As soon as he got to the I’m A Celebrity camp and saw who his campmates would be, Grant Denyer regretted saying yes to participating in the show. The TV WEEK Gold Logie winner says he’s “not really into” reality stars.
“When I arrived, I was like, ‘I’ve made the wrong decision,'” Grant, 43, tells TV WEEK.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, ‘Oh, my God – I can’t be here around the clock with these fame-seekers bouncing off the walls busting to be on camera. This is going to kill me.'”
It didn’t take long for the TV star to warm to his campmates.
(Channel Ten)But as the days went by, Grant says everyone involved realised they needed each other, and would rally around whoever was feeling weak.
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“If we didn’t do that, the show would have smashed us and we would have walked out in droves,” he says.
“It was that harrowing.”
With the challenges dialled up this year, Grant admits going on I’m A Celebrity was “a thousand times harder” than he imagined it would be.
“I thought most of it was just made for television,” he admits.
“As it turns out, it’s not. You’re starving, you’re exhausted, you’re being punished every single day with some ridiculous challenge to frighten the life out of you, and you’ve just got nothing left in the tank to fight back.”
Going into the jungle wasn’t easy.
(Channel Ten)But the former host of Family Feud reveals there was a positive: he lost “heaps” of weight while in the jungle.
“I’ve lost seven kilos off my tiny frame,” he says.
“That’s probably the only benefit to going in there.”
Fans recently watched the TV host open up about a horrific car accident that almost left him for dead two years ago.
The Dancing with the Stars host rarely speaks about the ordeal, understandably so given how traumatic it would have been.
But on the second episode of I’m A Celebrity, he opened up about the incident with an emotional confession.
As his fellow campers listened in, Grant explained: “I had a really bad rally crash about two years ago. There was a failure and the car left the road and I hit a tree head on.”
He continued: “The noise my co-driver made still haunts me. He just made this half squeal half gulp, like someone acknowledging that…” Grant broke off.
“Death was imminent,” another camper added, to which Grant acknowledged.
