Naked Jungle: the worst TV show ever made?

If ‘Naked Jungle‘, the one-off Channel 5 gameshow hosted by a nude Keith Chegwin (take those last three words in) wasn’t the worst TV show ever made, it’s up there. Right up there, in fact. Sure, he wore a pith helmet and sandals, but other than that he was as naked as the day he was born. As were his contestants. Good lord, what were they thinking?

The show was made as part of a series of programmes broadcast in 2000 to mark the 50th anniversary of British naturism, and found Cheggers the custodian of an assault course, the origins of which lay – perhaps inappropriately – with the CITV kids’ show ‘Jungle Run’, originally hosted by a young Dominic Wood, from Dick and Dom fame. The contestants were all themselves nudists, five couples separated into a mens team and a ladies team, competing for a cash prize. What price dignity, you ask? £5000, to be precise.

On the ladies’ team was Melina, who decided it appropriate to ‘come out’ as a naturist to her family and friends on the show, (no doubt something of a shock), Lynne, Cyndi, Helen, and Barbara, while the chaps comprised Steve, Glenn, Graham, Thomas, and Andy. Tasks included paddling floating lily pads, and climbing through waterfalls and caves to collect fig leaves, bugs and other such jungle-based ephemera.

But rather than the nudity on display, which quickly becomes run-of-the-mill, it’s Chegwin’s between game banter which is perhaps the most awkward. It’s the toe-curling, heedless witterings of a man wondering why he agreed to this madness in the first place, now finds himself surrounded by a group of naked people thinking much the same thing.

Despite all that, it managed to score two million viewers and a 20% audience share, a record for Channel 5 since it launched in 1997. It recorded 50 phone calls from the public, but oddly, these were not solely complaints. In fact, the channel said it was pretty much an even split, with one woman calling in to say the show had cured her post-natal depression. The telly watchdog of the time, the Independent Television Commission, received just one complaint, from a viewer who said he could ‘do without Keith Chegwin prancing around’. Seems fair. Because the show was broadcast late at night (11pm on a Tuesday), and there was no sexual content, it was deemed to have breached no programming codes of conduct.

While the audience reaction was reasonably kind, some corners of the press were much less so. The Daily Mail said the show ‘plumbed new depths’. It later topped a list compiled by the Radio Times in 2006 of the most memorably awful TV of all time, beating the likes of ‘Love Thy Neighbour’. ‘Minipops’ and ferry-based soap opera ‘Triangle’. The then culture secretary Chris Smith even had his say in the House of Commons, though it was something of a nebulous criticism: “Government cannot and should not, of course, directly intervene, but I believe that the broadcasters have a commercial and moral duty to take account of the views of the public and I urge them to do so,” he said.

Then Channel 5 controller Dawn Airey accused some corners of the press of double standards, saying that they’d happily support ‘the WI posing naked for a calendar’. Cheggers himself, however, was less sanguine about his decision to take the job. He told Digital Spy in 2007: “It’s the worst career move I made in my entire life – if I could turn the clock back, I would.”

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