Ant and Dec reveal Stephen Hawking emailed them about I'm A Celebrity joke

Remember that almighty hoohah over Ant and Dec’s Stephen Hawking joke in this year’s I’m A Celebrity?

One person who definitely wasn’t offended by the gag was Professor Hawking himself.

In fact, he even emailed the Geordie duo to signal his approval!

In case you missed it, the joke was inspired by jungle queen Scarlett Moffatt telling fellow campers she once tried to get hold of Hawking’s email address to run her goofy theories about time travel past him.

Ant and Dec followed up the clip with a skit which received a rather mixed response from the show’s fans on Twitter.

“That’s an interesting theory isn’t? It’s a shame she didn’t get in touch with Stephen Hawking via his Hotmail account,” Dec said, before Ant added: “She should have asked me. I’ve got his mobile.”

The stars then pretended to call Hawking, and a robotic voice mimicked the former Cambridge professor declaring: “Sorry lads it’s a load of old tosh.”

Outraged viewers took to Twitter to brand the routine distasteful, but Dec told the Daily Mirror that the butt of the joke thought it was just hilarious.

“We got an email from Stephen Hawking after that,” he explained. “He said he enjoyed her thoughts on the pyramids and enjoyed the sketch that we did in the studio. So that was a highlight.”

In case you missed it, Scarlett’s musings on time travel centred around “loads of numbers” and the pyramids in Egypt. “In order to travel back in time we have to go faster than the speed of light,” she explained to her fellow campers.

“The speed of light is like 319 and then loads of numbers, it’s exactly the same latitude point as the tip of the great Pyramid.

“So I think the pyramids are from the future, I think someone from the future realised we would need them and went back in time and built them.”

Yup, a load of old tosh, as a Stephen Hawking impressionist might say.