When Ruby Wax was announced as one of the contestants on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! there was probably a generation of viewers glad to see this TV comedy veteran back on the box. And another generation asking "who is Ruby Wax?" So I'll try to help the second group out.
I can't quite remember when I first saw Ruby Wax. She was not quite a central part of the alternative stand-up comedy scene in the early 1980s but was around the same age and started to be connected to them in the mid-eighties when she co-starred in the ITV sitcom Girls on Top – very loosely an anarchic female version of BBC hit The Young Ones – alongside Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Tracey Ullman.
She soon started to carve out her own distinctive path with her interview shows. Long before the likes of Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson got in on the act, Wax was doing fearless interviews with celebrities, from Donald Trump (on his plane) and Imelda Marcos (remember her shoes?) to Prince Andrew's former wife Sarah Ferguson (lots of labelled drawers).
Wax was funny and probing in a way that was unheard in an era when chat shows were reverential or fawning. Along with Edna Everage Wax paved the way for the likes of Ali G and Mrs Merton, getting insights via stealth and comedy.
She renewed her partnership with Jennifer Saunders working as script editor on a little thing called Absolutely Fabulous. It's possible that the series would have never happened without Wax's involvement. She was instrumental in the casting of Joanna Lumley as Patsy, having interviewed Lumley on her own show and realised that she had previously untapped comedy chops.
For a long time Wax, who is married to Red Dwarf director Ed Bye and has three children, was a regular on our screens, and then she started to disappear. When she reemerged she had been studying for a masters degree in cognitive therapy at Oxford and was seriously into mindfulness and mental health issues. Once again she was ahead of her time as gradually the world was starting to wake up to the importance of mental health.
Since then she has talked openly about her own mental health and being bipolar. She has also written two very candid autobiographies, How Do You Want Me? (2002) and Sane New World (2013). In 2018 she also published How to Be Human: The Manual, which looked at the way humans have the ability to change their brains through what is known as neuroplasicity.
Will all of these various skills that she has acquired over the years help Ruby Wax to eat a kanagaroo testicle without barfing? You'll have to tune in to I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! to find out.
I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, ITV1.
Picture: ITV
