"NOW I want everyone to vote on this one," said my wife in full 'I'm mother, I mean it' mode to the rest of the family as I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here (ITV1) started its second week.

She paused carefully and announced: "Hands up all those who want your father banished from the front room while they're showing this programme."

Now I never said that I'm A Celebrity wasn't addictive or hidden from my wife that, come 10.10pm each night, I have to know which Z-lister has been evicted from the camp.

You don't believe for a moment those pathetic gestures of euphoria as the grubby, half-starved, insect-ravaged individual trudges wearily off to renewed oblivion.

All of them expected to win. Perhaps we just enjoy seeing them suffer, but my wife has had enough of vote-ridden Saturday night TV.

Over-lapping Strictly Come Dancing, X-Factor and I'm A Celebrity polls have certainly attempted to turn us into the phone companies' best friends. Interestingly, only the X-Factor gives figures and totals like 3m seem quite small - once you take all the fees out of the cash generated that's hardly enough to keep Ant & Dec in hair gell for a month.

"There's nothing worth watching and you're driving me mad by using the advertising breaks to go off and look at other programmes," raged Mrs Saturday Night. Look, it was just keeping tabs on The Ultimate Film (C4) just to confirm that far more people went to the cinema in the 1940s than now, which meant that Gone With The Wind topped the poll here.

To be honest, any film list which avoids Citizen Kane is all right with me. However, for my interest in such programmes to result in me actually facing being voted off my own sofa seemed as savage as some of the words being thrown at the poor children in Hard Spell (BBC1).

"This is truly horrible," said my wife as we watched a succession of unsuccessful spellers reduced to tears.

Sadly, no child from the North-East has reached Sunday's final - and the words given to our last hopefuls Jonathon Leech of Knaresborough and Joshua Tognarelli of Sunderland seemed particularly difficult compared to rivals from the south-west of England.

There is still strong North-East interest in Strictly Come Dancing this Saturday, with Geordie actress Jill Halfpenny and expert dancer Darren Bennet, who has unspecified Northern links, looking like favourites to win.

The most popular dancer seems to be Anton Du Beke, who made an early exit opposite Esther Rantzen. du Beke made a memorable impact with his poem calling for voters support. It was called Vote For Us and went: "Vote for us, vote for us, vote for us, vote for us..."

It was the most blatant, no-nonsense and amusing attempt to allow a celebrity to keep competing on a primetime phone-in show so far. Esther and Anton were duly voted off.

Fortunately, I narrowly survived suffering a similar fate by just one vote. So why do I feel that spending a day in the jungle with Janet Street Porter's snakes will seem like a picnic if Ant & Dec return offering us I'm A Celebrity in 2005?

Published: 04/12/2004