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Double thumbs for the last episode of Celebrity Treasure Island 2022 (Design: Tina Tiller)
Double thumbs for the last episode of Celebrity Treasure Island 2022 (Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureNovember 2, 2022

Celebrity Treasure Island power rankings: At last, we have our winner

Double thumbs for the last episode of Celebrity Treasure Island 2022 (Design: Tina Tiller)
Double thumbs for the last episode of Celebrity Treasure Island 2022 (Design: Tina Tiller)

The sun has set on another season of Celebrity Treasure Island, as Tara Ward delivers her final power ranking for 2022. 

After 27 episodes, 1,000 packets of Tim Tams and a million hopes and dreams, we have found our newest Celebrity Treasure Island winner. The final week of the competition was a slog of challenges and strategy, so praise be for Elvis Lopeti, who brought us light and joy while Courtenay Louise and Jesse Tuke freaked out about everything else.

The final six castaways were put into pairs by Courtenay Louise, and it seemed like the show saved the most exhausting challenges until last. Our celebs had to endure a wacky “keep flipping the boards over to your team colour” challenge that seemed impossible to win, a “dig some puzzle pieces out of the sand” challenge that demanded way more effort than the prize deserved, and an endurance test that drowned the loser in a bucket of their own tears, before eliminating them from the competition forever.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Grab yourself one last packet of Tim Tams and do the splits like Dame Suzy D, as we tumble into the power rankings for the final time.


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Eliminated: Cam Mansel 

Cam left after a tragic turn of events that saw him miscount the objects he and Susan had dug out of the sand. We’ll never know what could have been, but it was fitting that Cam left with Nana Susan, two new mates whose unlikely friendship has blossomed over the past few weeks. She called him her fifth son, he picked her up when she fell off a box. Maybe these new BFFs found the treasure after all.

Eliminated: Dame Susan Devoy

Susan was the undisputed star of this season, closely followed by Lynette Forday’s illegal apple and Jesse Tuke’s tube of zinc. Dame Suzy D played this game with brutal honesty and fierce competitiveness, yet refused to take this ridiculous school camp seriously. She also fell off a box and lay on the sand laughing like a drain, thus blessing us with the second best stumble of the season after Dr Joel’s elimination challenge trip.

In a perfect world, Nana Susan would have found the treasure and then followed through on her promise to suck Dylan’s Schmidt’s toes, but that will have to remain a dream in the CTI vault of my heart. Susan said she’d had a blast, and then ran off into the distance screaming “silly game, silly game, silly silly silly game”. Just like “Blind Jim’s got a big vag”, never a truer word was spoken.

Eliminated: Siobhan Marshall

CTI’s quiet powerhouse stormed into the final four, only for a bucket of water to prove her undoing. Siobhan was knocked out in an emotional endurance challenge that saw her pitted against her feminist ally Courtenay, and while the boys took their shirts off and feasted on grapes, the women held ropes and silently cursed the patriarchy. A true legend.

Runner up: Elvis Lopeti

I’m locking myself inside a bamboo prison to protest what happened to Elvis in the final, and I’ll stay there until either he or Blind Jim the Vaggy Possum digs me out. Making Elvis do two additional challenges in lieu of having any clues basically ruled him out of the competition as soon as it began, but full credit to him for refusing to give up and for reaching his goal of getting to the end and enjoying all the nice food. He also got to squawk at Jesse Tuke’s hairy chest, so live, laugh, love, Lopeti.

Runner up: Courtenay Louise

Courtenay was gracious in defeat, even though it must have hurt more than the time Team Kuaka realised Nana Susan ate all their spaghetti. Courtney did everything she could to beat Jesse Tuke, and nobody was more tenacious in this game than the Shorty Street actor. Courtenay tried to get more women into the top three, she realised Jesse was the traitor who buried the treasure and she had to carry the hopes and dreams of the other women in the competition. Sadly, Jesse Tuke is descended from several Greek and Roman gods and thus impossible to beat. An emotional journey from one of the fiercest competitors CTI will ever see.

Winner: Jesse Tuke

In the end, Jesse Tuke made it look simple: you had to run really fast and hope the treasure was exactly where you left it. He did and it was and that was that, and Jesse Tuke earned his chosen charity Live Ocean a jazzy $100,000. He spent the week sleeping on his web of lies, and even though Jesse’s conscience got the better of him and he admitted to Courtenay and Elvis that he was the traitor, it made no difference. He knew where the treasure was! He had a million clues! He runs like a whippet! Some say it was his game play that got him to the final, others say it was the monolith that helped him, but I say it was all down to the face zinc. That stuff is powerful.

Celebrity Treasure Island is available to stream on TVNZ+.


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Keep going!
HUNTED.jpg

Pop CultureNovember 2, 2022

Why watch a whole action movie when you can simply watch Hunted Australia? 

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Alex Casey watches Hunted Australia, a high-octane reality series that pits high-level intelligence officers against classic Aussie drongos on the run. 

The lowdown

With Celebrity Treasure Island coming to an end and FBOY Island pulling another petal off the reality romance rose with every passing week, Hunted has come storming onto TVNZ to fill the void. The action-packed series sees 18 Australian “fugitives” (read: classic Aussie drongos) go on the run from an expert team of detectives and high-level intelligence tracking their every move. If they manage to avoid capture by the end of the 21-day hunt, they win their share of $100,000. 

Think early-2000s high-concept Julie Christie reality shows like The Mole (which person is the mole?) and Going Straight (how long can you walk in a straight line?). As the experts pace around central HQ in the middle of Melbourne, the fugitive teams instantly scatter from a van in Federation Square and the big game of tag is afoot. There are aunty/niece teams, soon-to-be-wed teams, best friend teams, and an unlikely pairing of a hairdresser and a cop. 

The good

No expense is spared on selling the idea that this is a real hunt for dangerous criminals, rather than for a gentle account director named something like Sandra. There’s a fleet of helicopters, covert blacked-out vans and rabid sniffer dogs. It’s shot like an action film, with stealthy camera operators following our fugitives around the state of Victoria, who also capture the action with GoPros. All the while, former intelligence officers eff and jeff their way around HQ in Succession-style crash zooms trying to figure out where the hell everybody is. 

Hunted’s hunters hunting

The idea of actually disappearing in 2022 is a challenging one. Contestants have to be careful about what they do with their phones, where they get cash out and even what colour their hair is. One team immediately dons mullet wigs and tradie outfits. Another young woman dresses up in a large polo shirt and aviators in an attempt to look like a young boy at the ATM. Even if you have no need to go on the run, it is interesting to mull over how you might attempt to disappear, and what your digital footprint reveals about your life and habits. 

Finally, outside of Dame Susan Devoy on Celebrity Treasure Island, Hunted provides some mega reality laughs. In one instance, a fugitive crumbles into a pile of shaking tears halfway through packing up her bag in a remote campsite. Could the pressure be too much? Is it a panic attack? Is she going to hand herself in? “It’s a grasshopper,” she wails. “Little spiky legs.” Some of the teams are total duffers and immediately get caught by staying with one of their close friends on Facebook, while others make a narrow escape by using an old lady decoy. 


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The bad

There’s a disclaimer that comes at the very end of every episode that says “some powers available to government agencies including electronic surveillance have been simulated in the production of Hunted”. Although you don’t need to be FBI to understand that a lot of reality television is manipulated, you really do have to suspend your belief an awful lot when these former MI5s pull up footage of someone buying snacks at a servo in the outback within seconds. But this is Hunted, where everything is made up and rules of civil surveillance don’t matter. 

The verdict: Run, don’t walk – and pack a wig just in case. 

Hunted Australia screens at 8.30pm Tuesdays on TVNZ 2 and is available to stream on TVNZ+.

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