1 hour ago
6
If it’s early August, it must be Celebrity Hunted’s annual series in aid of the charity Stand Up to Cancer. The dozen famouses must evade capture for two weeks, which is a shorter time than civilians are required to manage it. Is it because celebrity schedules are fuller or their brains emptier? By the end of the first couple of episodes, I know which way I’m leaning.
The contestants, working in six pairs, include Britain’s last vaudevillian Brian Conley (“I’m like a coiled sponge!”) and his daughter Lucy (“Dad! Stop being funny”), TV property presenter siblings – a sort of hyphenate from hell – Scarlette and Stuart Douglas, plus comedians Jen Brister and Laura Smyth. In a game where predictability is the greatest – well, predictor – of failure, they may have the best plan. “I’m just not going to take my HRT for a week and let’s see what happens,” says Jen.
At Hunter HQ, Ray Howard (whose every feature still suggests thrillingly that only this gainful and well-publicised employment is keeping him from laying waste to everyone within a 50-mile radius, and I for one am going into hiding the minute he is forced to retire) has gathered his team about him. As ever, it comprises ex-police and military types, counter-terrorist dooberries, cyberwhatsits, analysts and profilers. The last two are vital because no one else is qualified to say things such as: “They will be using the networks they have,” “They could be hiding in plain sight,” or, if operating at peak performance levels, “They may have gone out the back way.” These all-seeing gods direct the “ground hunters” as to where best they might cut the fugitives off at the pass, and they do it expertly badly.
No matter how dim a prey may be – and God love the brace of children from Love Island, Chris and Toby, who dutifully tap in and out at the end of their Transport for London journeys and show HQ exactly where they are – the predator can be counted on to be dimmer, for at least as long as the producer needs them to be.
The Douglases go on a live morning news programme to promote their new show but – oh, they are whisked away in a taxi just in time to avoid capture!
Jen appears at a well-advertised gig in Brighton (“Jen is appearing at a well-advertised gig in Brighton!” announces one analyst, pretty much) but happens to have 400 Jen masks ready-printed (though not ready-strung with the necessary elastic) for the audience, to confuse any pursuers.
Brian calls his friend and member of “the Prat Pack” Joe Pasquale on a phone he knows is tapped and gives him the time and address at which to collect him and Lucy. “Sometimes it’s gruelling and analytical work,” grins Howard’s right-hand man Dr Steve Hersee. “And sometimes they just tell you exactly where they are.” The Conleys still escape, though. This is where you find yourself hoping fervently that it is all exactly as staged as it looks. Because if the people in charge of our national safety and security can be outwitted by Joe Pasquale, we are all in much worse shape than we ever suspected.
There are occasional outbreaks of competence, such as when one of the hunter team triangulates a phone belonging to the driver of the cab taken by ex-soldier and presenter JJ Chalmers and disability advocate Sophie Morgan and a phone it called during the journey. This gives them the name of the person who provided the fugitives with a switch in transport and thus the identity of the new vehicle. This is briefly reassuring, until you get to thinking about how widely and deeply we are all surveilled on the regular and how much information any bad actor at any time could get on us all … So it’s a good thing that Strictly Come Dancing stars Amy Dowden and Carlos Gu are on hand to distract us by attending Craig Revel Horwood’s gold-spangled 60th birthday bash on the grounds that Amy really, really wants to go and the hunters “can’t dictate what we do for the next two weeks! I’ve given up so much already!” But don’t worry – it’s still too early in the series for them to get caught and they are soon wading across a stream to freedom.
At the end of each near-hour of frothing wildness, however, you are dropped into an ice bath of reality. Each episode ends with a story told by someone with cancer – or, in some cases, by those who have survived them. Unlike what has gone before, these are told simply and stripped of any kind of manipulation. They speak of unbounded love and unfathomable loss and they break your heart. They are there to raise awareness and money, and do so with dignity and grace. The rest? Utter chaos, in the service of good.
-
Celebrity Hunted is on Channel 4
