Given the popularity of Channel 10’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here it’s hardly surprising that other networks have started developing their own versions. The ABC’s first foray into offshore incarceration fell a bit flat, Malaysian police releasing reporter Linton Besser without charge only hours after he’d quizzed their Prime Minister about his bank balance. But Nine Network’s better funded Lebanese venture has been a ratings triumph, and as Julie Bishop continues pulling strings to get Tara Brown out of a Beirut jail work has already begun on future episodes of I’m an Anchor and I’m Stuck. These will see Nine Network camera crews dispatched to Pyongyang to record the consequences of lovable brekky host David Koch egging a statue of Kim Jong-un, and to war-torn Mogadishu to film still-attractive Tracy Grimshaw streaking through a souk.

Monica ‘that dress’ Lewinsky is someone else age has not withered, so I was pleased to see that she is one of the guest speakers at an upcoming Australian Association of National Advertisers lunch. According to my invitation Ms Lewinsky was ‘one of the very first people to have her reputation publically trashed by social media’, and she is now ‘a passionate anti-bullying ambassador’ who travels the world ‘advocating for a less harmful social media environment’. I’ve no doubt that life was far from pleasant for young Monica in the months after her White House internship went pear-shaped, but I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to blame social media, given that the events which thrust her into the international spotlight preceded the launch of Facebook by six years. Having said that, anyone who can extrapolate an office fling into an international publishing and speaking career must be worth a Cabcharge to Randwick and it will be interesting to see how she handles a microphone in a room full of post-prandial Australians. Come to think of it, it will be interesting just to see how she handles a microphone.

It will be money well-spent if she’s half as entertaining as ex-sprinter Matt Shervington was as MC of the Australian Olympic Committee’s athletes’ induction session I attended recently. In a fun-filled three hours Matt and Chef de Mission Kitty Chiller told us everything any of us could want to know about what life will be like in Rio for the 450 who are lucky enough to make the cut. But what subject took up the biggest slice of the morning? Favela gangs? Brazil belly? Performance enhancing drugs? The Zika virus? No. Apparently the threat those things pose to our 2016 medal hopes are as nothing compared to the threat posed by (you nailed it, Monica) social media. I can remember when coaches warned their charges off booze and bonking in the lead up to competition. These days it seems it’s all too easy to undo four years of sweat and self-discipline with a glance at Snapchat or Instagram the night before your event. For the benefit of Speccie readers who don’t know me and are wondering what my event is (and for the benefit of those who do know me and are wondering when Taking it Easy became an Olympic sport) I should say that I only got a guernsey to the briefing as an employee of the AOC’s ad agency.

As such I’m all too aware of the potency of social media, of course, and of all the other digital channels I can now put at my clients’ disposal. But despite being constantly assured by young people with beards that that there is no future for traditional broadcast mediums, an annoying number of those clients are now turning back to them, having discovered that even the sexiest website and Facebook page and app – and all those millions of views and clicks and likes – don’t necessarily shift as many boxes as a 30 second slot in Home and Away. Our industry’s very own inconvenient truth

In addition to the usual choice of healthy outdoor school holiday pursuits, last week a limited number of Sydney parents were able to send their children to Camp Out, a gay school holiday initiative which, presumably in addition to all the usual things you do in tents, encourages kids to question their sexuality. ‘If only we’d had something like that when I was a boy,’ I can hear many Speccie readers saying to themselves, ‘I might not have continued to be one.’