though one would be forgiven for suggesting, as Lauren Laverne speculated on Twitter, that he was, in fact, a human anagram of another celebrity). The result? The girls' team won, meaning a night spent in a luxury villa. The boys were left trying to start a campfire. Five minutes in, they realised Shaun had a lighter. Men, eh?

The next day, both groups were dispatched to the camps, the girls greeted with the sight of pink camping accoutrements and the boys blue. Somewhere, for some reason, people had been voting, selecting which contestants would be coerced into another tucker trial. The lucky pair? Lembit Opik and Gillian McKeith. Funny, that.