A RAT shot across. "Let's give it a good spooning," shouted John Lydon as he scurried about the camp with a silly smirk on his face and a wooden cooking utensil in his hand.

It was a ridiculous moment and, watching it, it was hard to believe what Lydon had once been.

He had once been all snarl and spit, he had once made the establishment shake, he had once been really dangerous - now he was threatening a rat with a bop on the head.

I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here has been fascinating if only because it has allowed us to see what has become of the former Sex Pistol John Lydon.

His band was the product of the dog days of the 1970s Callaghan Government. Rubbish was on the street, industry was on strike, youth was on the dole - it was the wasteland out of which the Thatcher revolution grew, nourished by the phlegm that Mr Lydon spat on the ground.

But how anarchic were the Pistols? One of the biggest disappointments of Mr Lydon's appearance has been learning that his obnoxious spitting habit was not an act of rebellion guaranteed to wind up the sort of person who has nothing better to do than complain about bad language on television. His "gobbing", as it was called back then, was in fact due to a medical problem. Aged seven, the poor chap had fallen victim to meningitis. He'd spent a year drifting in and out of a coma, and had been left with poor vision, curvature of the spine and sinus problems that caused saliva to build up as soon as he started bouncing around on stage.

We've also learnt that Mr Lydon now lives in Los Angeles when he is not in his house in Malibu. He is married to a German heiress 13 years his senior and is a devoted step-grandfather. He drives a Volvo and has made a fortune as an estate agent. None of which is particularly anarchic.

But then punk didn't turn out to be especially anarchic, either. By the early 1980s, mad-haired mohicans were strutting about London not destroying things but posing for pictures for American tourists in return for a few pennies. To foreigners, they had come to represent England as much as the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace.

And, of course, the Sex Pistols' anarchy was as man-made as Jordan's breasts. They were put together by an astute manager, Malcolm McLaren, and their single God Save The Queen was timed to coincide with the Silver Jubilee of 1977 to maximise its profits. Lydon himself recognised this by calling his 1996 comeback The Filthy Lucre Tour.

His current comeback also conveniently coincides with the re-release of the Pistols' classic album, Never Mind the B*******, which rides high in the charts. There's a solo album in the offing and - proving Lydon's timing is as cute as it was in 1977 - it capitalises on the middle-aged middle-class guitar trend. A few years ago, the children of the 1960s and 1970s were spending their money on motorbikes to recreate their youth. In the last few months, they have turned to expensive guitars - sales up 65 per cent - as rock is suddenly all the rage. And the Pistols were a far better rock band than the Darkness who are currently coining it in.

Yet for all this commercial cynicism, Lydon left the jungle when he realised that defeat was an option. He's dealt in certainties all of his life: outrage always sells, swearing on TV always gains publicity. And the only certainty about being defeated by a silicon queen or a jailbird lord is that it would certainly be embarrassing.