Richard Madeley says he woke up ‘babbling’ before I’m a Celebrity exit

Richard Madeley has said dehydration may have been the cause of him having to leave I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! for a hospital visit.

The TV presenter, 65, announced on Thursday he was departing the ITV reality show after being taken to hospital when he fell ill in the early hours of the morning.

He was originally seen by an on-site medical team before being admitted to hospital as a precaution, after an episode in which he slid headfirst into a sewer of rotten fruit and vegetables.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain on Monday, 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 had 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 and I knew I was feeling thirsty and I’m quite bad at remembering to drink actually. 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.”

Madeley said the next thing he knew he was “sitting there babbling”. “I was talking nonsense,” he said. “I basically woke up, I didn’t know where I was, what was going on and I could hardly string a sentence together.

“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% clean bill of health and they were happy for me to go back in.”

By leaving the camp, Madeley broke the Covid “bubble” and therefore had to leave the castle. In his last challenge, called Castle Kitchen Nightmares, he had hunted for 10 hidden stars in a room “full of castle critters” as rotten food including fish guts and offal was dumped on him from above.

After Madeley’s exit, the production fell victim to Storm Arwen, with the remaining celebrities removed from the castle at the weekend while work was carried out to get the production base in Wales running again after technical issues.

ITV said the storm caused “significant damage” to the base. A statement from I’m A Celebrity said: “Whilst we get the production base back up and running after suffering technical issues due to the storm, we have removed the celebrities from the castle.”

The quarantine conditions for the celebrities would be the same as they had before entering the castle, ITV added.