Celebrity Bear Hunt Isn’t the First Time Joe Thomas Has Wowed People

Contains spoilers for Celebrity Bear Hunt episode 2.

“You’re giving Inbetweeners right now,” model Lottie Moss tells actor Joe Thomas in the first episode of Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt. That’s young-person speak for ‘you come across as unsure and anxious in the manner of a schoolboy’, applied specifically in Joe’s case because he played an unsure and anxious schoolboy in Channel 4 comedy The Inbetweeners.  

Joe Thomas probably gets that a lot. Despite now being 41 years old, whenever he’s dithering between two jars of pasta sauce in the aisle of a Waitrose, or apologetically asking a pigeon to move out of the path of his car, his inner Inbetweener must shine through. The cast of Celebrity Bear Hunt (not a show in which celebrities hunt a bear, thank goodness, but in which they themselves are hunted by a man named “Bear” – or more properly, a man named Edward who insists that everybody calls him “Bear” and they do it because he used to be in the SAS) can certainly see it. 

The show is a mashup TV premise that mixes I’m a Celebrity, Survivor and Hunted. In it, a group of celebrities are asked to live together in a Costa Rican beach house for 18 days while they complete challenges and try to avoid entering “The Bear Pit” – a Hunger Games-style arena in which they’re stalked and in most cases, caught and hogtied by Grylls. (It is an undeniably weird look for a former Chief Scout to be seen in episode one first wrestling a young woman to the ground and then pulling another from the front seat of a car before tying them both up. Though perhaps it’s weirder when he does it to Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen while he’s having a wee?)

The early consensus on contestant Joe Thomas is that he’s more worrier than warrior. “Joe would not be Decisive Spice,” rules Llewellyn-Bowen – a judgement that makes greater sense when you know that LLB is talking to Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown.

We’ve just watched Joe endearingly tear up over missing his fiancée (fellow The Inbetweeners actor Hannah Tointon) and their child, and when he’s picked by Bear to form part of a three-person team challenged with crossing a rickety bridge over a 200ft drop, everybody foresees doom. They’re not concerned about the competing team featuring 64-year-old heights-phobic Shirley Ballas; it’s Joe they’re worried about. They think he’ll crack. 

Joe does not crack, far from it. After spending the run-up to the challenge wearing an expression akin to that of a cringing lion from a medieval bestiary, Joe steps onto that bridge. And then, in a twist that came as a surprise to everybody – Joe included – he absolutely bosses it. All that worrying wasn’t for naught; he’d been formulating a plan that he then executed with confident mastery, leading his team to victory. And this, from a man who once took five and a half hours to make a macaroni cheese. 

Anybody who saw Joe’s season of Taskmaster shouldn’t have been surprised. There, he revealed his leopard-like stealth in a challenge that required him to sneak up on host Alex Horne from a railway track in 10-second intervals. He was athletic, he was agile, and he managed to sneak so close to Horne that, in his words, he made it to “cuddle distance”. 

The railway task wasn’t Thomas’ only Taskmaster triumph. Throughout the series he proved himself to be a resourceful, if strange, man. Pelting an inflatable watermelon ball with individual ice cubes because he’d been told that it could only be propelled along a course by water wasn’t his finest moment (“It’s as though I’d never heard of a hosepipe,”) but there were several. Take the 80s electronica band he formed with fellow contestant Sian Gibson, or him quoting Keats instead of Stu Francis from Crackerjack to successfully argue that a grape is something that bursts.

All of that though, pales into insignificance next to Thomas’ appearance on celebrity food podcast Off Menu. His episode was so astounding that not only did it top our list of the funniest ever, it’s gone down in Off Menu history and been called back to in episodes since. On a podcast in which celebrities simply have to name the constituents of their dream restaurant menu, Joe Thomas told an extraordinary and apparently true story about burying a dead pig in a neighbour’s garden in such a way that it made absurdist co-host James Acaster look like the sensible one. 

Have a listen, and ask yourself if he should have made it past the Celebrity Bear Hunt psych evaluation. Probably not, but for television’s sake, thank heavens he did.

Celebrity Bear Hunt is streaming now on Netflix UK.

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