Rylan Clark has urged I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! viewers to watch what they’re saying about his friend Tulisa during her time in the jungle.
The pair met during Rylan’s appearance on The X Factor back in 2012, which marked Tulisa’s second year on the judging panel, and have remained friends in the decade since.
On Sunday night, the new season of I’m A Celebrity got underway, with Tulisa settling into camp alongside an impressive cast that includes McFly musician Danny Jones, two-time Strictly Come Dancing champion Oti Mabuse and media personality Coleen Rooney.
Halfway through the episode, Rylan insisted that anyone tuning into the show should hold their comments about Tulisa’s appearance – with good reason.
“Before people start going for appearance, Tulisa has been through a lot health wise the last few years so let’s not make shit jokes about her on Twitter, yeah?” he told his X followers.
In 2020, Tulisa disclosed that she had been diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, which she suggested was the result of a “serious horseriding accident” years earlier that left her with a fractured skull and “caused a lot of nerve damage”.
“At any time, I have emergency steroids on me, and now luckily I know how to manage it, so the attacks don’t last as long,” she told the Loose Women panel (including, interestingly enough, her future campmate Jane Moore).
“There have actually been times when people have criticised me for the way I look and my face, not knowing I’m actually going through a Bell’s palsy attack.”
Last month, Tulisa made an appearance on Olivia Attwood’s podcast So Wrong It’s Right where she discussed her diagnosis as well as her changing appearance.
The N-Dubz star maintained that she’d never gone under the knife “until recently”, having previously only undergone filler “to balance out the symmetry” in her face, as a direct result of her Bell’s palsy.
She also shared that the first time she experienced Bells’s palsy – described by the NHS as a “temporary weakness or lack of movement that usually affects one side of the face” – the effects spanned seven months, during which time she was reluctant to go outside, instead preferring to “just hide in the house”.
I’m A Celebrity continues on Monday night at 9pm on ITV1.