WHEN I heard that Nigel Farage was to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, my immediate feeling was disappointment. Truth be told, the man has been sliding this way for a while; from commodities broker to activist, politician to presenter, it wasn’t going to be long until he fell into the realm of mainstream celebrity, butt of more jokes from the Left-wing media.
Considering the way in which society is slipping, I’d hoped he might re-enter politics and galvanise the Right, giving proper conservatives something to look forward to next year, but that wasn’t to happen. As I said under the line recently, I don’t begrudge Farage his success. After all, if it wasn’t for him and UKIP, we wouldn’t have had the Brexit referendum, even it if was an illusion of democracy. We’re still linked to the EU and probably will be until a real conservative party is elected and does the job properly. Which will be when I have been dead and buried for at least a century.
That said, my secondary reaction to Farage’s participation on the show was, well, we’d probably have watched it. We used to watch I’m a Celebrity back when we had the licence and in the run-up to Christmas would probably have turned it on again. It’s flat-out schadenfreude; who doesn’t enjoy watching gobby B-listers being humiliated? We know that the majority of viewers would vote Farage in for practically every Bushtucker Trial but we’d also have enjoyed viewing him in conversations with the others, no doubt having to answer for what the Leftist media considers crimes; giving the public a vote on EU membership, pointing out the failures of the uniparty, highlighting the plight at the borders. And Farage being a fighter, he wouldn’t stay silent in the face of conflict. It would have been fun.
But, alas, we can’t watch it because we don’t have a TV licence so ITV is missing out on two viewers from this house who would be treated to its content and the corresponding adverts that come with it. In fact, it will be losing out on many more viewers who refuse to pay the TV tax. Channel 5, Sky, Amazon – if you’re watching live, you need to be covered by the TV licence which, to me, raises the question; why have these broadcasters never joined the Defund the BBC campaign? Why have advertisers not signed up? For every person or household ditching the TV tax, that means a smaller audience for the advertising which accompanies programmes on non-BBC channels. Shouldn’t that be a source of disappointment for these channels?
According to a Daily Mail article last year, 270,000 people stopped paying the licence fee. That is an awful lot of missed revenue for channels which come with paid advertising. If they were on board the Defund the BBC campaign, they could potentially welcome back hundreds of thousands of viewers who would once again be privy to the ads they sell. As long as they sit on the sidelines and say nothing, viewers will continue to switch off and they will continue to lose out.
It’s high time these channels did something more than promote woke nonsense.