In Germany, it is Ich bin ein Star — Holt mich hier raus! In France, Je suis une célébrite, sortez moi de là! and in the Netherlands — because they always have to be a little bit different from the rest of Europe, it is the slightly more gnomic Bobo’s in de Bush.

Yes, it is I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, the juggernaut reality-TV show format now licensed across the world, and returning, last night, for its eighth series in the UK.

Make no mistake — it is one of the genius programmes of the past decade. It is cheeringly capable of being all things to all people. For celebrities past their peak, it allows them to “re-audition” for fame during the show’s three-week run. Myleene Klass, for instance, owes her current career to a bikini-wearing appearance in 2006.

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For broadcasters with plummeting advertising revenue, meanwhile, I’m A Celebrity is a chance to get an increasingly vital cash top-up from those lucrative public phone-votes.

And most importantly, for Johnny Viewing Public, I’m A Celebrity provides the innocent, yet primal, joy of watching Uri Geller chow down on a gigantic kangaroo testicle.

So let us literally parachute in the screaming cast for I’m A Celebrity. There are WAGs here and Dani Behr there, and a very amiable man from EastEnders — but what I’m A Celebrity 2008 really comes down to is that the celeb-bookers have got Martina Navratilova, Robert Kilroy-Silk and Mr Sulu from Star Trek all in the jungle together.

More specifically, Navratilova and Mr Sulu have been booked to watch Kilroy-Silk set fire to his career. Rarely are the last moments of someone’s public life so clearly telegraphed. Having joined two marginal political parties in little more than a year, the MEP now exudes an aura of “manky lone-wolf”. In his banana-yellow wife-beater vest, hunched around the campfire, moaning, he conjured up Albert Steptoe at a rave. He seems to have forgotten how to interact.

“There’s obviously going to be problems with the women,” he said — staring at the WAGs like a sadistic farmhand would stare at a hen. He wouldn’t move his sleeping bag, declined to take part in any challenges, bitched behind everyone’s backs (“I just thought — why should I?”) and, perhaps most crucially of all, in terms of public image, repeatedly fell off a pair of custard-coloured floating boat-shoes. Does he not know how the public respond to an arrogant bitch with no sense of balance?

His cheeks will be bulging with crocodile winkle for the next three weeks.

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