Malcolm McLaren Out Of I’m A Celebrity Already

The new series of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here starts tonight, but it'll have to do so with one less deeply irritating attention-whore than it thought - Malcolm McLaren has pulled out.

Malcolm McLaren - former Sex Pistols manager, composer of songs about skipping and the bloke from a recent advert for mayonnaise - has suddenly decided that he doesn't want to be a contestant on this year's I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here mere hours before the show is set to begin. Nobody is sure what prompted Malcolm McLaren to pull out of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here - the show where borderline famous people go to Australia, become the host body for all kinds of exotic skin-burrowing insects and survive exclusively on a diet of nothing but testicles and anuses - but it was probably because he couldn't stand spending a fortnight in the same campsite as that awful Changing Rooms woman.

Aside from filling every single one of its commercial breaks with the sort of idiotic jungle noises that you'd usually find in the new-age panpipe concession stand at Woolworths, ITV has always managed to hype I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here in the same way - by promising big names and then delivering names so small that you'd need a sub-atomic microscope and a laptop set to Wikipedia to work out who they actually are.

That's been exactly the case this year - last month the big rumour was that Paris Hilton would appear on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, but what's actually happened is that the only people appearing on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here are one of the interchangeable Hollyoaks titbots, a couple of people from bands you hadn't thought about in a decade and Malcolm McLaren.

Actually, scrap the last one - even though he flew all the way out to Australia to take part on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, it's been reported that Malcolm McLaren has changed his mind and decided to go home hours before its debut on ITV1 tonight, possibly because his fear of poisonous snakes is too great. 

No doubt the entire dramatic story of how Malcolm McLaren left I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here will be told on the show tonight - or at least it'll be as dramatic as you can make the sight of an old man interrupting his billionth month-long anecdote about how he invented hip-hop and was the brains behind The Sex Pistols to look at a snake and make a noise like a schoolgirl wetting herself. It's a shame, really, because Malcolm McLaren had said of himself beforehand that:

"I am utterly irresponsible, I am completely childish and probably everything this production team and society hate."

Now now Malcolm, 'hate' is a strong word. 'Have completely forgotten about' is a far more accurate substitute. But still, just because Malcolm McLaren has realised that chewing on kangaroo anuses isn't particularly the best way to spend one's time, it doesn't mean that I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is without its big names. Also slated to appear tonight are:

* Her out of Catatonia

* Him out of 5ive

* The bloke from Celebrity Wrestling

* The world's most anonymous TV chef

* Inevitable Bikini Girl

* The woman from Changing Rooms. No, not that one. Or that one. The other one

* An annoying highly strung old lady 

* Another annoying highly strung old lady

* Rodney Marsh

But now that Malcolm McLaren won't be a part of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here any longer, it looks like the show's producers have no other option but to draft in a last-minute replacement. This could be the moment that Keith Chegwin has been waiting his entire life for.