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Celebrity Hunted (Channel 4)

Rating: Two stars out of five

You can't be seen moaning. It's all in a great cause. Don't be negative, it'll just seem curmudgeonly. Try to enter into the spirit of the thing.

Still, I can't help feeling that the charity series Celebrity Hunted might raise a lot more money for Stand Up To Cancer if it weren't such a heap of weary codswallop.

Hunted, whether starring ordinary members of the public or celebs, has been running for 11 years, and rarely has a show aged more badly.

When it launched in 2015, it was billed as a sharp commentary on how state surveillance has stripped us of all privacy, with number plate recognition, facial recognition software, phone intercepts and digital footprint tracking.

It was impossible to escape the all-seeing eye of the security services, or so the producers wanted us to believe.

To prove it, they challenged teams to go on the run and evade their hunters — relying on their wits, their friends and the kindness of strangers to survive under the radar.

We now know this is nothing but paranoid delusion.

Far from being able to watch us every hour of the day, the government is like a panicking primary school teacher who has lost sight of half the children on a school trip and can't make the rest pay a blind bit of attention.

Pictured from left to right: Lucy Conley, Brian Conley, Chris Taylor, Toby Aromolaran, Stuart Douglas, Scarlette Douglas, Carlos Gu, Amy Dowden, JJ Chalmers, Sophie Morgan, Laura Smyth and Jen Brister

Georgina Bradley (left), Ray Howard (centre), and Steve Hersee (right) in Hunter HQ

This became humiliatingly obvious when sex offender and small-boat migrant Hadush Kebatu was wrongly freed from prison last October, and spent several days at large while a £150,000 manhunt was launched.

He was eventually found sitting on a bench in Finsbury Park, north London.

Deporting him, the Home Office then bribed Kebatu £500 to go quietly. At least the fugitives in Hunted have to evade capture to win a prize.

Despite this, Channel 4 maintains the pretence that its crack squad of ex-coppers and human bloodhounds can mimic state powers to find people, however far they run.

The celebs are handicapped, of course, by the camera crews that trail them everywhere.

I suspect the bloke with the video camera is phoning home every half an hour to reveal their location, which must make the hunters' job easier.

To give themselves a chance, the five celebrity duos need to remain as anonymous as possible.

YouTube performers and former Love Islanders Chris Taylor and Toby Aromolaran are at an advantage here, since they are unknown outside their niche.

Realising this, the cameras largely ignored them, except for a moment when the boys hid in a giant ball pit.

As they submerged, one of them (I have no idea which is which) yelled, 'Mate, they'll never find us.' And we didn't see them again.

Comedian and EastEnders actor Brian Conley took the opposite tack, announcing, 'I'm famous!' as he introduced himself to everyone he met.

'Just a run-of-the-mill showbiz legend,' he boasted breezily. Maybe the hunters will be able to track his ego via satellite.