I realised that I truly watch too much reality TV at the point last night where the portrayal of perma-tanned, perma-gormless The Only Way Is Essex beefcake Mark Wright on I’m A Celebrity prompted a bout of philosophical reflection.

At the risk of sparking an intervention where the television plug is wrenched from the wall and the cable box is smashed with a lump hammer by concerned relatives, I’m actually going to write about the metamorphosis of Mark Wright from odious moron to curiously charming lunkhead. 

I know that in order to keep my laminated Middle Class Licence and be allowed to once again order from Ocado, I’m meant to watch The Killing on a Saturday night but I didn’t.

The truth is I slipped lazily from the squawking and squealing of X Factor into I’m A Celebrity without even considering raising the remote in protest. Sarah Lund might have been brooding in an ironically-venerated jumper but Willie Carson was wearing a crown and a glamour model was being dunked in eels. 

What has fascinated me about I’m A Celebrity this year has not been the creepy crawly-based challenges or even Ant and Dec’s seemingly endless bonhomie. My mind is boggled by the odd feeling of starting to warm to Mark Wright.

On the opening night of the series as he stood among the other D, E and Unclassified list celebrities I was ready and willing to cast the TOWIE tosspot as the villain of the piece. He’s proved me wrong. 

The bad guy role has been taken up by Pat Sharp. He’s changed from the grinning, mullet-swishing man in the ‘90s clips reel of my mind (positioned somewhere before Knightmare and just after Sharkey And George) to a creepy figure so capable of putting his foot in his mouth that I suspect he actually has a flip top head.

Mark meanwhile has shown himself to be good-natured, a team player and possessed of a level of self-depreciation that seemed unlikely from a man so fond of endlessly peering at his pecs in the mirror. 

Confronted by the presence of Australian glamour puss Emily Scott, whose posters he once had on his wall (aged 18 no less), Mark is like one of the boys from Weird Science curiously trapped inside the body of a jock.

Watching as he clumsily professes his attraction to her and babbles on is endearing. Inevitably any relationship they have will be transmogrified into a papier-mâché husk made of Heat magazine covers and OK spreads but right now it’s sweeter than the barely constrained televised flirting of a himbo and a bimbette has any right to be. 

The Mark of TOWIE was a very different creature. Beyond a Brokeback Mountain-via-Bromley bromance with his best pal Arg and his obvious love for sausage plait making machine Nanny Pat, Mark came across as a prime plum. His philandering and permanent presence in the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame with his on again/off again/oh really again? fiancé Lauren Goodger pitched him as the Primark playboy of scripted reality. 

Perhaps the ‘scripted’ part of TOWIE was the problem. Freed from his role as Essex’s de facto villain, the Mark of I’m A Celebrity has revealed something slightly more palatable beneath the outer layer of fake tan. Freud said the sexual self is the essential self. In reality TV world, the essential self is the one that eats a kangaroo’s bollock on camera.  

Of course, the change in him could just be the result of some judicious editing on behalf of the I’m A Celebrity… producers, teeing him up for his inevitable solo show on ITV2, or coaching by a team of PR gurus.

But despite that lingering suspicion, I’ve still ended up liking him. Either someone has done their job very well or Mark Wright really is just a slightly dim but surprisingly kind 24-year-old. Damn you for confounding my preconceptions, reality TV.