Freddie Flintoff has revealed how he bent the rules during his winning stint in the Australian version of ‘I’m A Celebrity’.
Although the UK version has taken place Down Under since its inception in 2004, Australia didn’t actually get its own ‘I’m A Celebrity’ until 2015, and Freddie was among its first contestants.
The former cricketer eventually went on to win the show, but has now disclosed that he didn’t entirely stick to the rules during his time on the show.
“In England you see [I’m A Celebrity contestants] smoking all the time,” he said during a recording of the BBC Radio 5 Live podcast ‘Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy’. “In Australia they don’t let you smoke on TV so I said ‘I’m a smoker’, which I’m not by any stretch. They asked me how many I [cigarettes] wanted a day so I said five knowing, I’d have to do it off screen.”
He continued: “I’d walk out the gate and there’d be a chair with a cigarette that I didn’t have, I just sat and had some peace to myself, not filmed and in nobody’s hearing.”
From there, he was also able to access fresh water, explaining: “I also then noticed there’s a medical hut 50 yards away. You don’t get water, if you want water you boil it and I’m thinking it’s a hassle.
“So in the medical hut was a water tub, a water fountain. So I picked all the putty out the window and took it out then filled my bottle five times a day. I was more hydrated than I’d ever been in my life. [My wee] was crystal clear.”
Freddie also revealed that he wasn’t entirely truthful when speaking to producers before entering the jungle, keeping his actual fears a secret so that he wouldn’t be confronted by them.
“You fill a form in about what you don’t like,” he recalled. “It’s out there that I don’t like the dark, so I thought I’d be truthful about that. Another one I put was frogs, because I don’t mind frogs. I did this challenge and they dumped a load of frogs on my head…”
Other stars who have appeared on the Aussie version of ‘I’m A Celebrity’, which takes place in South Africa, include The Brady Bunch’s Maureen McCormick, ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ judge Carson Kressley and cricketer Shane Warne, as well as UK ‘I’m A Celebrity’ stars Vicky Pattison and Paul Burrell.
Over the weekend, the UK crowned its latest King Of The Jungle, with Harry Redknapp voted the winner of this year’s ‘I’m A Celebrity’.