Jamie Redknapp gave his dad Harry Redknapp some advice before he first entered the I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! jungle as he told him “it doesn’t work like that”
Former football manager Harry Redknapp was crowned ‘King of the Jungle’ at the end of the 2018 series of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! But according to his son, former England star Jamie Redknapp, Harry went into the show with entirely the wrong attitude.
Jamie describes on the AFC Bournemouth podcast how he had seen an early report of his dad’s involvement in the hit show in the Mirror, and had to tell him some harsh truth about the way I’m A Celeb works: “It was in the paper and I went, ‘Dad, have you seen this story in the The Mirror that says you’re going into the jungle?’
“He went ‘Yeah, I am.’ I said, ‘Do you know what you got to do?’ and he went, “Yeah, it’ll be all right. There’ll be loads of food there. It’ll all be around the back. You can get a bacon sandwich.’
“I went, ‘No, it doesn’t work like that, Dad’ … but the thing is, I think because of that naivety made it so much easier for him.”
Harry, who had retired from football management the previous year, went on to win the series and returned as one of the ‘All Star’ contestants who returned this year for I’m a Celebrity… South Africa.
Jamie explained that his dad has never been particularly interested in food, and would often skip meals at home. He thinks Harry wouldn’t have suffered too much when it came to going hungry in the Jungle: “He’s weird,” he joked.
The former footballer revealed that he had also been invited onto the show: “I got offered it the next year,” he said. “It was a year after dad did it. My agent called me up, and he said ‘Would you like …’ and I said ‘How can I match that?’ My dad just killed it, didn’t he?’”
He added that his football career should probably have ended before it did. Jamie’s career in the Premier League, where he starred for Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Southampton, was blighted by a succession of injuries. He admits this made life “really difficult.”
In one particularly memorable case, he says he probably did himself lasting harm by returning to the pitch much too soon.
Jamie said: “We’re losing one-nil to Bristol City in the FA Cup. It’s horrendous.…Graeme Souness is the manager and I sit down to listen to Graeme and as I go to get up my knee just locks – I can’t move. I cannot straighten my leg. It was the weirdest sensation.”
With Liverpool facing an embarrassing defeat, Jamie had no desire to be substituted. Despite this a doctor was called over, and it was confirmed that he had suffered a meniscus tear injury.
He had to undergo a surgical procedure to repair the tear, an operation that would nowadays probed necessitate a six-month period of recuperation, but these were different times, Jamie says: “He operates on me. 12 days later I’m playing at Southampton.”
Jamie adds: “That’s why at 49 years of age I had to have a knee replacement.”
He looks back with some disappointment at his “injury-prone” reputation: “That was really difficult to sort of …you get a reputation of being injury-prone and everything that goes with it. But if you actually know the details and how hard I worked to come back and how unlucky I was with injuries,… I was probably too honest for my own good at times.
“I think that came from my dad and just thinking that I’m not going to come off in this game but my you know you’re in trouble with your knee instead of just going look I’ve got to come off and not play.”
However, Jamie remains philosophical: “But as I look back, and even as a person I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I’ve had so many things that have gone my way, you know, and every decision I’ve made has been pretty pretty fortunate.”
Catch Harry on Celebrity Sabotage tonight (Saturday, April 18) from 8pm to 9pm on Channel 4.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
