When 22-year-old Helen Flanagan signed up for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in 2012, she had no idea what she was getting herself into.
She knew the show was hugely popular and recognised it had the power to supercharge her career, but it wasn’t until she boarded the plane and started watching clips on YouTube that the full horror of her ordeal began to dawn on her.
“I just got absolutely destroyed,” says Helen. “It was just ridiculous. I was just like, ‘Oh, I’ll be fine. I’ll chill in my bikini, make some friends, it will be good for me…’ I’d watched a few episodes but I didn’t watch it in detail. I was only just YouTubing things when I was on my plane, then I was thinking, ‘It won’t be that bad’.”
It was that bad, and when producers took Helen’s phone off her, she was in tears before she even saw her first rat.
“I was horrified,” gasps Helen. “I’ll never forget it. When I arrived at the camp there were rats everywhere.
"I’d never seen a rat. I was just absolutely thrown. I felt sick. I was so scared. I was just horrified by everything.”
