jungle

The household name should prove a hit with ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here viewers after his many decades in the public eye and hugely successful career

A huge TV and pop icon from the ’80s is in ‘advanced talks’ to appear on this year’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!

Martin Kemp is poised to become the first star to join I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here as the second member of a family to have the jungle experience. The Spandau Ballet star is in “advanced talks” to join the hit ITV show when it launches next month.

And he’ll be following in the footsteps of his radio presenter son, Roman, who took part back in 2019. One insider said: “Martin is a household name having been top of the hit parade with Spandau Ballet in the 80s and then in EastEnders in the early 2000s – he’s a great signing and everyone is very excited at the prospect of getting him Down Under.”

One person who’ll be particularly thrilled is Roman himself, 32, who told the Mirror a couple of years ago that he’d be “very up” for his famous dad to take part.

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When Roman did it, he lasted the full 22 days and finished in third place, behind Corrie star Andy Whyment and winner Jacqueline Jossa.

But along the way he tackled some pretty tricky Bushtucker Trials – for which he held his dad partially responsible after he urged the public to nominate his son.

“Listen, I would do anything to see my dad eat llama anus,” Roman told the Mirror in 2022. “I’ll tell you why, because when I got nominated the first time it was the eating trial,” he recalled. “When you’re in there, you get so paranoid about why people are voting for you, because you’re like ‘am I coming across as a d*** and people want to see me suffer’?

“When I got out I was looking through some of the headlines, and it turns out the only reason I got voted to do that trial at the beginning was because my dad tweeted: ‘Let’s get my son to eat kangaroo anus’. So, my God, I’m very up for him going in.”

Once Martin arrives in the jungle, there will be a Kemp TV takeover in Britain with him on ITV alongside hosts Ant and Dec and his kids Roman and elder sister Harley Moon competing on BBC1’s Race Across the World from next week.

And Martin, who is a regular on Celebrity Gogglebox with Roman, will also be following his old bandmate Tony Hadley, who competed on the show in 2015, finishing in sixth place.

The singer of hits including True, Gold and To Cut a Long Story Short, afterwards described his jungle experience as “one of the best things I’ve ever done” despite his endless conflict with fellow contestant Lady Colin Campbell, who took an instant dislike to him.

Martin, 64, married to former Wham backing singer Shirley Holliman, is unlikely to ask Hadley for tips, after the rest of the Spandau members fell out with the lead singer when he quit the band in 2017.

Hadley told the Mirror earlier this year that he and Martin’s brother Gary – the band’s songwriter – were unlikely to work together again. “I haven’t spoken to him in 10 years. I don’t have anything to do with the Spandau thing at all,” he said.

This came after Gary claimed, in 2021, that he and Tony had never been mates “even at school”. But Martin has always remained hopeful about the possibility of a reunion, saying a few years ago: “It’s something I would love to do and I know Gary would love to do it. It’s very difficult to get five adults to say ‘yes’ at the same time. Tony at the moment doesn’t want to do it and I understand his reasons for wanting to be a solo singer.”

I’m a Celebrity is expected to start on ITV on November 16 with other camp-mates likely to include Emmerdale’s Lisa Riley and ex- EastEnder Shona McGarty plus radio host Nick Ferrari, comedian Ruby Wax, model Kelly Brook and presenter Vogue Williams.

A show spokesman said the official announcement would come soon, adding: “Any names suggested for I’m A Celebrity are speculation.”

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In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place.

In a testament to the inherent deadliness of borders – not to mention of existence in general for the impoverished of the world – countless refuge seekers have ended up unburied corpses in the jungle, denied dignity in death as in life. Lethal obstacles abound, ranging from fierce river currents to steep ravines to attacks by armed assailants to the sheer physical exhaustion that attends days or weeks of trekking through hostile terrain without adequate food or water.

And while literally “shutting down” the Darien Gap is about as feasible as shutting down the Mediterranean Sea or the Sahara Desert, the jungle has become drastically less trafficked in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s machinations to shut down the US border itself, essentially scrapping the whole right to asylum in violation of both international and domestic law.

In March, two months into Trump’s term, Panama’s immigration service registered a mere 194 arrivals from Colombia via the Darien Gap – compared with 36,841 arrivals in March of the previous year. This is no doubt music to the xenophobic ears of the US establishment, whose members delight in eternally bleating about the “immigration crisis”.

However, it does not remotely constitute any sort of solution to the real crisis – which is that, thanks in large part to decades of pernicious US foreign policy, life is simply unliveable in a whole lot of places. And “shutting down” the Darien Gap won’t deter desperate people with nothing to lose from pursuing other perilous paths in the direction of perceived physical and economic safety.

Nor can the enduring psychological impact of the Darien trajectory on the survivors of its horrors be understated. While conducting research for my book The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, published this month by Rutgers University Press, I found it next to impossible to speak with anyone who had made the journey without receiving a rundown of all of the bodies they had encountered en route.

In Panama in February 2023, for example, I spoke with a young Venezuelan woman named Guailis, who had spent 10 days crossing the jungle in the rain with her husband and two-year-old son. Among the numerous corpses they stumbled upon was an elderly man curled up under a tree “like he was cold”. Guailis said she had also made the acquaintance of a bereaved Haitian woman whose six-month-old baby had just drowned right before her eyes.

Guailis’s husband, Jesus, meanwhile, had experienced a more intimate interaction with a lifeless body when, tumbling down a formidable hill, he had grabbed onto what he thought was a tree root but turned out to be a human hand protruding from the mud. Recounting the incident to me, Jesus reasoned: “That hand saved my life.”

I heard about bloated corpses floating in the river, about a dead woman sprawled in a tent with her two dead newborn twins and about another dead woman with two dead children and a man who had hanged himself nearby – presumably the children’s father.

A Venezuelan woman named Yurbis, part of an extended family of 10 that I spent a good deal of time with in Mexico in late 2023, offered the following calculation regarding the prevalence of bodies in the jungle: “I can say that we have all stepped on dead people.”

For pretty much every step of the way, then, refuge seekers transiting the Darien Gap were reminded of the disconcerting proximity of death – and the negligible value assigned to their own lives in a US-led world order.

Add to that the surge in rapes and other forms of sexual violence with The New York Times reporting in April 2024 that the “sexual assault of migrants” on the Panamanian side of the jungle had risen to a “level rarely seen outside war” – and it becomes painfully clear that the individual and collective trauma signified by the Darien Gap is not something that will be summarily resolved by its ostensible “shutting-down”.

That said, the Darien Gap has also served as a venue for the display of incredible solidarity in the face of structural dehumanisation. I met a young Colombian man who had personally saved an infant from being swept away in a river. I was also told of a Venezuelan man who had carried an ailing one-year-old Ecuadorean girl through the jungle when her mother, too weak to move at a rapid pace, feared she wouldn’t make it out in time to seek medical help.

When I myself staged an incursion into the Darien Gap in January 2024, two refuge seekers from Yemen complimented me on my Palestine football shirt and did their best to assuage my apparently visible terror at entering the jungle: “If you need anything, we are here.” This from folks who had for more than two decades been on the receiving end of quite literal terror, courtesy of my own country, as successive US administrations went about waging covert war on Yemen.

The Darien Gap, too, has functioned as a de facto warzone in its own right where punitive US policy plays out on vulnerable human bodies in the interests of maintaining systemic inequality. Widely referred to in Spanish as “el infierno verde”, or The Green Hell, the gap has certainly lived up to its nickname.

And while the heyday of the Darien Gap may be at least temporarily over, the territory remains an enduring symbol of one of the defining crises of the modern era in which the global poor must risk their lives to live and are criminalised for doing so. In that sense, then, the Darien Gap is the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Coronation Street star Adam Hussain could be about sign up for the jungle as he has become a favourite of the bookies to brave the reality show amid his soap exit

Coronation Street star Adam Hussain could be about sign up for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! The actor, 24, has played the role of Aadi Alahan on the world’s longest-running television soap since 2020 but recently quit the cobbles and his final scenes are yet to air.

But speculation suggests that Adam could be about to trade the the fictional Manchester backstreet for the Australian Outback, when the reality show returns to screens later this year.

Adam has been priced up at 7/1 to swap the Rovers Return for bugs, rice, and beans. It comes after it was announced that Aadi’s twin sister Asha (Tanisha Gorey) is to ‘reach breaking point’ as part of an upcoming special.

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If Adam, who took over the part of shopkeeper Aadi from Zennon Ditchett, does end up venturing off into the jungle, he will certainly not be the first famous face from the soap to take part in Ant and Dec’s long-running reality show, which first aired in 2002. Antony Cotton, who plays knicker stitcher Sean Tully, entered the jungle in 2011 and just missed out on a place in the final, where McFly star Dougie Poynter was crowned winner.

In 2012, Helen Flanagan (Rosie Webster) was voted by the public to face seven consecutive Bushtucker trials, which, at the time, was a record for the programme. And ever since Jennie McAlpine (Fiz Dobbs) joined the jungle in 2017, it has become almost an annual occurrence for a star from the soap to appear.

Last year, Jennie’s on-screen husband Alan Halsall (Tyrone Dobbs) famously struck up a friendship with co-star Tulisa, whilst other Street favourites like Beverley Callard (Liz McDonald), Sair Khan (Alya Nazir), Simon Gregson (Steve McDonald), and Sue Cleaver (Eileen Grimshaw) have braved the programme in recent times.

The news comes just days after Aadi’s exit was teased in sad scenes. As views will know, character has been embroiled in various conflicts over the last few months. Earlier this year, he was unintentionally responsible for Lauren Bolton (Cait Fitton) becoming a victim of spiking when he threw a house party that went wrong, and, amid their budding romance, he has lied to her about the events of that fateful night.

Aadi was entrusted with the upkeep of the corner shop owned by his dad Dev (Jimmi Harkishin) when he took a break but he ran up debts of £6,000 and then staged a failed robbery with Brody Michaelis (Ryan Mulvey) to try to claim on the insurance.

After all that failed, Aadi finally fessed up to Dev, and his dad learned that his partner Bernie Winter (Jane Hazlegrove) had been in on the initial attempt to cover it all up as well, when she brought forward their wedding in the hopes of getting a rich relative to pay for it.

Having been branded a ‘failure’ by Dev, who has owned and operated multiple Weatherfield businesses since he arrived in 1999, things came to a head for the teenager as he hit a new low. Clearly unsure what to do next, Aadi decided to drink his problems away as he ignored calls and text from Lauren, who had been hoping to meet him that day.

Eventually, he was spotted by builders Gary Windass (Mikey North) and Theo Silverton (James Cartwright). He was blocking their van and it all ended in calamity when he refused to move, as he fell and hit his head on a brick wall. Dev, desperate to find his son after he wasn’t in bed after Lauren came calling for him, swooped onto the scene to see what had happened to his son, but Aadi refused any help from him whatsoever and stormed off.

That night, Dev asked him: “What happened with us? You always used to make me so proud of you. Did I not tell you enough? Is that why you’re punishing me?”

Aadi admitted: “It’s not always easy, trying to live up to you. You’re always going on about everything you achieved. I’m not saying you never praised me but it was only when it made you look good. It was never enough to just be me.” Acknowledging that things have to change, Dev revealed that he had been in touch with his cousin Vikram and has arranged for him to go and work with him in India.

Through tears, Aadi protested: “I’m not moving to India!” but Dev said he ‘could not support him anymore. “You’re just kicking me out?” Aadi shot back, to which Dev confessed through tears of his own: “I don’t want to. But you have left me no choice.” Viewers then saw Aadi and Amy Barlow (Elle Mulvaney) act on their true feelings for each other, but even that went wrong in the end, and the character looks set to depart Weatherfield for good in the coming weeks.

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