There were two times he almost walked out.
Following his recent stint in the I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! jungle, comedian Iain Lee sat down with James O’Brien for JOE’s latest Unfiltered video podcast.
During their over an hour-long discussion, the 44-year-old talked about the ups and downs of his career, his challenges with mental health, and what exactly what went through his head before the infamous ‘strawberry-gate’.
Watch it here:
But, as well as discussing the incidents viewers saw at home, Iain also opened up to James about the unseen ‘mind games’ he was subject to by the show’s producers.
Speaking on Unfiltered, he said: “You know nothing about what’s going on, you are kept completely in the dark, there are so many mind games.
“You’re not allowed a watch in there. You only see crew when you go out to do a trial or a challenge, and they’ve got tape over their watches so you’re constantly trying to find the time.
“Here’s the thing, no one comes into the camp… very rarely someone would come into the camp, but they won’t talk to you and look at you. Sometimes you go ‘how’s it going, you alright?’ or more often you ignore them.
“You wanted to do a trial, because it was so boring in there – no books, no pens, no paper: nothing – but fives times I had the same conversation [with a member of the crew]. ‘What team do you support?’ ‘I’m not into football,’ ‘oh, you’re not into football, what’s your sport then?’ and they’d say ‘I don’t have a sport’. Five times I had that conversation with the same person.
“Then, to get you to the trials, they would put you in the back of a blackout van so you couldn’t see anything – and when you got to where [the trial] was they would put a towel over your head.
“If there was a group of you they would put towels over your heads and you would have to look at the floor with your hand of the shoulder of the security guard, who would then walk you there.
“It was all mind games. We had no idea what was going out outside. There was a couple of times I almost walked, because I hated it.”
Unfiltered is a show presented by the inimitable James O’Brien, featuring a revealing and candid interview with a different special guest every week. You can watch and subscribe to it here.
