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

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.