I am there in the torrential rain, my pretend silk (pilk) white dress is now see-through so it is revealing my Bridget Jones pants, my fake tan has now run all down my legs, my hair is stuck to my head and my eyelashes look like spiders’ legs. I have got loads of soggy sachets of salt in my bra that I’d taken from a café and was trying to sneak in there. I have a leech on my right arse cheek and my canoeing skills are as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition.
‘This is not how I imagined my entrance to the jungle would be, Larry.’
He couldn’t hear me at all. We had to find a little island with two flags, one for me and one for Larry and put our flag in the flagpole back on land on the other side of the lake.
‘Have you found the flag, Larry?’ I shouted.
‘Yes, it’s getting out lovely now the rain has stopped.’
After canoeing for about seventy minutes I finally found the flag. Now bearing in mind I couldn’t even see the cameras at this point I genuinely thought something bad had happened to Larry. I could see a capsized canoe and my flag and that was about it. ‘I can see the canoe, but I can’t see you! Larry, are you OK?’
‘Yes I’m fine. What you need to do is pull out the flag using the key in your canoe. But be careful, the water’s freezing and the canoe will capsize when you take the key out.’
Now another little fact about me: I can’t swim very well. I managed to get the very heavy flag but I couldn’t swim with it at all. I just lay there floating like a rotten log in the lake. ‘I’ll come and get you,’ Larry exclaimed. (Cue Superman music.) And save me he did. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe Larry is seventy years old; the man is as fit as a fiddle. But as grateful as I was to Larry, it just wasn’t the entrance I’d imagined I was going to have.
One of the first things my mam said to me when I got out of the jungle was, ‘Honestly, the night before it aired, the papers’ headlines were, “Scarlett Has to Be Rescued”. I thought, “Jesus, how embarrassing, she hasn’t even made it in yet, and she’s already had to be saved!” I thought you were going to only last a few days in there.’
Once I finally got in, I quickly got chatting to my camp mates, trying to work out who I was the most compatible with. Now I always try to look for the good in people even if they’re crappy personalities (life’s easier that way) but I didn’t have to try at all. It’s a cliché I know but I honestly was so lucky to be put in a camp with such amazing people. I mean obviously me and Martin Roberts didn’t hit it off straight away and we clashed quite quickly (I’ll chat more about that later) but everyone else was lovely.
After being rescued (I’d still be in that canoe now to be honest if it wasn’t for Larry), it was the start of a beautiful friendship for Larry and me. Larry (or Lazeruth as we all nicknamed him) is such a kind soul and would do anything he could to help us all. If I was missing home or it was all getting too much, it was Larry I would go and speak to. His wise words and his magic hugs seemed to make everything all right again. Everyone would agree with me that Larry was the boss; it didn’t matter who got voted for by the public, Larry was our King of the Jungle. He is like a boy scouts leader; before Larry and I arrived no one knew how to light a fire so they were actually trying to burn Adam Thomas’s trousers. I could be exaggerating here but Larry literally started a fire by just staring at a piece of wood and flint. He is at one with nature.
He didn’t give a shit about any trials; when we had to do the Rancid Retreat which was a cold tub of water filled with fish guts in which they threw more fish and gloop onto us, he was just coolly diving underneath to collect the stars. At one point he put one of the dead fish in his pocket and said he would cook it later. Some of the boys got shown right up by him – all the boys would be doing press-ups with nothing but little tiny pants on (I mean seriously, I had such a hard life in there having to watch all them boys’ six-packs glistening in the sun, I don’t know how I got through it) and Larry would just strut into the middle of camp, take his top off and start pumping iron, out-squatting most of them. Sometimes he would even count in different languages just to spice things up a bit. He was definitely eye candy for those ladies with their free bus passes.
Yeah, Larry was the father of the camp and Carol Vorderman was the yummy mummy of the group. What a beautiful lady, inside and out. I loved listening to Carol’s stories. She has grafted hard all of her life and made her mum, Jean, so proud. She has Jean (who sounded like a truly amazing woman) to thank for giving Carol the push to do Countdown. See, Jean saw an advert in a local newspaper about this new TV channel (Channel 4) and how they were doing a show that required a lady who was good at maths. That’s an understatement: Carol is the mental arithmetic queen, Princess of Pythagoras. She can do mental arithmetic as quick as I can order a Domino’s pizza (and that is quick), to the point where I’d take her answer over a calculator’s. She sent a letter off to the channel without Carol knowing and encouraged her to go to the interview. I am so pleased she did because now the British public have got to know Carol Vorderman. Not many people can say they’re a pilot, they’re a graduate from Cambridge, they have an MBE and they’ve won Rear of the Year (twice).
One of the highlights of my experience in the jungle and one of the most surreal moments of my life is when Carol washed my hair for me. Because the shower and creek is so cold, your hair just stinks constantly; you end up with soap suds, dead bugs and all sorts in there. I think I managed to get a comb through my hair twice during the whole month I was in there. So this time I was lying on the creek and Carol had boiled some water for me and gave me a little head massage and everything. I mean the Carol Vorderman was washing my hair. Talk about surreal. When I was younger and my dad would finish work at two, he would pick me up from school and we would watch Countdown together. We would get a pen and paper out and play along. ‘Two from the top and four from the bottom please, Carol.’ I grew up with her in my house. I once even burnt down the kitchen in my mam and dad’s house because of Carol and here she was playing Vidal Sassoon with me.
How that happened was I got that engrossed in a game of Countdown I forgot I had put some potato wedges under the grill. The whole kitchen went up in flames and the firemen had to open every window in the house including the ones upstairs which brought black soot all up the new cream carpet. So we had to get a new kitchen and new carpets throughout. My mam and dad were not happy that day, mostly because of my response to one of the firemen.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘I’m absolutely starving, I was craving those wedges.’
Me and Carol had lots of in-depth chats about how there should be more regional accents on the the television. ‘When you turn on your local news it should be someone with your local accent reading it out to you,’ she would say.
‘Exactly, surely everyone would be able to understand that person? They would have the same accent themselves or at least live in that place so they’d hear it all the time.’
We also had in-depth conversations about how women still haven’t got equality. She told me about the time she went for an interview for a presenting role and they told her, and I quote, her ‘tits weren’t big enough’. (Bloody charming, eh!)
We bonded after our trial, ‘The Big Bush Bake Off’. We kept getting the name wrong and calling it ‘The Big Bush Off’. (But that’s a whole totally different show, probably for Babestation not ITV.) Carol went first, gobbling down two turkey testicles presented as ‘French knackeroons’.
‘God, you ate them balls so fast, Carol.’ It was as if she had done it before.
‘They taste quite nice, like sweetbreads,’ she said.
I went next. ‘Look at the size of that!’ I could not get to grips with how big the deer’s penis was. I had to eat the tip of a ‘sticky cocky pudding’. It tasted like really out-of-date corned beef. ‘Oh, it’s like meaty lard,’ I said. I wouldn’t advise having a nibble on it anytime soon. Carol ended up eating vomit fruit, which hones
tly is the worst thing I’ve ever smelt in my life. This was presented by Ant and Dec as ‘sicktoria sponge’. She also devoured ‘whole brain loaf’ (sheep’s brain) and a ‘danus pastry’, which was in fact an ostrich anus. One of the things I was pleased to get to eat was my ‘bumoffee pie’ (cow’s anus). I mean I didn’t understand how you could eat a hole, because technically an anus is a hole. I thought I’d be able to stick my tongue through it (I know that sounds gross) but honestly I was quite shocked at how little a cow’s arse actually is.
One of the things I felt terrible about eating was the ‘Cornish nasty’. It has genuinely put me off pasties for life. I had to eat a live beetle. I actually felt guilty about eating it, to be honest. I mean it had never done anything to me, and what an awful way to die. So apologies to the beetle but I did it. I asked Medic Bob what would be the quickest and most painless way I could kill it. ‘Grab it between two fingers and bite its head off quickly,’ he said. It tasted like a really hard Smarties shell.
I had completed three of my foods and only had two left. ‘The next delight is “chocolate nip cookies”. These are in fact camel nipples,’ Dec announced with his cheeky little grin.
‘One of my favourite foods is doner meat, I eat it sober sometimes and I don’t even know what meat that is, so honestly I don’t mind eating a nip or two,’ I replied. They were just really chewy and later in camp I had to use the tweezers to get one of the camel hairs out from between my teeth.
One of the questions I often get asked is what was the worst thing you had to eat in the jungle and I’ll tell you. A fermented duck egg. Jesus Christ on a bike, I can still taste it now. It was so huge. For those who don’t know (as I didn’t), a fermented egg is an egg that’s basically a hundred years old. The yolk was a dark greeny-grey colour and it had the same texture as creamy Play-Doh with the taste of a sweaty rotten egg. I knew I had to eat it, I couldn’t let the team down. Also before I went in there, one of the bits of advice my dad gave me (apart from leaving plastic spiders around the house and making me eat Scotch eggs as apparently that’s what kangaroo balls taste like) was, ‘I always say, what won’t stick in your throat, won’t stick in your arse.’ But I swear I have never gagged so much in my life.
Poor Carol’s final challenge was a live scorpion with the venom taken out. She just couldn’t do it; I’m not surprised as it nipped her finger as she was holding it and her finger went bright red. Imagine if it had nipped her gum or tongue, ouch! I wasn’t disappointed in her, though. I was sort of pleased because hooray, the scorpion lived.
Lisa Snowdon was my big sister in the camp. To everyone else she is known as one of the top models in the UK, or as a judge of Britain’s Next Top Model, appearing in magazines like Vogue and Elle. To us in camp she was our go-to chef. Joel Dommett used to have her poster on his bedroom wall and here she was cooking him kangaroo loin and rice. I mean I was the cook for two days and it is hard work, cooking for twelve people who are absolutely ravenous from eating nothing but a portion of rice and beans for the day. Even when you have won loads of stars, the portion sizes are ridiculous.
One day, we won a crocodile arm.
‘Woah, feel how heavy the basket is.’
‘Oh my God, it’s crocodile hands.’
I was a little confused. ‘How many hands does a crocodile have, like, or is this from a couple of crocs?’ They looked huge but it has actually got the tiniest bit of meat on it. It’s all skin, and ooh, you can’t eat that. You’re chewing on what’s essentially a cocktail sausage’s worth of crocodile with some vegetables you’ve never heard of, most of which taste like celery. In fact, all of the vegetables in Australia taste like celery. I’ve never known anything like it in my life. Proper pissy celery vegetables – even if it looked like a potato it tasted like a celery stick. That’s why me, Sam, Ola Jordan and Carol would sit on our hammock and cry with laughter watching Lisa cook. She would try every single vegetable and fruit to decipher what it was.
‘That looks like an apple that, Lisa,’ I’d say.
‘Let me just take a little chunk out of it. Yeah, you’re right, it’s an apple.’
She had the right idea being the cook; you would be full from sampling before your food even hit your tin canister.
I loved our chats by the camp fire. ‘Lisa, apart from your family and loved ones, what do you miss the most?’
‘Hot showers and a nice bubbly bath, what about you?’
‘I miss condiments; I would bathe in a bath of offal if it meant I could have a pinch of salt with this meal.’ To be honest I smelt like offal for most of my time in Australia. Noddy changed his bloody clothes more than me.
While I literally looked like I had been born and raised in the jungle Outback with my ferrel hair, bug-bitten skin and the fact Adam and Joel washed my bra in cooking oil so I had a constant whiff of a greasy café, Ola Jordan was glowing. We were all already used to seeing Ola with all of her fake tan, make-up and beautiful gowns on Strictly but she looked even better without it all on. Ola had a beautiful tan and she was strutting around in a bikini with no wobbly bits at all. It was remarkable, sometimes I would watch her walk and literally nothing would wobble. She would use the mosquito repellent as a shimmer oil for her legs and made little bandanas. Meanwhile I had to use a belt on my actual knickers because I’d lost so much weight my arse was always hanging out of my shorts.
As a massive ballroom and Latin lover obviously I wanted to become best friends with Ola; she is the princess of dance. To get as far as she has in the dance world is incredible and I have such admiration for her. It takes dedication, drive, hard work, skill and patience to get to where she has. I would love listening to her stories about Strictly. She used that competitiveness and drive in all of her tasks – she was a little pocket rocket. The time me and her had to go head to head and down fish guts was gross. Although Ola won, technically we both lost. Even with half a tube of the au naturel green tea toothpaste, our breath still stank of carp.
From one dancer to another, I loved spending time with Jordan Banjo. He is a prime example of how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Now I try to never ever judge but first impressions count and because I’d met hunky men like Jordan before I must admit I thought he was going to be a little bit cocky and arrogant. Knowing that he is part of the huge dance troupe Diversity, once dated Little Mix’s Jesy Nelson and is about eight foot tall with a ten-pack, I thought he was going to ooze with confidence. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. What a gentle giant. He is actually quite shy and isn’t the massive party animal I thought he would be; in fact I found out that he actually doesn’t drink alcohol at all and he is as close to his family as I am.
Me and Jordan also had a shared passion. I’m not talking about dancing, I’m talking about naps. Actually naps sounds too childish, let’s call them ‘horizontal life pauses’. We both had at least an hour’s worth of horizontal life pauses a day. With me being just five foot I was as snug as a bug in my hammock; I looked like a little parcel of ravioli all neatly tucked away. Jordan, on the other hand, being six foot five, looked like a sausage roll in his hammock, with his head and feet poking out. I’ll be honest, that is half the reason I was so shocked I even made the final three, never mind won, because I thought the show would just be cut-aways of me drooling in my hammock.
Another camp mate who completely shocked me was Wayne Bridge. I had heard so many stories about footballers and how they’re bigheads. Well Bridgey is not one of those. He is one of the most humble and sweetest guys ever. He loves his wife and children so much, when he would chat about them you could see his eyes bursting with pride. I really wanted him to get to the final because I know he would have loved the Cyclone so much (the huge slip and slide which is super fun but results in you being bruised). He looked out for everybody and without realising it entertained most of the girls with his campfire routine doing one-armed press-ups whilst making sure the fire was roaring. Obviously being a footballer he was super competitive
and when me and him went up against each other in a challenge where we were covered in this honey stuff and bugs were dropped on us, he genuinely felt guilty about winning. ‘I should have let you win, Scarlett.’
‘Of course you shouldn’t have, Wayne, you won fair and square. Go and enjoy the bloody banquet and stop being daft.’ He is the sort of guy I want my little sister to marry when she is older.
Me and my dad met up with him and his wife Frankie recently actually, as we share a love of The Walking Dead. We went to this Walking Dead screening of an unseen episode. To be honest that’s the only premiére sort of thing I’ve ever been to. I am so pleased I did because – and I’m writing this with a huge smile on my face – I met Jesus. (Not the actual Jesus as in God’s son, but Paul ‘Jesus’ Monroe, the character from The Walking Dead.)
I have always been a massive fan of zombies, thanks to my dad – well, ‘fan’ is the wrong word. I’ve been ‘made aware’ of zombies since a young age. My dad is convinced that movies are there to prepare us for what’s about to happen. So there is an increase of alien movies at the moment as aliens have already made contact and the government is going to have to introduce us all to them soon. Same as the increase in zombie shows. My dad is prepared for what could be a zombie apocalypse.
I told this story on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. ‘So my dad is ready for the zombie takeover to happen in our lifetime. He has stored tins of food, a hot stove, bottles of water, a first-aid kit, a radio and old welding masks in our attic. I haven’t got a clue why we need the masks, like, and how much use they will be, like – but we are prepared. We have also had a chat – me, Dad, Mam and Ava – about our exits and where we would flee to. We are pretty sure we would lose my mam along the way as she has said she probably will give up within the first twenty-four hours.’
Me Life Story Page 15