He's a decent enough actor, but he's only been in a soap and a light drama about a school (where he had a relationship with a hot teacher). I wouldn't have recognised his name and I actually watch it.
Yeah, he could turn out to be good entertainment in the house, but really, this just shows they should've done an ordinary non-celeb version first. The rest of the production isn't much changed from when it was on C4, so if this had been a non-celeb version we would have thought it was pretty good and forgiven some of the awkward deliveries to camera from Brian or the endless zit cream adverts. Having a celebrity version with no real celebrities makes it look like a joke.
However, I do think it'll be successful, because it taps in very well to that group of people who love keeping up to date with reality tv show contestants after the shows have ended. Pretty much all these housemates besides a couple of actors are ex-reality show stars, so in a sense, it's like an all-stars (of reality tv in general) version.