James Walton

Should we be playing the surveillance state for laughs? Celebrity Hunted reviewed

Plus: Giri/Haji offers an intriguing mesh of storylines

One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’ capacity for virtually blanket surveillance was a nightmare vision of the future or a nightmare portrait of the present. Celebrity Hunted, though, suggests a third possibility: that virtually blanket surveillance is simply proof of how marvellous the authorities are, and so untroubling that it can be played for laughs.

This third series is, once again, part of Channel 4’s annual Stand Up to Cancer season, and features four teams of two, whose job is to go on the run for a fortnight and avoid capture by intelligence experts equipped with the latest snooping technology. Once again, too, it confirms that TV can still do extremely broad-brush characterisation even when dealing with real people. The women from TOWIE, apparently forgetting the cancer bit, are ‘doing this for Essex’. The chefs Jean-Christophe Novelli and Aldo Zilli show how passionate they are by swearing a lot and saying how passionate they are. The rugby players Gavin Henson and Martin Offiah take a more blokeish approach, with much talk of toilets and faeces (not their preferred term).

Nonetheless, Sunday’s first episode was comprehensively stolen by the I’m a Celebrity duo of Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo and Stanley Johnson — who, as several surveillance experts wonderingly noted (echoing, I suspect, the thoughts of many viewers), is ‘the Prime Minister’s father, for goodness’ sake’. Nor, as it turned out, did the programme-makers have to worry that Stanley may have followed his son’s example of abandoning a once-proud commitment to projecting amiable buffoonery.

Toff and Stanley’s fugitive life began in the agreeable surroundings of a county pile owned by an old Oxford chum of his. At this stage, Toff’s faith in her partner was total.

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