After winning Season 11 of Big Brother, Josie Gibson has gone on to become a regular presenter on ITV’s This Morning and one of the TV personalities tormented in the 23rd season of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! But she says she really wasn’t “the best version” of herself.
One of her biggest challenges in the jungle was her massive phobia of spiders. Josie said appearing on the show was “an incredible experience” but that she struggled with the creepy-crawlies: “When people go in and say, ‘Oh I’m afraid of spiders’? Well, mine’s an actual proper phobia so that ruined it a bit for me, I was terrified. And out there, the spiders are on steroids, as big as your head!
“I made myself look like a right idiot. They tried to put me in a box with a spider and it came up behind me… They said they’ve never seen anyone move so fast. I nearly gave myself a splinter getting out of that box. I think I started crying it was that bad.”
But, despite attacks from spiders on steroids, the thing that Josie struggled with the most was missing her young son Reggie-James, who was born in September 2018.
“For me,” she told Metro, “Big Brother was a lot easier and that’s because I didn’t have a little boy.
“When you’re in the jungle, I probably wasn’t the best version of myself because I was missing Reg so much. As soon as you land, you get your chaperone, you get to make your last phone call and they take your phone off you and that’s it, no communication with anyone for a whole month.”
That isolation forced Josie and her campmates who included Nigel Farage, Danielle Harold from EastEnders and Fred Sirieix from First Dates to bond into a tight-knit group: “Everyone thinks we don’t get on but we do,” she says. “In the jungle, you’ve only got each other so you’ve got to get on.”
She says they’re all still friends, and they share a WhatsApp group to share updates about their busy lives. Josie adds that she’s grateful to her camp mates because they accepted her crippling arachnophobia: “They knew not to put me up for tasks because of my phobia but I wish I’d cured my phobia before I went.”