My vote goes to Johnny Rotten. He is the star — and the only star — of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here, that graceless but compelling parlour game in the Australian jungle which is pulling in 12 million British viewers a night.

Like many of the 12 million, I’d guess, I stumbled on it on a rainy night last week and was drawn in. A lot of that was because of John Lydon, as the middle-aged Sex Pistol now wants us to call him, who has spent the past week making acerbic fun of the show, his fellow celebrities and himself.

“What’s this about?”, he asked rhetorically about the programme. “It’s about nothing.” Those who can’t stand the show would agree. But if you watch it at all, the amusement comes from celebrities’ willingness to undergo humiliation to have their true selves understood.

It’s an exercise from which John emerges better than most. “I like complaining. It suits me,” he said, showing a self-awareness most of the others lack. And then, he didn’t complain. He liked the beans and rice, pronounced his camp mates “professionally ill” when they griped, and walked off in disgust as they proved unable to make tea. “I can’t bear this,” he said — and every viewer was with him.

Then he turned environmentalist, and it would be hardhearted not to find it poignant. “I really don’t feel out of place here,” he said, peering up at the rainforest canopy, with the bemusement of someone who always feels out of place. He used to think the “green” bits were just the gaps between cities, he explained. But “nature”, he now offered tentatively, “is great”.

The producers had the wit to cut to a lizard whose sagging cheeks echoed his. Someone should sign him up to present one of those Sunday night nature programmes.

In fact, the show took to filming him in the dark in his bunk as David Attenborough would a dangerous predator, using a soft voice-over, so as not to rouse the beast from its immobile menace. Even so, every now and then, John would explode out of the shadows in a tirade against Jordan.

All right, I can’t dismiss Jordan. The making of the show has been the instant hostility between the punk and the glamour model. “It”, as John took to calling Jordan, was lazy. Didn’t get firewood. Wouldn’t boil water. “It gets on my tits,” he said, appositely, as they are antithetical in every part of their anatomies.

She has added bits on with expensive calculation; he has bits artlessly falling off. An incisor is missing, one cheek is gouged, and he has shaved an erratic firebreak through the rusty scrub of his hair.

The Jordan/Johnny question divides viewers down the middle. I prefer his sarcasm, but many have warmed to her plea that “Katie Price” — her real name — is not what she seems. The week’s funniest phenomenon has been the efforts to turn Jordan into a feminist icon. Joan Bakewell, musing on Jordan’s silicone breasts, presents the thesis in purest form. “We have permission to stare, to goggle, to see them bounce and rebound, to notice how she takes pleasure in her body and enjoys it when others do so. I begin to admire her strong sense of self and her determination to shape her life — and body — exactly as she wishes.”

This is ridiculous. Jordan is photogenic for the usual reasons — she has a handsome face and is very slim. The implants are unfailingly startling; like someone who’s pregnant, she looks ordinary from the back, and then when you catch another angle, you pause as you are reminded of her condition.

But the calculation we are supposed to admire is relentless. She grabbed Sunday’s tabloid headlines with the revelation of an alleged affair with a footballer, Monday’s with the hint of another (hotly denied) and yesterday’s with whether she would dump her boyfriend. Dominating a few front pages is not a likeable skill; nor is it rare.

The show itself has had great moments. The deadpan presenters Ant and Dec have made the most of the earnest narcissism of Peter Andre, the singer. His composition Insania — his own fusion of “insane” and “mania”, he carefully explained — could have been appropriated without change by David Brent, of The Office. But although it runs until Monday, it is already too long. The weather has turned from steam to downpour. Jordan is pleading that with another week, people “would definitely see the proper Katie Price”, but surely at least some can already.

Even John Lydon is regressing charmlessly into Johnny Rotten. He is now just a humped figure under waterproofs in his bunk, emitting double-barrelled expletives. “I’m sorry for John’s language,” said Dec with discomfort. “It’s a live show. These things happen”.

It’s a shame. At the start, it was fun. But they invited us to see what they were like, and after a few days, we did.

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