Kelly Brook heading into the I’m A Celebrity jungle this year isn’t the first time she’s crossed paths with Ant and Dec, but the last time didn’t exactly end in a warm reunion. In fact, they reportedly don’t like each other at all.
View this post on Instagram
Long before she was gearing up to eat kangaroo bollocks on telly, radio host and former model Kelly was signed up as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, back in 2009. Well… for about five minutes, anyway. She joined Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan on the panel, but only lasted a couple of days before being suddenly removed.
Officially, Simon said the show just “didn’t work” with four judges, as they were used to only having three at the time. According to Kelly, that wasn’t the whole story.
She later claimed ITV bosses told her she’d unknowingly upset Ant and Dec, the presenters of both BGT and I’m A Celeb, and that their influence sealed her fate.
Speaking to The Sun at the time, Kelly said: “The people at ITV were telling me that I had upset Ant and Dec and that was it.
Credit: ITV
“I would love to have stayed on the show… Ant and Dec had never been anything but pleasant to my face, but clearly they didn’t want me on the show.”
Kelly even claimed the pair thought “How dare she think she can come on to our show?”, insisting they’d been “very vocal” behind the scenes about not wanting her involved.
Dec later addressed the whole thing in his memoir Ooh! What a Lovely Pair, and his version of events… did not help. He said Kelly showed up for her first day looking nervous, but then asked him: “And what do you do on the show?”
According to Dec, even Simon Cowell was stunned, asking Kelly if she had actually ever watched BGT. Her answer? “Yeah… well, bits.”
Dec wrote that the last person to ask him that question was literally the Queen, which he admits made the moment a bit awkward. He and Ant later insisted the decision to get rid of Kelly wasn’t personal, and that producers simply felt having four judges “didn’t work”. Kelly has clearly never been convinced.
As people watched the first episode of I’m A Celebrity last night, some slowly began to remember the three had history as one wrote on X: “Do people realise Kelly Brook & Ant and Dec have serious beef with each other?”
In the episode, as Kelly jumped from the helicopter, she shouted: “Ant and Dec I’m coming for you!”
For more like this, like The Tab on Facebook.
Featured image credit: ITV, X/@antanddec
