ISN’T it spooky that, in the very week his new autobiography is the subject of splashy serialisation in a tabloid newspaper, Stan Collymore is visible on our screens nightly in The Farm, the new reality show from Five? It’s one of those uncanny coincidences that almost makes you believe in the existence of agents.

Unfortunately, it’s also the sort of thing that will lend further momentum to an unwholesome conspiracy theory, at present doing the rounds, which suggests that the celebrities who go on reality shows don’t do so out of sheer love for the reality format, and for the honour of representing their profession. They do so because they have personal, commercial agendas, quite superfluous to the show’s immediate purposes.

According to this view, Collymore isn’t holed up in a camera-infested farmhouse with Margi Clarke and Vanilla Ice because the rural life has always called to him. Rather he is doing it to publicise a book and at the same time, repair some of the damage done to his opportunities by an incident of woman-beating, various unhappy dependencies and a long career as one of football’s more notable wastes of space.

Well, if you want to be that cynical about it, it’s up to you, I guess. But the truth may be more complicated. Indeed, if Collymore’s image needs rescuing right now, it’s from the damage done to it by his own book. Of course, this impression might be the unhappy result of an emphasis in the serialising. The tabloid publishing the extracts has chosen, for reasons of its own, to overlook Stan’s doubtless lengthy analyses of the form of Nottingham Forest in the 1994-95 season and has dwelled instead on his nights of passion with television presenters.

Thus one’s overriding impression at this point is that Collymore has produced a work of literature so relentlessly grubby that readers will be required to turn its pages with tweezers. Indeed, at the moment one can’t understand why he didn’t abandon the book idea and simply issue a limited edition, notched bedpost. If Stan feels he can turn this PR disaster around by working tenderly and diligently with cows amid the likes of Ritchie Neville, once of the boy band 5ive, good luck to him.

It’s early doors (or, as we prefer to say in the farming community, “early gates”), but my feeling is that the celebrities on The Farm have not been selected straightforwardly for their likely usefulness around a busy working yard. For instance, the cast included Paul Daniels, who soon walked out. And understandably, given that his professional skills were irrelevant here and only ever going to come into their own if, for some reason, it proved necessary to saw a cow in half.

Vanilla Ice, too, brings little in the way of former experience to the table, white rap having no connection with forking excrement, except metaphorically. Lady Victoria Hervey also looks a touch uncomfortable at this level, her life as one of our foremost socialites having mostly failed to prepare her for three weeks of horny-handed labour in a rural setting. Indeed, until events of this week awoke her, I suspect she thought “tipping a sheep” was something you did after getting your coat out of the cloakroom at Annabel’s. (In fact, it’s the received method for wrestling a sheep into a position where you can check its feet for rot. Education by reality television: eat that, John Humphrys.) The farmhands also include Rebecca Loos — “PA to the stars”, as she is billed. Again, not a job that regularly requires a person to trim a cow’s foot with a mallet and a chisel. Or if it does, David Beckham didn’t mention it in the recent, updated version of his autobiography. Remember when Loos seemed kind of cool? Smart, glamorous, slightly mysterious, multilingual? Well, now she’s trimming cow’s feet on The Farm. Funny old world.

Only Collymore, then, has a background that is in any way agricultural. True, his is not the first name one reaches for when the conversation turns to early-rising, go-til-you-drop industry. But he has, at least, by his own eager admission, spent a large part of his adult life behaving like a pig. Plus he’s got the shoulders for the work, and he’s willing.

Boy, is he willing. On day one, Collymore was required to milk a cow. Stan grasped the teat and palpated it with his masterful fingers. (For anyone joining this article late, you arrive, not in the middle of another extract from Collymore’s autobiography, but during a description of something that actually happened.) He could thrive here. In fact, let’s nail the flag to the bedpost: provided he continues to put the effort in, and provided he manages to keep out of the women’s dormitory, Collymore will survive the public voting phase and become the first sportsperson to collect serious honours in a reality television show since Phil Tufnell was crowned King of the Jungle.

How proud we’ll be. Meanwhile, if anything, the show seems a bit sluggish, bar the odd outbreak of bickering with Vanilla Ice about the war in Iraq. (Ice is pro: the rest are largely anti.) Personally, I’m hoping the producers spring a topical surprise at the weekend and tell the cast they’ve got to go hunting. A bit political? Maybe. But it would provoke a reaction. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

GILES SMITH RETURNS

ON SATURDAY