Bear Grylls never comes close to fractional self-awareness in Celebrity Bear Hunt

It is a terrible habit of TV producers – particularly those of the reality persuasion – to work backwards from a show’s name to its format. Naked and Afraid, Ladette to Lady, Milf Manor: all have instantly memorable pitches, but have produced mixed final results. The same, it feels, could be true of Celebrity Bear Hunt, a new Netflix show involving survivalist Bear Grylls and, as is necessary under the confines of the chosen title, a light amount of hunting.

The premise is simple and compelling: 12 celebrities are dropped into the Costa Rican jungle where they must survive on their wits while making their way to a checkpoint. The catch? They’re being hunted by TV’s piss-drinking wild man, Bear Grylls. That sounds easy enough to follow, except, actually, that’s not what Celebrity Bear Hunt is about. Instead, a dozen celebrities bed down for 18 days in a glamping cove. From there, they compete in extravagant daily tasks, after which a few will be sent, semi-randomly, to the “Bear Pit”, a local wilderness area into which Grylls will eventually parachute to chase them for an hour. And then some might be sent back to Blighty, while others will go back to their yurt. Oh, and, for some reason, Holly Willoughby is there, dressed like a colonial wife on safari.

Breaking out of “nature’s deadliest escape room” is no mean feat. Not least because the show is structurally reliant on not giving its contestants a fair shot. Grylls – fresh from his stint baptising Russell Brand – crawls around the undergrowth, telling a cameraman what the contestants are getting wrong, all without acknowledging the ludicrous, tension-sapping spectacle of watching a former SAS soldier stalking Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. The mixed-ability contestants range from former athletes like Danny Cipriani and Boris Becker, to 29-year-old TV chef Big Zuu and Gen X model Lottie Moss. It’s a surprisingly starry cast – Mel B, Shirley Ballas and Inbetweener Joe Thomas all head to camp – which suggests that Netflix was willing to get the chequebook out.

What it’s failed to invest in is an engaging format. Camp sequences are filled with the spectre of meddling producers, off screen with a cattle prod, getting the celebs to interview each other. Was being in the Spice Girls “a fun journey”, Mel? Going to prison, “did that not stress you out”, Boris? How will your “fellow judges” on Strictly “view you” after this, Shirley? It is incredibly inane, glossy chatter, lacking even the banal intimacy of I’m a Celeb. When Thomas describes his relationship with his fiancée (“we’re, like, so close”) he looks like an unwilling attendee at an office party. And, after all that, the challenges themselves are interminable and low stakes, stretching thin material across this eight-episode series.

On the plus side, Llewelyn-Bowen is always a good booking. “Takes me back to ’Nam,” he says while crawling through the undergrowth. “Cheltenham.” (This works better out loud than on the page.) Moss brings some welcome vulnerability – this feels like a bigger opportunity for her than the others – while Steph McGovern is the camp’s straight man, a sensible head among the highly strung antics. Grylls himself is a fascinating specimen, never once stooping to even fractional self-awareness, and he seems to have a unilateral say in who stays and goes from the show. Rather than operating as an odd-couple double act with the immaculately coiffed Willoughby, Grylls intermittently parachutes into the locale (“bit much,” Willoughby grins to camera – perhaps she missed the production meeting), his face pre-smeared with dirt.

Netflix has had a hit-and-miss time with its reality TV programming. Shows like Love is Blind and Too Hot to Handle have proved reliable, multi-season successes in the dating arena. But Celebrity Bear Hunt demonstrates a misunderstanding of the British public’s televisual interests. Celebrities are not objects of inherent fascination, but beautiful, charismatic prisms through which to reflect our, often perverse, desires and ambitions. We want to see them dance elegantly; we want to see them eat an ostrich anus. What we don’t want is to see them making half-hearted small talk, followed by a highly choreographed, zero jeopardy, set piece. If Netflix executives had watched Grylls’s previous celeb survival format – Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls – they would’ve understood this.

Instead, Celebrity Bear Hunt is kitsch without being camp, and overcooked where it ought to be raw. The casting team should be applauded for putting together a set of celebrities who actually justify the term, but perhaps a surfeit of riders and allowances have blunted Bear’s teeth. Unlike the Aussie outback, this Costa Rican beach resort feels almost hospitable, more like a spa retreat than the eviscerated hollow of a camel’s stomach. That’s not what we expect from Bear Grylls – and not what we want for our celebrities.