MP, Matt Hancock, the former Conservative health minister, is pictured here feathering his nest while taking part in a reality television programme set in the Australian outback called ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’.

The premise of the programme is that a group of celebrities are subjected to tests and trials that are so horrible they would rather leave the programme than stay and try to win the competition.

I’d love to know the age of whichever researcher thought it would be hilarious to tar and feather a famous person. The ‘tar’ may well have been brown sauce, treacle or maple syrup but the visual impact is sickening on so many levels.

The pouring of hot tar over a person followed by a bucket of feathers is an excruciatingly painful act of ritual humiliation and torture dating back centuries and found across the world, including close to home. In 2007 an alleged drug dealer was tarred and feathered in Belfast.

He was tied to a lamppost and a placard was hung round his neck that read: ‘I’m a drug dealing scumbag.’ Where Mat Hancock could wash off the treacle and feathers easily, those who to this day experience the hot tar version sustain life-long injury. It’s not funny.

So why is ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’ so popular? Well, the contestants get the last laugh in the form of a big fat cheque. They are doing it for the money and the fame. But why is it such successful television? After watching it for the first time, I fear for the future of our country. As with most reality tv shows, the cameras are always on a group of people as they wake and sleep with the merciful exception of when they go to the loo.

The contestants have no doubt signed waivers to exonerate the show’s producers from blame if the experience of being on the show damages them. Given that the programme’s ‘rules’ includes food competition and restriction not to mention being made to crawl through tunnels full of spiders, flies, rats, snakes and sludge, it seems pretty likely to me that some psychological damage is inevitable.

The show lists a psychiatrist in the credits and I’d love to know how any healthcare professional can approve of what is in fact a social experiment using people who cannot possibly have been consented appropriately. I wonder if when they sign up they are told, for example, how many contestants have suffered illness and even committed suicide after taking part in reality television programmes.

Members of the public vote for the contestant they most want to see humiliated, distressed and abused.

MP Mat Hancock has been chosen for several of the show’s ‘trials’ by a public keen for revenge perhaps against a Conservative politician who broke covid rules while setting them. As well as these ‘trials’ the public also vote for a contestant to leave the competition at regular intervals. Viewers can feel powerful in having a part to play in booting out somebody they find dull and selecting somebody they want to see ‘forced’ into humiliating and horrific circumstances.

It’s all a bit like Ancient Rome. The Hollywood version anyway. Picture an amphitheatre. A gladiator has managed to survive fighting another gladiator. The mob is chanting for him to be spared death. A thumbs up or thumbs down from the emperor will consign the man to life or death. There may be dispute over how accurate this picture of the classical world is, but these days, for certain, the ‘emperor’ is holding a TV remote.

Watching Mat Hancock enter a room full of snakes was horrible. (And no, that’s not a metaphor for him walking into parliament…). Even though there’s no way any of those snakes were poisonous or dangerous, the pantomime ‘be careful’ comments from the TV hosts were still alarming.

To everybody who ‘voted’ for Matt Hancock to face one of these awful TV ‘trials’ may I ask that they consider punishing him more appropriately by campaigning in the next General Election to elect Labour (who came second in 2019) or the Lib Dems in his constituency?