ALL-singing, all-dancing, celebrity flasher John Barrowman exited public life this week, not with the flourish and round of applause he’d probably have wanted. But with a puddle of vomit at his feet and the words “sack of s**t” ringing in his ears as he quit Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins just 32 minutes after the latest contestants had reached their base in New Zealand. This self-styled “centre of the universe” was back on Lorraine’s ITV show the next morning trying to explain that he’d been “true to himself” and blah blah blah.
Barrowman knew, though, that if there’s one thing the long-suffering British won’t forgive, it’s a quitter who shuns redemption. He’s gone. It was public service broadcasting, then, of the highest and most brutal order from SAS: WDW, a show that, to paraphrase the great Johnny Carson on the Oscars, is 45 minutes of sparkling entertainment spread over an hour-long show.
First clue to the 15-minute lag arrived, right at the start of this series, with the appearance of a psychologist named Alia Bojilova, who specialises in declarations of the bleeding obvious and telling us the new celebrities are: “A complicated bunch.” READ MORE ON JOHN BARROWMAN I’ll say. For “complicated”, though, you can probably guess that, with the exception of the sports stars, they are every sort of pointless , bone-brained public nuisance, from Boris’s steely-eyed sister Rachel Johnson to “comedian” Tez Ilyas, whos.
