Celebrity Bear Hunt's jungle gamble proves Netflix is just copying terrestrial TV

What will surely bring home his descent from the great heights is having to sit and explain who he used to be – sorry, I mean still is – to a bunch of nonplussed C-listers, relatively speaking.

Yet there he is, smiling beatifically at his fellow contestants on Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt, confiding as if for the first time that his greatest opponent was "the man in the mirror".

For we’re in Costa Rica, with Becker one of 12 celebs bedding down in a jungle camp, tearfully helping each other through team tasks, then competing like boxers not to enter the Bear Pit, where they try not to evade being captured by Bear Grylls. (That childhood nickname does a lot of work throughout.)

The gang is the usual eclectic bunch, with their noble reasons for taking part. TV chef and rapper Big Zuu wants to get away from his phone – surely there are easier ways? Former rugby union star Danny Cipriani complains the nation views him in a certain light, perhaps unfairly related to his track record with women or the authorities. Spice Girl Mel B wants to "know more about myself", to which I suggest reading 30 years’ worth of interviews and/or her own autobiography.

But I do have a soft spot for Shirley Ballas, who says she’s taking part for "older women everywhere", although I’ve watched her dance in high heels, and she is like no other woman anywhere.

For sure, there are some enjoyable moments. Besides Boom-Boom Becker’s philosophies on tap, Mel 'I just am who I am' B finally meets her match in Ballas’s deceptively gentle query: "What is the matter with you?" And Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen wonders aloud: "What do Boomers do at 60?"

The challenges are sufficiently taxing, and co-host Holly Willoughby worries, "I don’t think they knew what they were signing up for."

Well, except for those who have watched every other TV challenge show since Clive James’s favourite, Endurance, from Japan in the 1980s. Because, if you’re thinking that all this sounds familiar, it is: we’ve watched Grylls hacking around in the undergrowth for 20 years, and even the casualty list is borrowed from The Jump: Boris’s torn meniscus, Steph McGovern’s bloody nose, LL-B’s panic attack.

Its nearest cousin is clearly I’m a Celebrity…, which Willoughby once co-hosted. So, what’s special in this Netflix offering?

In a word: money! It’s something that’s never mentioned but clear in every high-end drone shot of the jungle. Willoughby was paid a reported £1 million for 24 minutes on screen across the whole series, which newspapers helpfully calculated to be £40,000 a minute. Becker confided in an interview the money offered was "a no-brainer" and Grylls won’t have come cheap. There’s not much else for all those bucks.

It’s all sufficiently watchable. But when Netflix debuted in 2012 it leant on the "golden age of TV" (again) to promise us original drama. During lockdown, it was where we got to wallow with Friends (again). In 2025, it has just put up its prices with the lure of big-ticket sporting events.

Turns out, now the novelty of all that has faded, that making good TV is tough, and it has ended up doing the same as every other broadcaster in the land. If this is the sign of Netflix to come, we might as well watch our good old terrestrial channels. There’s nothing new under this Costa Rican sun.

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Celebrity Bear Hunt is available to watch on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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