Well I made it safely back from Western Australia, and three days later opened in panto in Bournemouth with a bout of merry seasonal lurgi and promptly lost my voice.

Hopefully as you read this the Baker tones will be restored after much steaming, consumption of proprietary and prescription remedies and every other cast member’s pet cold remedy.

I am in no doubt that many millions watched my sojourn in the jungle. The evidence is in the number of people who stop me to ask about it. So if you didn’t watch it, forgive me if I answer some of the many questions I am being asked.

Yes it is all completely legit. We were all on lockdown and incommunicado from the moment we landed in Oz. Our phones, laptops etc were all confiscated and between then and the moment I walked across that metal bridge two and half weeks later, we really did survive on the meagre menu and did sleep in that jungle clearing, which is a lot smaller than it appears on telly.

Given poor Helen from Corrie’s terror of trials and the public’s insistence on making her do more, we really did live on a tiny amount of beans (yuck) and rice (sigh) for five long days, until we finally worked out a way to cook the wretched beans so that they tasted less like cardboard.

The luckiest thing was that given the extraordinarily wide range of people in the jungle, we did actually genuinely get on well together. They were a great bunch and we will all stay in touch.

The two who attracted the most adverse comments ( I learned later) were in fact the two who helped me the most when, as the out-of-condition senior member, I struggled on the jungle yomps and slumped. So I will hear no criticism of either Nadine Dorries or Eric Bristow, both of whom went the extra mile for me.

What was it like? Well, despite being told it would be tough, we all found it tougher than we imagined.

We all found the experience of being completely cut off from our ‘real’ lives unsettling and difficult at times.

And we all leaned an awful lot about ourselves, as well as quite a bit about each other.

For instance I never imagined I would ever get a thumbs-up from a Pussycat Doll after exiting (successfully) from the dunny.