This is why Jill Scott really won I’m a Celebrity

The English have an endless gift for revelling in their own bitterness and slop, but on this one solitary occasion, we chose not to be weird masochists for a change

Well Britain, we did it. We managed to not completely embarrass ourselves. We did manage to mostly embarrass ourselves, sure; but after the way the past six years have gone, I’ll take what I can get.

Professional footballer and all-around decent person Jill Scott won the 2022 edition of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, putting our fears of a Matt Hancock win to rest once and for all. Scott was one of the final two campers alongside Hollyoaks actor Owen Warner, and managed to clinch the win by public vote after a hard-fought contest.

Sure, Hancock still came third which is… well it’s not great, is it? That means that a mathematically significant percentage of the British public were completely on the side of the guy who “unlawfully” sent people with Covid into care homes, resulting in the deaths of thousands of British pensioners.

It means that a good number of us looked at the guy who gave crucial PPE contracts to his unqualified friends at the height of a public health crisis that would go on to kill 200,000 people in Britain and said “he seems nicer than Chris Moyles”. But at least he didn’t win the whole thing. It’s a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless.

It was also pretty unexpected. Sure, Scott was the favourite to win, but this country and polling don’t exactly have the most reliable track record. If you didn’t watch I’m A Celebrity this year and got most of your information about it from Twitter comments and sarcastic op-eds like this one, you were probably under the impression that this year’s season was the Matt Hancock show.

That wasn’t an unfair assessment, either; ITV pushed Hancock’s involvement in the show pretty heavily, featuring him in endless promos and YouTube thumbnails. In an otherwise unremarkable season, Hancock was very clearly the draw.

So why didn’t he win? Maybe all those Twitter jokes were true, and people only kept him in for so long because they wanted to see him punished as much as possible. To be fair, the man did six consecutive Bushtucker trials – five of them by public vote – which saw him suffer virtually every humiliation that Ant and Dec had at their disposal, from eating cow anus to crawling through a pit a snakes (of which Hancock admitted to having a phobia). Maybe in the absence of any real justice for the actions of our government, the public took what little catharsis they could by dropping toads on Hancock’s head in history’s least-subtle visual metaphor.

Or maybe – and this might just be me being naïve, but let me take what I can get – maybe we just like it when nice things happen to nice people. Jill Scott is cool, funny and personable. She helped score a victory for England in this year’s Euros, making her a bit of a national hero. She’s humble, saying she had no idea why people voted for her as queen of the jungle. She’s even got jokes, as the show’s closing montage demonstrated (with by far the best being directed at Hancock: “Are these Bushtucker trials preparation for your real trial?”)

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Maybe she just won because people were more interested in seeing something good happen than they were in continuing to reward rich, powerful sociopaths. I know, it’s a novel idea for the UK, but maybe we’re finally reaching a turning point where optimism wins out in the face of misery.

Scott’s win also helped to counteract the show’s worrying trend of eliminating virtually every other non-white or LGBT+ contestant early, leaving the field open to a cohort of predominantly straight, white men. In a season that was overpoweringly conservative by default, it was nice to see a gay woman (and a working-class Northerner to boot) take home the win.

The English have an endless gift for revelling in their own bitterness and slop, but on this one solitary occasion, we chose not to be weird masochists for a change. It’s honestly a nice change of pace, after a season of television centred on reliving the British public’s very real trauma. It’s a small step, but it’s a step in the right direction – and it’s one that gives us one of those increasingly rare opportunities to say “the right woman won”.