Richard Madeley explains why he had to leave I’m a Celebrity

Richard Madeley has revealed why he had to leave I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! for a hospital visit.

The TV presenter, 65, announced on Thursday (25 November) he was leaving the show after he was taken to hospital as a precaution when he fell ill in the early hours of the morning.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain after his exit, Madeley said: “I think what happened to me was I got dehydrated. I think that’s all it was. But dehydration, if anyone’s ever suffered from it, is actually quite disturbing.

“Basically, I think I’d been up for about 20 hours the day before, and the day before that we were having very long days and sleeping quite late, and we don’t have watches in there but I don’t think I got to bed until about 4, 4.30 in the morning.

“I knew I was feeling thirsty and I’m quite bad at remembering to drink actually, drink water, and as I actually snuggled into my sleeping bag, it was freezing, I thought, ‘Ah, I haven’t had a big drink in a while, I’ll do it when I wake up.’

He continued: “And the next thing I knew I was sitting there babbling, I was talking nonsense… I basically woke up I didn’t know where I was, what was going and I could hardly string a sentence together, you know as it turned out, it was harmless, there was nothing wrong, I went to the hospital, had all the tests you can imagine… got a 100 per cent clean bill of health and they were happy for me to go back in…”

Although Madeley was disappointed to not be let back into the camp because he had broken the Covid bubble, he commended ITV for having a “proper duty of care”.

The remaining celebrities were removed from the castle over the weekend while work was carried out to get the production base running again after suffering technical issues due to extreme weather caused by Storm Arwen.

Shows at the weekend were cancelled because the production base at Gwrych Castle in North Wales suffered significant damage during the storm on Friday night (26 November). It is not yet known if Monday night’s show (29 November) will go ahead yet.

Additional reporting by Press Association