Gillian McKeith

Who would have thought Gillian McKeith was so squeamish? The 51-year diet expert failed spectacularly in her bushtucker trials in the latest series of reality TV show I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, laying the blame on her phobia about "anything that moves". Famously, that fear does not extend to bowel movements. Even the casual channel hopper, enjoying a nice post-dinner cuppa and a dozen Hobnobs of an early evening, could not be unaware of her former Channel 4 series You Are What You Eat in which McKeith's modus operandi was picking over faecal samples dutifully presented to her in Tupperware lunchboxes by her hopelessly overweight victims. A "stool analysis and poo chart" is still up there on the official Gillian
McKeith website for the benefit of the self-medicating surfer. But the whiff of suspicion has always surrounded the medical and nutritional credentials of this diet "guru".

She "voluntarily" decided to no longer call herself a doctor after the UK's Advertising Standards Authority found her medical qualification was based on a correspondence course from a non-accredited college in the States. In his Bad Science column in the Guardian, medical doctor and writer Ben Goldacre frequently targeted McKeith's self-professed scholarliness. He challenged the professional value of her certification from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants by paying $60 online for membership – for his dead cat, Hettie. The quack-ometer went up another notch over her herbal take on Viagra – Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex (surely worth it for its novelty value alone). It was ordered to be removed from sale three years ago by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. The spoilsports.

The latest cries of 'fake' are over that fainting fit following her first bushtucker trial last week. But McKeith is famously litigious, taking an action against the Sun newspaper in 2004 and even sending Google a legal warning after it suggested a link to a blog post highly critical of her. Her resolve in going after people may be something jumpy programme makers are aware of, as she was reportedly kept under medical supervision in Camp Sheila last week. Despite her own prominence on the small screen, she seemingly has little grasp of the realities of reality TV, and its role in creating national hate-
figures. You could almost feel sorry for her, failing to contest in the "school dinners" trial as poor old Shaun Ryder swallowed five 'meals' consisting of wriggly worms, bull's tongue, crocodile eyeballs and fermented egg – ingredients unlikely ever to appear in Gillian's Detox Diet. She is the candidate of choice for relentless sentencing – otherwise known as 'the public vote' – by the Torquemadas of terrestrial telly.

Whether she is genuinely odd or playing to the cameras is unclear. But perhaps that spell down under could help her diagnose if there is something actually wrong with the viewer who enjoys these celebrity torture fests. Or maybe she'd just pooh-pooh the very notion.