I'm A Celebrity 2026: Start Date, Ant and Dec & Line-Up

The jungle is coming back. ITV has confirmed that I'm A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! will return this autumn on ITV1 and ITVX, with Ant and Dec back on presenting duty, and the announcement lands with the reassuring inevitability of the seasons turning. For a certain kind of British viewer, the show's return is the true start of autumn — the cue to settle in for six weeks of critters, camp politics and grown adults sobbing over a plate of rice and beans. Here is what to expect when the gates swing open again.

The numbers that explain its staying power. It is easy to be blasé about a show this established, so it is worth pausing on the scale of it. Last year's series launched with 11.3 million viewers and averaged 8.7 million across its run. Across all platforms, the 2025 series reached 23.4 million people — roughly 38 per cent of the entire TV-watching population. In a fragmented, streaming-splintered age, those are extraordinary figures, and they explain why ITV guards this format so jealously. Very little on British television still gathers a nation around the same campfire. This does.

The Ant and Dec factor. The Geordie duo remain the show's not-so-secret weapon. Their nightly live links — part sports commentary, part pantomime, part barely-suppressed corpsing — set the tone, and their evident glee at the contestants' suffering gives the whole enterprise its warmth. A Bushtucker Trial is only half as fun without the sight of Ant and Dec doubled over at someone's expense. Expect more of the same: affectionate mockery, running gags, and the occasional genuinely tender moment when a celebrity finally cracks.

The camp dynamics. The casting is always a careful chemistry experiment, mixing reality veterans, sportspeople, soap stars, musicians and at least one figure whose presence makes viewers ask "why are they doing this?" The pleasure is watching status dissolve. Strip away stylists, phones and privacy, hand everyone a thin sleeping bag and a hunger headache, and hierarchies reorganise fast. Some famous names crumble; some unknowns become national treasures over a fortnight. The camp is a great leveller, and the audience adores watching it do its work.

The trials. The Bushtucker Trials are the show's spine — the eating challenges, the enclosed-space horrors, the height-based ordeals that reduce confident public figures to quivering wrecks. They also carry a democratic sting: it is the public who vote for who faces them, meaning early unpopularity or simple entertainment value can land a celebrity in trial after trial. Watch for the contestant who "volunteers as tribute" early to win the camp's affection, and the one who grumbles their way into becoming everyone's least favourite by day three.

The emotional arc. Beneath the spiders and the slime, I'm A Celebrity runs on something surprisingly sincere: the slow humanising of people we thought we had figured out. Sleep-deprived, underfed and stripped of their armour, contestants tend to reveal themselves. Friendships form with unlikely speed. Someone always has a fireside confession that recasts their public image entirely. It is manipulative, of course — the edit shapes everything — but it is also, at its best, oddly moving.

The South Africa question. Fans should note that the jungle is not the franchise's only outpost. The all-stars spin-off, I'm A Celebrity…South Africa, is also lined up for a second run, and it comes with a notable format tweak: for the first time, the public will decide who is crowned the ultimate legend, rather than that decision resting solely with the show. It is a smart change that hands power back to the audience and raises the stakes for the returning fan favourites. Between the two strands, ITV has effectively turned a single autumn juggernaut into a year-round brand.

What could shake things up. The format is now old enough that producers face a perennial challenge: how to keep a familiar show feeling fresh. Recent series have leaned on twists — secret missions, camp divisions, surprise late arrivals — to keep the celebrities off balance and the audience guessing. Expect the 2026 series to reach for similar tools. The core, though, will not change, because it does not need to. The trials, the rice and beans, the nightly votes and the crowning of a King or Queen of the Jungle are load-bearing rituals, and tampering with them too much would be a mistake ITV is unlikely to make.

The verdict, in advance. There is no great mystery to why I'm A Celebrity endures. It is comfort television with teeth — cosy enough to have on every night, cruel enough to keep you watching. Its return this autumn is less a launch than a homecoming, and the audience will show up as it always does. The only real questions are the ones the show asks every year: who will win the nation over, who will unravel on camera, and who, come the final, will emerge blinking into the Australian sunlight with a crown, a career bump and a lifelong aversion to witchetty grubs.