‘I’m A Celebrity’ winner Harry Redknapp has revealed he almost pulled out of the show completely, as his beloved wife Sandra had been suffering with sepsis.
Harry was crowned King of the Jungle on Sunday night, but has now admitted he came close to not even appearing on the show, as his wife had been in hospital just weeks before he was due to enter the camp.
“She’s been ill with the sepsis and it’s knocked her for six,” he told The Sun. “It was only five weeks ago.
“Sandra was in and out of hospital but she wanted to come over to Australia. I was worried about her coming, I didn’t know if it was going to be too much for her.”
He continued: “Sepsis is such a dangerous thing, we were quite lucky.
“The day before I came in, if she said she didn’t feel well or weren’t up for it — I wouldn’t have come, I’d have scrubbed it.”
Sandra’s surprise visit to Harry was one of our highlights of this year’s ‘I’m A Celebrity’, but he also revealed during the interview that because he didn’t know what was happening when he was told he had to leave the main camp to see her, he began to fear the worst.
Harry said: “I thought something had happened, I really did — I thought something wasn’t right and I was going to come out. When the girl called me in the Bush Telegraph office, I said, ‘Can I tell the others?’ and she says, ‘No you can’t’.
“That’s why I got double choked when I saw her.”
The football manager also disclosed that he had his own health scare in the jungle, when an insect bite caused him to have a facial reaction.
“My face has swelled up on one side,” he recalled. “But I wasn’t having a stroke, thankfully.”
Fellow contestants Emily Atack and John Barrowman also made it through to the ‘I’m A Celebrity’ final, but it was Harry who won over the public and was ultimately crowned this year’s winner.
He told presenters Declan Donnelly and Holly Willoughby: “When I first came in, I looked and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m in trouble here.’ I looked at the group and I thought, they don’t really know or are interested in anything I’m interested in. No sport and it was only Nick really who knew a little bit about football. I thought it’s going to be a hard couple of weeks but they just dragged me through it, every one of them.
“They’re the most lovely people I’ve ever met, the whole group. There wasn’t one person I could ever say one single bad word about. They were amazing. Without them, I would never have survived.”
