Disappointment continues after the eviction of Nicola McLean from I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! We had a lot of time for McLean, both as a member of the extended sport family (she is the fiancée of Tom Williams, of Peterborough United) and as a fellow journalist (she used to do a column for Page 3 of The Sun).

We applaud the work she did in the jungle to overturn the unhelpful WAG stereotype, which suggests that footballers' other halves are interested only in holidays and make-up and are hopeless when it comes to everyday, real-world matters, such as tucking into a bowl of green ants or sleeping in a damp hammock near Timmy Mallett.

These are not easy times for the WAG lifestyle, what with everyone from Roy Keane to Rio Ferdinand having a dig and with the recession biting shoe shops. Yet McLean put in some hard miles on behalf of WAG reputations everywhere and we were sad that she didn't get the chance to finish the job.

Still, for every cloud a silver lining, and Nicola's exit meant that, not for the first time in her career, Martina Navratilova was the last woman standing. Whatever the outcome of last night's vote-off, the Florida-based tennis legend knows that her place as unofficial “Queen of the Jungle 2008” is secure and to a gilded list of fallen opponents that includes Chris Evert Lloyd, Steffi Graf and Evonne Goolagong Cawley can now be added Esther Rantzen, Dani Behr and Carly Zucker.

We wondered what Navratilova was doing on this show. Not any more. One wouldn't go so far as to say that watching a lot of I'm a Celebrity ends up monkeying with the mind, but the sight of the nine-times Wimbledon singles champion crouched fireside with Mr Sulu from Star Trek and one half of Dollar, the 1980s singing sensation, has come to seem perfectly normal.

Incidentally, because he was one half of Dollar, would it be historically accurate to refer to David Van Day as the original 50 Cent? Or would there be some dispute about that in the hip-hop community? A debate for another day, perhaps.

Navratilova started quietly - indeed, silently and almost invisibly - but finally burst into the reckoning with a Bushtucker Trial in which she clambered across a pontoon of Minis and won a full quota of ten stars for the camp. “I haven't had a rush like that in a long while,” she said. “Not like winning Wimbledon. But maybe first or second round.”

It wasn't enough. She was soon saying: “Maybe, just maybe, I can get a perfect score again.” And there you had the Navratilova mentality - always seeking that next challenge. She was soon pushing herself forward (unsuccessfully) for the “Tower of Terror”. “If it's physical, I'm there,” she said.

Contrast this with the attitude - not untypical among the 2008 competitors - of Joe Swash. “I don't want to jump out of planes and I don't want to eat anything that's alive,” the former EastEnders actor announced at the start of the series.

You had to question his motivation. Would you do Celebrity Masterchef if you didn't want to cook? Would you do Strictly Come Dancing if you didn't want to dance? Not unless you had an incredibly bossy and intimidating agent. In future, I'm a Celebrity needs more straight-backed contenders such as Navratilova - people for whom jumping out of planes and eating things that are alive represent a goal.

Still, a sportsperson cannot prosper in that famous spotlit clearing by willingness alone. It also takes a few tears (Navratilova had an emotional moment remembering her mother, who died nearly a year ago). And it takes politics. Navratilova has been as militant as anyone about the behaviour of Van Day, who has not endeared himself to his camp-mates. Indeed, he has been using insect repellent as hair gel, amid some surprise that he is able to go near the stuff. Still, as Mr Sulu (George Takei) calmly opined: “Such is the diversity of the human animal.” Or, as Swash put it: “He's a conniving, sneaky little snake in the grass.”

It was the completeness of Navratilova's game that ensured her survival while others were falling. On leaving the jungle, Brian Paddick said that he had signed up for I'm a Celebrity because, after weighty matters (30 years of policing, a mayoral candidacy), he wanted to do “something trivial”. A hard frost descended on the studio in the wake of this statement. “It's a living for us,” an understandably hurt Dec said.

One appreciates that, in the heat of the moment, all sorts of things are said. Nevertheless, it cannot be in the interests of I'm a Celebrity for insiders to start bringing the competition into disrepute, and we fully expect Paddick to be fined and suspended forthwith. Trivial? Tell Navratilova about it. Tell McLean, too.