Singer Ricki-Lee Coulter and comedian Jim Jefferies have been announced as the hosts of Seven’s take on the reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!
When Seven snaffled the show from Ten earlier this year, it was widely assumed it would reinstate the show’s former co-host Dr Chris Brown, who left the show in 2023 and joined Seven, and was replaced by Robert Irwin.
The network has high hopes for its journey to the jungle, even if the show (developed in Britain and first aired there in 2002) has been on-air in this country since 2015.
“Everyone always wants to talk about new, and I get it,” said Seven’s chief content officer, Brook Hall. “You can have a really reliable car that you love, but there’s something exciting about getting a new one, whether it’s better or not. Same with TV shows. [But] any new show in television inherently carries greater risk than a proven form.
“Why I love I’m A Celeb is it’s new for us, we can do something different, but it’s a proven performer. We’re going to have a different twist on it.”
The format is “built to be talked about” said Hall. With Jefferies – who has proven a winner for the network as host of the game show The 1% Club – it has a fast-talking funnyman likely to generate plenty of headlines. And in Coulter, who has been a fixture on Australian television screens since first emerging as a contestant on the second season of Australian Idol in 2004, he’ll have a foil adept at smoothing over any rough edges.
“They are two of our biggest stars, and very different types of stars, and putting them together I think already looks really different, but it’s still got the comedy and the warmth at the front there,” said Hall, who promises Seven’s version of the show – which will begin production early next year – will be “dialling up the real jungle as much as possible”.
Also new to hosting an established format is Nashville-based Australian country music star Morgan Evans, who will join the Australian Idol judging panel alongside Marcia Hines and Amy Shark.
“He’s a Newcastle kid, he’s come through the system himself, and he’s genuinely interested in the process of finding Australian talent,” said Hall. “He was really passionate about it.”
Hall will also need to fill the Idol chair formerly occupied by Kyle Sandilands, whose career trajectory is looking very different thanks to the massive falling out with ARN, owner of KIIS FM, which was his principal employer until March.
Seven and rival broadcaster SCA (Southern Cross Austereo) merged in January, so the option to stick it to the old rival might have been tempting. The economics of doing so, however, given the boycotts of advertisers associated with Sandilands-aligned content, might have been less so.
“On radio, he was polarising, but on Australian Idol he was a different character, and I thought he was really good for the show,” said Hall. “But both parties decided, well, is this the time to freshen it up? We do that with a lot of shows, changing judges and panels.”
The merger of Seven and SCA has been a boon for both parties, said Matthew O’Reilly, head of broadcast content at the audio arm. “The cross-promotion of us running promos and commercials for the TV shows, and them doing the same to us, means their ratings are flying and our ratings are up considerably year-on-year, so I would say there’s been a good benefit for both parties,” O’Reilly said.
One place that will play out is in the coverage of the Melbourne Cup next week. While Seven has the broadcast rights to most of the Spring Racing Carnival, the biggest horse-racing event of the year is on Nine (owner of this masthead). But Seven’s veteran sportscaster Bruce McAvaney will call the race as usual – only this time on Triple M for what O’Reilly called “a first-time experiment”.
Hall sees plenty of cross-promotional opportunities, too, and thinks Australian Idol is the place where they will most clearly play out (Seven has not announced a return for The Voice, though that is still under active discussion).
“It’s a music show so you’ll probably see things like Hit week, Triple M week,” he said. “We weren’t part of a merged company last year, so there are a few different things we can play with and I’m really excited about that.”
On the drama front, Seven’s only offering is Home and Away, which remains the country’s most-watched drama with an average 1.1 million viewers per episode – about two-thirds of them watching at the time it’s broadcast.
That’s an extraordinary result in this era of on-demand drama watching, and one that Hall said has caught the attention of industry colleagues overseas. “Probably because of the way it’s written, with heightened storylines all the time, people are consuming it like it’s an event,” he said.
The network is doing its best to turn the weekday staple of the game show into something like an event, too, with two new short-run series: the Matt Shirvington-fronted Stacks of Cash, which attempts to merge the frenetic excitement of Tetris with the frenzied pursuit of a pile of money, and Caught in the Middle, a knowledge-based contest hosted by Shane Jacobson. Each will run for six episodes, with Jim Jefferies’ The 1% Club returning for eight.
Though he won’t be going back into the South African jungle, and there’s no return for his makeover show My Reno Rules, Chris Brown will be back on air with Once In a Lifetime, a show in which he takes celebrities on journeys into nature around the world.
“That’s his format, we know he’s passionate about nature, and he’s going to different countries,” said Hall of the show which was originally announced at Seven’s 2025 upfront but is now scheduled to air around Easter next year. “You get a bit of travel, you get a bit of nature, he’s telling his story, but he’s taking someone with him as well. So you get to see different parts there.”
Returning shows to Seven in 2027 include MKR, with Manu Feildel and Colin Fassnidge hosting, The Chase, Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention and Oops I Bought a Pub.
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