The Cutprice Guignol

It was a Tuesday night like any other at the turn of the millennium in the UK. But, late that evening, Channel 5 would drop a bombshell on an unassuming nation – and that bombshell was Naked Jungle.

In the late nineties and early noughties, sex was at the forefront of much of mainstream British television. Whether under the banner of sex education like The 21st Century Girl’s Guide to Sex, documentary like Desperate Virgins, or the bawdy explicitness of comedy like Gimme Gimme Gimme, the era of Mary Whitehouse leading blockbuster campaigns against filth on TV were well and truly behind us. TV sleaze was, at the time, a pretty big market in the UK – Channel 4 was your most likely shot at finding some good ol’ sex content, featuring everything from uncensored broadcast of The Idiots to documentaries covering the clitoris to the iconic Pornography: The Musical. But they weren’t the only ones looking to cash in on an increased interest in and relaxed censorship of sexual topics on mainstream TV – no, at the turn of the millenium, Channel 5 had turned their attention to the possibility of some scandalous TV to tip the scales of public furore in their favour. And thus, Naked Jungle was born.

The premise of the show was simple: a gameshow set in the jungle, featuring ten contestants battling it out for a £5000 prize in front of TV cameras. So simple, in fact, that it didn’t bother with anything as pricey as, uh, clothes. No, the show would, as claimed in promotional material, serve as a celebration of the naturist lifestyle – which is to say, the ten contestants would be made up of five heterosexual couples who embraced naturism in their day-to-day lives, forgoing modern fripperies like clothes in the process wherever possible.

And, of course, who better to present such a scintillating look at the uncensored human body than…uh, Keith Chegwin? Cheggers, an icon of British children’s TV and presenter of classic kid’s television like Superstore, Swap Shop, and Cheggers Plays Pop through the 70s and 80s, had continued his presenting work through the 90s, but had seen a decline as TV moved away from variety shows and into more scripted productions. He’d worked with Channel 5 shortly before the development of Naked Jungle, on the short-lived revival of classic British gameshow It’s a Knockout! that ran between 1999-2000, and, when approached with the offer for the naturist production, he took it. “I thought it would be a laugh,” he remarked in an interview after the fact. “They said it was going to go out at 11pm on a Tuesday night, and I seriously thought that nobody would watch it.” Chegwin gamely agreed to appear nude alongside the contestants, with nothing but a hat (worn on his head, you foul-minded oafs) between him and the elements.

And so, with the stage set, Naked Jungle entered the Channel 5 schedule as a one-off special, due for release just before 11pm on Tuesday, 6th June, 2000. And…

The special is still available online (you can watch it here, though, fair warning, they are not kidding about the Naked part of that title), and I have to admit, there’s something kind of charming about it now. I’ll admit, it’s got the initial gloss of weirdness to it for me, given that it’s shot on the set of Jungle Run, a kid’s television gameshow that I watched near-obsessively as a child; I can’t deny how strange it is to see tits and arse and cock and balls flopping about on the same set I watched over cereal on a Saturday morning during my schooldays. The contestants vie for points in the form of fig leaves, and Keith Chegwin natters into a microphone with a bit of plastic ivy stuck on to it to really sell the jungle theme; It’s neither a good gameshow nor a particularly edifying look at naturism, but it’s got a cheerful good-naturedness to it and a non-judgemental approach to the various bodies on display that I can’t help but find a bit charming. It’s cheap, it’s not claiming to be anything other than what it seems to be on the surface, and Keith Chegwin is a national treasure for a reason, you know? Just not…not that one.

A one-off special, Naked Jungle had some of Channel 5’s best-ever ratings, snatching up 20% of the audience share for its timeslot (an impressive improvement on the channel’s usual goal of 5%). After the Tuesday night broadcast, Channel 5 received about fifty calls about the show, split down the middle between positive and negative, though my favourite is, without a doubt, the woman who claimed that the show “snapped her out of post-natal depression” by giving her something to laugh about for the first time in months. She didn’t specify exactly what it was she found so hilarious, but God, she’s my hero either way.

But, of course, the nature of a show like this one was never to actual produce an interesting piece of television, but rather to stoke as much controversy and media chatter as possible to draw attention to Channel 5’s other offerings. Heathcote Armory for the Daily Mail wrote in a hand-wringing editorial that the show represented “a new milestone in the degradation of mainstream British television“, and culture secretary Chris Smith, speaking to the House of Commons, referenced the show in a diatribe on the “moral duty” of broadcasters in the UK. Charlotte Raven for The Guardian had about the kindest words to offer it – “appalling a spectacle as it may have made, at least it had the decency to define itself as slapstick”.

Dawn Airey, Channel 5’s controller of programmes, made a very cogent point about the gendered divide in reaction to broadcast or published nudity in the mainstream – “Newspapers are happy to put an admiring picture of Joely Richardson in a skimpy dress on their front page….they’ll give acres of space to the women from the WI posing naked for a calendar. But then something like this comes along and they decide it’s an outrage.” I tend to agree with her when it comes to the goofy, silly nature of Naked Jungle being part of what made it so unpalatable – sexualized nudity was relatively well-understood and represented in the media, whereas something like this stood out in the pack as harder to define and categorize away.

The show’s legacy is about as impressive as you’d imagine: in 2006, it was voted the worst British TV show of all time in a Radio Times poll – I’m not sure it’s quite at those levels, but yeah, it was clearly a pretty cynical attempt to cash in on shock and hand-wringing disapproval. But that said, it’s a really fun little reminder of the weird places British television was going in the early 2000s, when even a kid’s TV legend like Keith Chegwin would whack it all out on the set of Jungle Run on a Tuesday evening.

I would love to hear about your memories of this show, if you recall its broadcast, or any other British TV from this era that stands out to you as a particularly egregious example of attention-grabbing nudity, sex, or miscellaneous sleaze. Let me know in the comments below!

If you’d like, you can check out some of my other writing on British reality TV here, here, and here! If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

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