ITV will surely have mixed feelings about all this. The channel knew what it was paying for when it spent half a million on Rourke’s services. Here is someone who threw his Hollywood career away not once but twice, having achieved huge 1980s success, fallen off the radar, made an Oscar-nominated comeback in Darren Aronfsky’s The Wrestler (2008) – then lapsed into a string of lazy cash-in parts. 

It’s true that the Rourke mini-saga has briefly restored to Celebrity Big Brother the grubby headlines it won during the 2006 series, during which the sitting MP George Galloway pretended to be a cat, and the 2007 one, in which Jade Goody engaged in racist bullying. But nearly two decades later, this year’s launch show had the lowest overnight viewing figures of any Celebrity Big Brother series to date – not a sign of deep public excitement. And after six days, the best-known contestant, and clearly the most volatile, is gone.

There will also be moral questions about why it seemed to ITV, temporarily at least, to be forgivable that Rourke manhandled a female host, and that he abused a female contestant, yet a bridge too far that he squared up against a man. Many will feel that after his bullying exchange with Siwa, ITV should have had the courage to throw him out of the show, and off British screens.