FORMER Strictly Come Dancing star Oti Mabuse is being teed up to appear on this year’s I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
It will see her waltz down under with hosts Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly for ITV1’s I’m a Celebrity in November – just a year after she had a difficult birth with her daughter.
Oti, 34, quit Strictly Come Dancing in 2022 – after winning the glitterball twice – with soap star Kelvin Fletcher and comedian Bill Bailey – and has gone on to become one of ITV’s biggest names as a judge on Dancing on Ice.
An ITV insider said: “Oti is a brilliant name for I’m A Celebrity, she’s hugely popular and well liked by the ITV audience so bosses are over the moon she could be a campmate this year.
“She’s very much seen as being part of the ITV family of stars and is always guaranteed to be great fun.”
Oti taking on the challenge of the jungle is remarkable.
If she signs for IAC, she may be down under when it is her daughter’s first birthday, as the show usually kicks off mid-November.
Also, she had an extremely stressful birth in November of last year, and both mother-and-child took weeks to recover.
The South African Latin dance champion and her husband, Romanian dancer Mairus Lepure, went through hell after their first child arrived prematurely.
The infant had to be placed into an incubator and spent six weeks in hospital in a critical condition with jaundice.
Meanwhile, Oti also developed sepsis, a life-threatening condition where the body responds wrongly to infection and attacks itself.
Speaking earlier this year, she said: “I think we didn’t hold her for about a week because she was still in an incubator with the wires, and with jaundice so she was under blue light. And she had infections because it turned out that I had sepsis.
“What happened was the bacteria around the womb which protects your body, when it breaks it attacks the baby. So she had infections that they didn’t have time to diagnose, so they had to give her antibiotics and see if she was okay…
“The NHS, the doctors, the midwives, they were amazing… I was taken down in a wheelchair and I couldn’t get up and hold my baby.
“That was traumatising and emotionally very, very exhausting.”
But Oti has bounced back and is loving being a mum. Her natural competitiveness, as seen on Strictly, is also expected to be invaluable for the trials she’s likely to face in the jungle.
She’s previously been asked if she’d ever appear on I’m A Celebrity and said: “If it works and it feels right then I’ll do it at that moment.”
Just two other names have so far been linked to the 23rd series. They are Coronation Street star Alan Halsall and influencer GK Barry.
An ITV spokesman said: “Any names suggested for I’m A Celebrity are speculation.”
