I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! is back. You may be none the wiser since someone could have easily mistaken Sunday night’s 90-minute episode for a re-run of the 2022 premiere. We could have watched The Lion King in that time, with minutes to spare: a whole 88 minutes in the wilderness, with the added bonus that Nigel Farage isn’t in it.

We met the first famous-ish faces and then it was down to I’m a Celebrity bread and butter: the challenges. Once again, we saw a fleet of choppers cut a path down the Gold Coast skies, each containing a celebrity who tried their best to emulate the emotions of surprise and shock as they approached the skyscrapers along the shoreline.

First Dates maître d’ Fred Sirieix said: “I have no idea what will happen now.”

Maybe he has never seen the show, because we knew exactly what was going to happen now: they were going to land and emerge atop what looked like the exact same Gold Coast high rise as in previous years for another iteration of the Walk the Plank challenge.

Despite that inevitability of proceedings, they all squealed, gulped and marvelled at the plank contraption once they got up close to it. Grace Dent even said: “I have no idea what this torture device is, but it doesn’t look like fun” – despite the fact she admitted she’s seen the show many times before, and even wrote about it as a columnist.

Then, our elected national treasures Ant and Dec appeared and started to over-egg how this year’s Walk the Plank challenge would be a whole new shebang to previous years. Because this year the near-identical set up was called Pole Position instead! And there was some dry additional detail about how some challenges unfolding with another group of celebs, in the Outback, were linked to the time allotted on the plank.

There had been a report ahead of the first episode that the challenge wrapped up filming “moments” before a “colossal” thunderstorm rolled in. Well, that sounds like it might have made things more interesting.

Instead, this was just a copy and paste job from years before. Once again, we saw the celebs scared stupid as they had to teeter along a short walkway clad in enough harness machinery to keep a baby hippo from plunging to certain death.

Once JLS’s Marvin Humes and Britney Spears’ little sister Jamie Lynn had been introduced later in the episode, it was once again time to skydive, featuring more of the same fretting. At least in this instance the repetitive segment was over pretty quickly, thanks to gravity’s swift pull.

Back in the Outback there was something a bit more unusual, mostly on account of the hilarious Nella Rose shouting bloody fury about the snakes they were tasked with sticking their heads near. But enjoying that bit meant staring at Farage’s face for long periods of time, and we wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

Ant and Dec again were quick to belabour the point that this year was different, by reminding us there had been no champagne reception for the cast as per usual. Budget issues? Or maybe they just wanted to pack in as many adverts as possible while still keeping it vaguely watchable.

But that reception is always one of the best bits of the premiere episode: watching everyone awkwardly greet one another and try to hide from their faces that they have no idea who people like Grace Dent or Sam Thompson actually are.

Instead, we got a blockbuster edition of the Walk the Plank spin-off challenge and when they did all finally say hello in base camp, we got the distinct feeling they already knew who else was in the line-up.

This is not to say that because this year’s first episode was dull, and down two million viewers compared to the 2022 premiere, the entire run is going to be a write-off. It’s a question of whether we get what we actually want from the show.

We got a sneak peak of them all around the campfire at the start of the show, as Ant and Dec welcomed viewers back from their jungle treehouse. Behind them during the live feed, we could see a silent film of what was unfolding below in the camp.

We saw Fred sticking a past-its-best tooth floss pick through his gob. We saw Jamie Lynn giving what we expected, fast asleep in a hammock.

So, let’s get to that bit sooner next year, because it’s where all the fun is. One of the highlights of the premiere was once we were in the camp and This Morning‘s Josie Gibson asked Jamie Lynn about her “musical” family, to which she replied with some line about her mum being a whizz on the old piano. Hilarious. More of it.

Josie’s direct line of questioning, not to mention her Brexit-based jab at Farage when they first greeted one another, shows why it is these interactions between the celebs, often during quiet moments in the camp, which are the most memorable on the show.

The year’s recruits get hungry, they get terse and they become up in arms over the most nothingness nonsense, but it’s a lot of fun to watch. There’s only so many years we can keep tuning in to see sort-of celebrities scream-fall from a helicopter or walk a high rise plank and not just switch the thing off to go to bed instead.

I’m a Celebrity… continues on ITV1 and ITVX.