I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here ITV1

Last Wednesday, while watching I'm a Celebrity, my television blew up. I know - I didn't think that sort of thing happened in real life either, especially not when you've got a TV as posh as mine. But without so much as a small warning sigh, the beloved box made a loud phssssht!, flashed blue somewhere deep inside itself and imploded just as cheesily as if it were starring in an episode of Terry and June, leaving behind a heady, lingering, horribly expensive-smelling bass note of burnt electrics.

Personally, I blame Jordan. This was, I feel sure, a cry for help from my telly, along the lines of 'I'm a Sophisticated Piece of Digital Hardware - Get Her Out of Me!'

And who can blame it? In less than a fortnight and without even being aware of it, the notorious topless model, tabloid fave and ladmag staple evolved, briefly, into some sort of broadsheet heroine-cum-post-feminist icon and then emerged at the other side, dissed by, well, people like me, not to mention damned by the departing John Lydon as 'lazy, selfish and spoilt'. Practically a tragic has-been at this point, the odds on her winning I'm A Celebrity were down from 4/1 to 5/2 at the time of writing this paragraph. Which means that, with my luck, she'll walk it in tomorrow's final. Max Clifford says she will, so who am I to argue?

Jordan's FF-funbags have become her funbaggage - the stuff(ing) that, literally and figuratively, gets in the way of the viewers relating to their owner as anything approaching an ordinary human being. It can't be right, for example, that I know far more about Jordan's intimate life than those of any of my closest friends. That, for example, she isn't really into noisy sex, unless she's drunk, in which case she talks dirty; that she likes to make potential boyfriends wait for a month before she sleeps with them; that she's never had a one-night stand in her life.

There may be more to life than sex for the girl her friends know as Katie Price (she owns horses, she lives in the country, she wasn't too posh to push when she gave birth), but there isn't for Jordan. I don't know which version it was who deprived nearly-Pop Idol Gareth Gates of his virginity ('I was on top of him more than he was on top of me.' Thank you for that, Heat magazine) while heavily pregnant with the footballer Dwight Yorke's child, or whose I'm a Celebrity flirtation with poor dim Peter Andre provoked her boyfriend, Wayne Lunkhead, to get on a plane to Australia in order to sort out his rival. But both Jordan and Katie are certainly a massive bundle of modern morals and therefore a complete mess of contradictions. But mostly, for ITV, what they are is a bloody great big ratings magnet.

I can only hope that by the time you read this some celebrity blood will have been shed in primetime between Peter and Lunkhead (I apologise, because of course this is not his name, but I'm taking the Gilligan defence in that Lunk is probably correct enough to be going on with) and that Jordan, newly crowned Queen of the Jungle, will be whisked away for a romantic candlelit Valentine's dinner before being given a good, possibly even noisy, seeing-to by her victorious suitor, after which both parties will sell some unnecessarily specific details to the Star. This would, after all, be the kind of classic-with-apostmodern-twist happyeverafter ending entirely befitting people whose lives appear to mimic real lives but are in fact artificial 'reality' lives.

'Men prefer natural,' Jordan told her fellow jungle dweller, Kerry McWestlife. If this wasn't quite an entire philosophy encapsulated in a pithy soundbite, then it might just have been a sweet stab at sisterliness. Let's face it, the contrasts between the two women and their spectacular breasts are, well, enormous - the old madonna/whore conundrum made flesh. Kerry may be a big cry-baby, but she's also a mother of two with a cosy, cushiony embonpoint and a maternal sort of waistline, while Jordan, though technically also a mother, is obviously far too skinny and a bit too fond of her chipped red nail varnish and blingbling accessories to fit the stereotype. Sometimes she even has to compete with her own breasts for attention rather than, as Kerry does, relating to them as though they're actually attached to the rest of her.

Occasionally, miraculously, Jordan's own personality and level of celebrity threatens to outweigh even that of her breasts. But just when we've seen one too many close-ups of her wrapped up in her fleece, looking 'like a scrubber', a few shots of the girl bending over in a thong, or brushing happy cockroaches out of her cleavage, or in the middle of some brusque mammary maintenance (can all that pushing and pulling and bouncing the damn things around really be good for them?) is sufficient to remind viewers why she's there. Fact: I'm a Celebrity is very brilliantly edited, possibly by Derren Brown working under several pseudonyms.

The best evidence of skilled editorial manipulation came at the top of Thursday night's show, when we were shown a little clip of Jordan saying 'I'm gonna win the whole show anyway, y'know.' Gracious! The arrogance of the girl! Let's get straight on the phone and vote for that sweet Kerry McWestlife immediately!

I was quite pleased with myself for spotting this as the editorial sleight-of-hand it turned out to be, but it took the best part of 90 minutes for the words to be contextualised, by which time it turned out that Jordan was quoting John Lydon. Clever, no? I'm not saying there's been a grand evil masterplan from day one, but more than any other piece of telly the live reality TV show needs to be edited on the hoof by a big team working towards a common goal, so we needn't be too surprised if viewers are taken gently by the hand and led towards a prescribed outcome.

John Lydon should have won it, of course, but in retrospect it's enough that he was there at all. I'm still reeling from the sheer boggling brilliance of seeing the punk Gollum wearing a single candle on his head and snarling the immortal line 'Got you something Rotten for your birthday' for Kerry's one-year-old daughter, Lily.

Just prior to his departure, Lydon told the camp that he didn't want to turn into Des O'Connor. Fair enough, but how about a sideline as the world's coolest children's party entertainer, hired by those parents who remember just how thrilling it was to see him snarl 'I yam an Antichrist-ah' back when Jordan wasn't even a twinkle in Mr and Mrs Price's eyes? Or how about a guest stint as the childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. 'Why didn't you show me killing the rats? I killed three rats in there,' Lydon hissed at his interrogators during his contractually obliged debrief on Thursday night, after a day spent selling stories to the tabloids (according to breathless reports on ITV1's This Morning on Thursday, which also featured an interview with John Lydon Snr, who declared 'I think he would've won it if he'd stayed').

Ant 'n' Dec winced slightly and changed the subject. They are very fine presenters and not easily fazed, but Lydon's gloriously predictable unpredictability appears, rather sweetly, to slightly scare them. Fabulous! I thought, Rotten murdering giant jungle rats will not only have the RSPCA straight on the blower again, but will incur the terrible wrath of rainforest-lover Germaine Greer. Anyway, as his parting shot, John revealed, in his own special way, that he thinks everybody in the camp is stupid ('Mama Lydon never raised such crazy fools') but that he wanted Kerry to win: 'For a kid she's a tough little cookie.' So I think we should do the decent thing, for John and for Kerry, who deserves it just for the following description of a spider in the camp dunny: 'It's on steroids, it's got tattoos, it's got chains round its neck. It's just got back from the gym.'

As I write, on Friday morning, Jordan's winning odds have slipped to 7/1 and my emergency backup television is tuned to the I'm a Celebrity live feed on ITV2. I note that the RSPCA have bought space in the advertising break, that Peter Andre has just told the camp he is planning to leave tomorrow ('I want to go. For myself.' He is almost completely ignored), and that Alex Best believes it is illegal not to have stifado on every restaurant menu in Greece. Worryingly, this television has also started making a strange humming noise. Or is that just Peter Andre?