Showering on I’m A Celeb made me uncomfortable but here’s what I did to get through it, reveals Carol Vorderman
SHE faced scorpions and ate testicles on I’m A Celebrity – but Carol Vorderman says being filmed in the shower on TV made her more uncomfortable than any Bushtucker Trial.
The former campmate says she wore a swimsuit and shorts in the jungle shower after the show became famous for its lingering shots of female celebs washing in skimpy bikinis.
But she believes the ITV show has moved on since society became less tolerant of objectification.
Carol said: “I wore swimming costumes rather than a bikini deliberately. It is a weird thing, that shower. I think you will notice on this series of I’m A Celebrity it’s not as obvious.
“It’s very uncomfortable. I found it uncomfortable mostly because you could see three cameras — you could see where they were positioned and there was nowhere to hide.
“They don’t do it now. It was of its time. That shows how society’s rules change.”
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The Countdown legend was speaking on podcast In A Good Place, hosted by Rosie Nixon, when she told of her discomfort.
Carol, 61, came eighth on the 2016 series, with Gogglebox star Scarlett Moffatt going on to win.
She has previously appeared in Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, but has ruled out doing more reality shows — unless Love Island launches a series for older contestants.
“I would do Love Island, that would be hilarious. I would really quite like that. Mischief-making,” she says.
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“I’m A Celebrity has always been my favourite show and I did it because it was my favourite.
“But I don’t think I would do another reality show. I wouldn’t ever do Big Brother.”
Carol says she is more fulfilled since she realised being in a relationship with just one person wasn’t the key to happiness and no longer practises monogamy.
The brain-box presenter first married in 1985 aged 24 to Christopher Mather, a Royal Navy officer, but they split after 12 months.
Her second marriage was to management consultant Patrick King in 1990, the father of her two children, and lasted ten years.
She went on to have a relationship with journalist Des Kelly but they split after five years together in 2007.
Now she has a string of “special” friends and is having fun.
Carol says: “About a month ago I was on This Morning and they said to us, can you do the phone-in? The subject was mature dating.
‘Special friends’
“I said, ‘I will do it, but only if I can be truthful. I won’t say, ‘Are you looking for your one true love?’ . . . because I don’t believe in it.
"I will do it and give my view, which is that you can be happy without having just one person.
“So I told how I had been doing this for ten years with what I call ‘special friends’. We ran over by 22 minutes with the number of phone calls that came in. I have never had a response like that to anything.
"Women have been made to feel like failures because their marriage failed and that they haven’t found another man. I’m happy to say it as it is. I could write a book about it.
“Because there are many ways of finding happiness and your worlds change as you get older. What I say is you decide what to put in the ‘us’ pot.
“Whatever anyone else thinks from your family, whatever anyone else from society might think — YOU decide. I happen to like a small ‘us’ pot because I don’t want to put much of my life into it. But I have quite a few ‘us’ pots. I am having fun.”
Carol’s big passion today is flying, after securing her pilot’s licence in 2014. She hails adventure and new experiences as the bedrock of her life and recalls flying around America as “absolute freedom”.
“I’m in a very happy chapter now,” she says. “There is that poem [Warning, by Jenny Joseph] — ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . . And learn to spit’ — well, I started doing that very early. My twenties was when I got on the telly.
“That was quite happy, I was doing well. Everything was the first time. Then in my thirties, I was very happily married and then suddenly it didn’t work.
“My forties should have been ace but they weren’t, largely for one reason. From 50, once I had lost this whole, ‘You’ve got to be with one person, you’re only valid if you’ve got a husband’, all that nonsense — that was a freedom, that was an absolute freedom.
“Then I learned to fly and got really good with that. I am in such a good place. I am happy. I am free.”
‘Not pleasant’
Carol says that the best lesson she has learnt in life is to drop people with negative energy, who she terms “fun-Hoovers”.
“The warning signs for me are when I am in the company of someone who is not pleasant and I just get myself out of there,” she says.
“I have had a couple of bad relationships in that way and we have all had the fun-Hoovers in our lives, whether they are friends or family members.
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“The best thing I have ever done is drop them. Drop them. Don’t waste time on them any more. What are we waiting for?
“I believe everything happens in chapters in your life and I do not cling on to the past at all. It’s gone.”
