Periodically, I am changed into a monstrous verminous bug. My wife recognises the signs, locks me in the cellar and slides saucers of milk and slivers of lard under the door to sustain me. We do not know why this transformation occurs. We suspect it may relate to some form of deep-seated shame or self-loathing, perhaps rooted in a childhood experience, or brought on by watching too many ITV celebrity reality shows, which we know are wrong, and yet are drawn to despite knowing better. But the vile metamorphoses are soon over. I become an insect for little more than a month at most each time, so we continue with our lives as normal, my poor wife making increasingly feeble excuses as to why she must attend all the cheese evenings, ceilidhs and tombolas alone.

My second life as a bug is not without its consolations. Crawling around our cellar, I was easily able to identify the source of a persistent damp patch in the scullery above, a task that a visiting specialist would have stung us heavily for. And in many ways I find the society of insects preferable to that of humans. Currently they hide in cracks in cavity walls, and I hide with them, looking over your shoulders as you watch I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. The insect community’s response to the degrading ITV1 hit is extremely illuminating.

Earlier this week I lay in a brickwork fissure on my armour-hard back with Franzi, an ant, and Josef, a cockroach, and discussed the new series of Ant and Dec’s jungle-based exploitation freak show. Franzi, the ant, is infuriated by it. She is not against humans per se, and indeed considers me a friend. But she has been angered in the past by what she calls our “boiling water thing”, admits that our use of ants as an off-the-peg simile for something that is easy to crush irks her, and is saddened by the gradual global failure of communism, which she saw as the only chance humanity had of organising itself into a sustainable social structure. But even Franzi despairs of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!.

Josef the cockroach explained the insect world’s hostility to the show. “It’s not so long ago you seemed to seek to understand us. You were watching The World About Us and Life On Earth, sympathetic portrayals of the natural world, produced by your brilliant BBC, surely the pinnacle of human achievement. David Attenborough avoided clumsy anthropomorphism or the tendency to attribute morality or consciousness to creatures such as Franzi and I, who are essentially automatons driven by need and instinct. But even all those sentimental computer-animated films where a succession of Jewish-American standup comedians make various innocent insect species into unwilling vehicles for their own urban sexual neuroses seem like War and Peace compared with I’m a Celebrity…. It represents humanity at its worst.”

Franzi elaborates. “Take this Eric Bristow of yours that you have now, for example. Once he threw his mighty stings with terrible accuracy, like a deadly Japanese wasp. Now what is he? In our nests, when a male ant has outlived his sexual usefulness, he is flung out into the cold to die. It is the kindest thing. Look at your Bristow, hanging around the fringes of human society, sniping at the young females and the homosexual, angered by his own impotence. We would let him grow flimsy wings and fly away to a dignified death, not make an entertainment of his decay.” But Franzi the ant is not angry. Instead she seems to pity us.

“Your David Haye that you also have now is no better,” continues Josef, the cockroach. “He is supposed to be a fighter. But when they locked him in the box of our insects he pretended to be so bored he asked to be let out, as if it were somehow beneath him to remain, leaving your old women and your young girls shaking, alone and afraid. He is a liar and a coward. Would this David Haye be brave enough to climb up and nibble the crust of a scab on the arm of a sleeping British tourist, many thousands of times his size? No. In the cockroach kingdom this David Haye would be shunned and left to die. We would have no use for him and his lies.”

“Bees would recognise the plight of your Nadine that you have now,” explains Franzi, “the overwintered queen, her fertility diminished, due for replacement. But bees give their old expendable sovereigns the option of living out their last days in peace. Her pitiless subjects merely expelled her. You are beneath contempt. And the core of the problem is this. In your I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! you use us insects as a source of entertainment, a fear resource, to be showered in clusters on to the burned faces of your famous citizens as if all we were good for were to amuse you by our supposed repulsiveness…”

And then Josef interrupts, “but it is you who are repulsive. You view the natural world as a mere sideshow to entertain your indolent masses. Your starving birds fly away. Your poisoned trees die. Your filthy rivers choke. Your pathetic harvests fail. Your miserable cities flood. All because of your selfishness and laziness. You know what will outlast the entire collapse of your species?” he asks rhetorically. “Cockroaches!”

“And Paxo stuffing,” I offer, “the sell-by dates on the Paxo stuffing in the cupboard upstairs are two or three hundred years away. I only noticed recently. It’s amazing.” Franzi and Josef ignore my attempt to lighten the mood.

“Rosemary the Large is the only human in the show who would earn the respect of insects,” suggests the ant, after an awkward pause. “She thinks of the collective good of the group. She is without ego. That is why, when she lay down and slept amid the crawling creatures, they left her unscathed. They recognised her nobility. She is a queen among humans. The rest of you… you’re like boys poking an ants’ nest with a stick. You make me sick.”

“One other thing,” pipes up the cockroach, “your Ashley Roberts that you have now looks much better with her hair down. Like a different person. Amazing.”

Upstairs I can hear my wife calling. Weeks have passed. She wonders if I am in a fit state to return. But up there in the light, everyone is talking about I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. I tighten my thorax and refuse to shed my skin. It is better down here in the dark.

Stewart Lee’s Carpet Remnant World DVD is out now. David Mitchell is away