Ant McPartlin struggled to find his true feelings when guiding I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! campmate Dean McCullough through his latest Bushtucker Trial.
During Thursday night’s highlights show, Dean was selected for the Lethal Labs task, in which he needed to use his mouth to unscrew plastic stars while his head was encased in tanks filled with different creatures, critters and other unpleasantness.
Before the task got underway, Ant gave Dean some tough love based on his performance in previous challenges.
“What happened yesterday? No stars,” he began. “What happened the day before? You said, ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’.”
When Dean insisted he planned to “change the narrative”, Ant pointed out: “You can only change the narrative by sticking with it and getting on with it.”
“I’m good cop,” co-host Declan Donnelly then quipped, while Ant agreed: “He’s very carrot, I’m very stick.”
Dean actually held his own pretty well in the trial, against snakes, spiders and cockroaches, but when he was faced with fishguts, he called, “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here” and the challenge ended.
“If you’d let us tell you what was coming in, you wouldn’t have freaked out with the fish guts,” a stern Ant then told the Radio 1 presenter.
Speaking to Sam Thompson on ITV2 companion show Unpacked, Ant admitted: “My annoyance came across on screen and I was quite unprofessional and I’m not happy about it.”
“You get to the point where you’re like ‘What are you doing?’,” he added.
Dean will once again face off in the next Bushtucker Trial during Friday night’s show, this time joining Danny Jones in the High Street Horrors challenge.
Thursday’s show also saw the arrival of Maura Higgins in camp, which has already been branded “TV gold” by I’m A Celebrity viewers.
I’m A Celebrity continues on Friday night at 9pm on ITV1.