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I'm A Celebrity 2017: Behind the scenes look at the celebrity jungle experience

Ebony Bowden
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First comes the detox. From your phone, caffeine, alcohol, maybe even your 1000-thread cotton sheets. Then the hunger pains set in.

Life as a cast mate on Ten's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! is no picnic.  Yet each year, 10 celebrities volunteer with the hope of finding clarity, enlightenment, challenge and, frequently, weight loss. Despite persistent rumours that the show is filmed NSW's Blue Mountains, the remote location at the base of a South African canyon is about as real as it gets.

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"It's two things," co-host Chris Brown says of what cracks contestants the most. "It's initially the detox and trying to adjust to this life, and six weeks seems like a lifetime on day two.

"That's the hardest thing, when they're so far from the end and they're trying to comprehend how they can make it through the six weeks. Then it's the food. Everyone gets hangry. They're on the basic calorie requirements that we calculate based on their weight, how much they need, and we give them that and not a grain of rice or single bean more."

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Combine starvation with gruelling mental and physical challenges and you've got a recipe for great television, says Alex Mavroidakis, the executive producer behind I'm a Celebrity's trials and challenges.

"The main currency in the jungle is food and comfort. In order to get food, they have to do the trials, obviously," he says. "When you come into this environment, and I've done it myself -- I stayed a night in camp myself and I stayed a night in the Big Brother house -- it's stupid little things that don't matter. "First World problems suddenly become really important. Who ate my apple?, I'm starving, I would kill someone for an ice-cream, who stole my pillow? There's no hot water left in the shower – all that stuff becomes incredibly important and there's the catalyst for content for us. "

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Then there's the tucker trial each week where contestants are forced to drink blended cockroaches and crunch on maggots and animal brains. If they don't, they go without dinner.

"The more stars they get, each star represents a meal for camp, so it takes on great importance," adds Mavroidakis. "When someone comes back to camp and says 'I only got two stars', we're all sitting on the couches at home going 'Look at her, she's getting all upset', but it actually matters. It means they've got no dinner."

But Stephen Tate, head of entertainment and factual programs at Ten and one of the show's executive producers, insists they don't push the celebrities too hard.

"The biggest challenge for them is the social deprivation. Getting used to no social media, no technology, detoxing off whatever they're detoxing off," he says. "So we don't feel that we need to prod and poke them. We don't."

 Throughout the camp, signs suggest otherwise.  Contestants disclose their fears on their application forms, so it's no coincidence that arachnophobe Shane Warne was forced to hold a tarantula in one challenge last year. Publicists are also instructed by Tate to take notes during celebrities' pre-camp interviews with journalists and feed them back to him as intel.

The producer stationed in the camp's Tok Tokkie confession room is also a former News of the World journalist who is supplied with a biography of each celebrity and probes them on their inner psychology.

But the contestants are willing guinea pigs in this process of manipulation, and may even benefit from it. It's just a question of how far to take the challenges. Last year, when Bachelor Australia star Laurina Fleure was voted by the public to lie in a coffin with 200 snakes, even Mavroidakis had his doubts.

"I think we had a meeting where we were like, do we halve the number of snakes?" he recalls. "Do we leave the light on for a bit longer? And we thought no, we've got to give her the opportunity to shine and I've never seen anything like that trial. She lay in a coffin for 10 minutes with 200-odd snakes on her in the dark, mating on her and she was a hero. She absolutely came out of it a bloody hero and nearly won the entire show, outlasted Shane Warne, the most famous Australian in the show. Incredible."

He denies trials are moved around to suit certain celebrity's phobias, likening production to that of a building site.

"We'll push them pretty hard and it's the luck of the draw who gets voted for what trial. We have trials scheduled. We won't move trials around to try and hit celebrities.

"The schedule is locked because obviously we have riggers who've got deadlines to hit, we've got some equipment that is hired. It's like working on a building site. You've got a crane for three days and that's when you do the crane trial.

"So we can't really move the trials around to suit the celebrities, so it really is luck of the draw. If you end up get voted for on a Wednesday and that ends up being [crane challenge] World's End, tough titties, really."

The sheer scale of the show is awe-inducing. The crew numbers sits at around 400, more than half of that is South African. Ten and production company ITV take over the remote forest where the show is set with shipping containers, an outdoor kitchen and this year, a permanent control room helmed by no less than three executive producers.

"The biggest challenge with this show is the tyranny of distance," says Tate. "I've done Big Brother which is a very similar production model, but this is just completely other level. We have to have two satellites.

"We're dealing with different cultures amongst the crew. More than half the crew here speak English as a second language, either they speak Afrikaans or other African dialects. You have to be incredibly clear in everything you want to achieve. But the brilliant thing is we've managed to find the most incredible, experienced, production crew here to help us. What they have achieved for us is just incredible."

Sure, the deprivation of celebrities normal luxuries makes for good viewing, but do the cast mates really get anything out of it? According to Tate, the show has an incredible power to change lives.

"The discovery of who these celebrities really are is actually the greatest reward for all of us," he says. "They do really do become a great big dysfunctional family in the jungle very quickly."

Co-host Julia Morris agrees: "The longer they're left, the more they chat with each other. We really start to find out about their mettle. What are they made of, what do they think about themselves?"

According to one trials producer, the moment Chrissie Swan challenged her fear of heights in season one, her attitude totally changed.

"She came back from that and I think there was a real change in her," he said. "I think it was something she obviously thought she'd never do. To have her conquer that fear and have everyone encouraging her as well and everyone telling her how amazing she did was pretty incredible for her. I think it gave her a real push moving forward."

*The journalist travelled to South Africa as a guest of the Ten Network.

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