I’m A Celebrity: Dicko breaks down over Australian Idol stoush 20 years on

Some 20 years after Dicko made national headlines with his comments on Paulini Curuenavuli’s infamous gold dress, he is still feeling the impact of the critique.

Two decades on, Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson still feels the impact of his infamous ‘gold dress’ critique of contestant Paulini Curuenavuli.

In 2003, as the hard hitting record label executive judge on the first season of Australian Idol, Dicko faced immediate backlash when he told Curuenavuli she needed to “choose more appropriate clothes or shed some pounds”.

The brutal comment still haunts him today.

“I don’t feel like that guy Dicko on television 20 years ago,” he said in a segment to air on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! tonight.

“I am a different person. It is interesting for me to feel how that impacts on the person I am today. I imagine there is still stuff I am still repressing there, there is stuff I am still hiding away from myself.”

Ian 'Dicko' Dickson breaks down in the jungle camp on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!

“Maybe each time I tell it and it invokes an emotion in me, it takes me nearer to working out how I actually feel about it. It probably tears a layer away and that is a good thing.”

Dicko was a judge on the ratings juggernaut TV show alongside Marcia Hines and Mark Holden with Guy Sebastian winning that first season and Shannon Noll placing second.

Of Curuenavuli’s dress that same night, Holden said: “What is what you are wearing girl? You never fail to sing brilliantly but whoever convinced you to wear that, I wouldn’t listen to them again.”

Holden’s comments went largely unnoticed while Dicko sparked national outrage.

He broke down to tears as he spoke to fellow I’m A Celebrity contestant Woody Whitelaw about the scandal.

“I probably had a chip on my shoulder and I had to prove myself but I just set about trying to be the cold hard facts guy and it was pretty brutal at times,” he said.

Australian Idol contestant Paulini Curuenavuli on the show in 2003.

“If Paulini had have come to me at the record company and the stylist had have been there and she had walked out in that dress and said this is what I am wearing to the ARIAs, I would have advised her against it. I didn’t want to hurt here and I promise you, if she had have walked a red carpet wearing that dress 20 years ago, there would have been comments made in women’s magazines.”

Dicko at a Waringah Mall shopping centre appearance in October 2003 with contestants Shannon Noll, Cosima De Vito and Guy Sebastian.

Dicko explained that it was a viewer, a surgeon, who wrote him a letter at the end of that Idol season in 2003 furious that the comments had triggered his daughter with her anorexia.

“He said, ‘this is your fault … she was an Australian Idol fan and when you said that comment to Paulini, she spiralled out of control and she is now in hospital, she might die and if she does, I am going to hold you personally responsible’,” Dicko explained.

Dicko, a father of two now-adult women, sought advice at the time from a psychologist friend about the comments he made.

The now 60-year-old choked back tears as he recounted the story.

“To feel that my comments might have driven a beautiful young girl, the apple of her father’s eye, into a hospital ward where she could die, is really hard,” he said.

Dicko in his I’m A Celebrity camp uniform.

Dicko in South Africa ahead of going into the jungle on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!

“Look, you’ve got to accept responsibility and I am prepared to accept in that long society struggle to get there, I am one of the villains that brought us here and I can’t change that.

“We do live in a different world now. I would like to have learnt from it.

“I would like the world to have learnt from it. “

I certainly don’t have the slightest inkling of bailing someone up for the way they look these days though.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with body image issues or an eating disorder, talk to someone now - call The Butterfly Foundation national helpline on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 334 673).