Ferne McCann lights up I'm A Celebrity
Sunday, November 29, 2015 at 11:51 So Susannah Constantine was the first celebrity to be voted out of 'I'm A Celebrity'.
What I had forgotten, when writing about the programme and its proud history of celebrity smokers a couple of weeks ago, is that Susannah is married to Sten Bertelson who launched Death cigarettes in the Nineties.
The brand ("choose Death for an honest smoke") enjoyed a brief moment of infamy. It was doomed to fail but Bertelsen and his business partner BJ Cunningham gave the then Chancellor Kenneth Clarke a good run for his money when they later tried to sell, to UK consumers, cigarettes purchased at a lower duty in Luxembourg.
(See They've got the Chancellor fuming. The article is dated October 2011 on the Independent website but it must have been published in the mid Nineties.)
Anyway, did anyone notice that Susannah was the only contestant using an e-cigarette?
The good news is there is still one nicotine addict holding the flame of liberty aloft (so to speak) – TOWIE's Ferne McCann who has helped light up the show (no pun intended) since she belatedly entered the camp with Geordie Shore's Vicky Pattison.
Anti-smoker Duncan Bannatyne has kept a fairly low profile so far. His Twitter account tells anyone who will listen that he's keen to do a Bushtucker trial but the public aren't voting for him, possibly because he's a little dull and would almost certainly do the trial without fear or fuss.
It was Lady C I think who described Bannatyne as vain but ironically he is probably benefitting from the endorsement of the much younger McCann and Pattison who seem to like him.
Whether McCann will like him quite so much if he complains about her smoking remains to be seen.
If Bannatyne wants to be King of the Jungle (and I'm sure he does) he may just have to grin and bear it. Picking a fight with the good-hearted McCann (or her habit) wouldn't go down well with the voting public.
Then again, why would you complain about someone smoking a cigarette when you've been sitting next to a burning camp fire for two weeks?
Whatever else he may be, Bannatyne isn't stupid. I suspect common sense (and self preservation) will prevail.
Reader Comments (3)
Actually, Suzannah went back to real cigarettes before she left the show, and no wonder - sharing bedspace with all sorts of creepy-crawlies (no, I'm not talking about Bannatyne here!) and having to crawl through swimming pools of fishguts (or whatever they want them to do) is enough to make anyone want the kind of smoke that an e-cigarette just can't deliver!
One of the things which is becoming apparent is that Bannatyne is all mouth & trousers when he's on the internet, but he hasn't got tthe balls to espouse his veherment views in person to people he clearly disagrees with.
And of course, as Simon points out, Bannatyne may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them – and he’d certainly look pretty silly whinging about one little cigarette when most of the time the whole camp seems to be enveloped in thick plumes of smoke from the campfire, wouldn’t he?