Over in the Queensland jungle on Wednesday night, actress Lucy Pargeter clutched a pillow with her child’s photo and declared: “It makes you realise what you’re missing.”

So I checked – New Tricks, some thrown-together nonsense about a Tudor Monastery Farm and, for the really desperate, a Jack Whitehall gig, on BBC3.

Not much, then, to distract us from the 13th outing of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! which began with Steve Davis’s theory: “There’s no smoke without fire,” proven by fellow OBE Rebecca Adlington with the use of a tampon.

It’s about the only thing that has ignited so far on a damp squib of a series whose fault lies squarely with ITV’s uninspired booking department.

They’ve given us Will Smith’s back-in-the-day straight man, Gary Oldman’s big sister, one of Westlife, a Channel 5 daytime presenter, snooker’s Mr Interesting, a phantom Olympic pool piddler, Chas Dingle, THE Amy Willerton and third-person speaking fashion designer David Emanuel who looks like Russell Grant having eaten Jonathan King.

Most of all, though, they’ve given us Joey Essex, a star billing that says everything about this year’s line-up.

Worse, the network is doing everything in its power to hand victory to the TOWIE bandana berk.

He’s already being referred to as “Hero Jungle Joey”, receives the bulk of airtime and his myriad flaws have been magically inverted to his advantage.

Under normal circumstances, a fully grown man who can’t tell the time, blow his own nose or comprehend rudimentary English but does, to be fair to him, understand crockery goes into a dishwasher dirty and comes out clean would be ridiculed and dismissed from public attention.

Not Joey, a bloke who wouldn’t “confrontate” anyone, not without a good reasontate.

ITV has made all these traits affectionate and paired him with beauty queen Amy in the hope of a fumble in the jungle.

But I can’t blame just him when most of the support cast aren’t helping matters.

Spare part Kian Egan may insist: “There is nothing I won’t do,” to which anyone who saw him as a judge on Your Face Sounds Familiar will attest, but it’s more accurate to say that, five days in, there’s nothing he has done.

The huge viewing figures don’t lie, however, and this show’s popularity is bigger than ever.

That’s understandable. The format is unbreakable, the Bushtucker eating trial was epic, Ant and Dec are on top form (“Monday night takeaway, the only trial on TV that says don’t just watch the nads, eat them”) and Matthew Wright has stepped effortlessly into the grumpy old sod role.

He’s been the most entertaining one there from the moment he revealed on day one he’d had “a last-night hurrah on my own in the hotel”.

(Don’t worry, Matthew, that won’t show up on your room bill.)

But the mid-series injection of new campmates can’t come soon enough, because right now a vintage series seems beyond our reach.

If the addition of Annabel Giles and Vincent Simone doesn’t make a vast and immediate improvement then I’ll have to agree with a thoroughly disgruntled Matthew Wright after the through-the-night memory task.

“What a waste of everybody’s time.”

Everybody’s except Joey’s, of course.

He can’t tell the time.