Irish pop star Una Healy says she had “intense nightmares” after being chased through a Central American jungle by Bear Grylls for his new Netflix reality show. The Co Tipperary singer did not reveal if the outdoors boffin caught her during Celebrity Bear Hunt; had he done so, her punishment would have no doubt involved a stern lecture on the best way to survive in a rainforest or how to stave off dehydration. In each case, Grylls’s solution would inevitably include sticking your underpants on your head and/or drinking your wee.
Grylls may be a famous adventurer and the curator of his own annual Gone Wild festival. But he’s also a wilderness weirdo whose survival recommendations sound like something that strange kid in school dared you to do when you were 10: lodge nettles up your nose and count to 10, wedge moss down your underpants ... that kind of thing.
As presenter and expert, Grylls has bobbed around the TV world for decades, fronting the occasional reality show with his name in it or one of Netflix’s Choose Your Own Adventure shows (with his name in it). But now this apex predator of drinking one’s own wee comes into his own with the show he was born to make. Behold Celebrity Bear Hunt – an unhinged Netflix take on I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!, where Grylls is a vengeful bushtucker trial made flesh. It is – whether by crash or design – the funniest thing Netflix has put on the screen since Henry Cavill’s manbun in The Witcher.
But if Grylls is the jungle nasty, who is the Bear Hunt equivalent of I’m a Celeb hosts Ant and Dec? The answer is none other than Holly Willoughby – the former presenter of ITV’s This Morning and temporary replacement for Ant McPartlin on I’m A Celeb during his stint in rehab. She has herself been away from the screens – having stepped down from This Morning after becoming the target of a failed kidnapping attempt.
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Willoughby is obviously a big name in the UK, though you wonder what Netflix’s international audience will make of her cheesy, breezy style. She lacks Ant and Dec’s mischievous – and their boyish cruelty. Nor does she seem in on the joke – as becomes clear as she explains, with great seriousness, that contestants who fail a task will be sent to the “bear pit” – a sort of demonic obstacle course, where they must outrun the gurning Grylls.
The celebs are the traditional mix of fading pop stars, reality television c-listers who could do with a pay-day and the token Irish person to keep us watching (the aforementioned Healy). They include Spice Girl Mel B, tennis champion turned jail debt dodger Boris Becker, Strictly Come Dancing judge Shirley Ballas and former England rugby international Dany Cipriani. They’re good sports – as you would need to be when your job involves keeping a straight face knowing Bear Grylls is hiding up a tree and liable to jump out at any moment.
What are the rules? I’m not sure. The volunteers spend most of their time hanging out in a sort of jungle Big Brother house. They must perform occasional challenges while at largely random moments they are chased by Grylls. The sense is that they packed all the celebrities off to Central America and then made up the rest as they went.
The tone is one of camp absurdism from the get-go. As the celebs arrive in baking Costa Rica and wander around in various states of mild heatstroke, Grylls leaps out of a plane and into the undergrowth, where he whispers to his camera crew – also presumably hiding and streaked in camouflage paint – about what a mess the contestants are making of the adventure.
In a later pep talk, he explains that normal life is like a “green light” – you wander across the street, not quite focusing on what you are at. In the jungle, that won’t cut it. “It has to be amber ... amber!,” he says, adding that they should think “like a deer”.
Back at camp, the volunteers are confused. “I can’t be a deer,” gasps reality chef Big Zuu. “I’m not very deer-y,” He says this with a certain weariness – ominous given that the fun has only started.
Celebrity Bear Hunt is the bingewatch Apocalypse Now – with sleep-deprived celebrities instead of terrified Vietnamese villagers and Grylls the jolly, gurning Colonel Kurtz to whom all roads lead. The horror ... the horror ... and that’s just the look on Big Zuu’s face early in the first episode when Mel B reveals she urgently needs the ladies’ room.
Blending unintentional comedy with deft touches of sadism, it’s hard to imagine Celebrity Bear Hunt being anything other than a massive hit for Netflix. It combines the absurdist cruelty of Squid Game with the cruel absurdity of Celebrity Big Brother – and then chucks in Grylls as the bark-chewing wild card. Seldom has bad TV been delivered with such unhinged panache and performative cruelty.
