Celebrity Lego Masters at Christmas: The tension, the music, the catastrophic mishaps - this is Bake Off with bricks

Television is eating itself. Lego Masters, as anyone who has watched it will attest, is Great British Bake Off with bricks.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is a good idea, because it allows the contestants to be children in a natural way, without being presented as scientific specimens. Adding celebrities and Christmas to the mix does test the recipe a bit, but it just about survives.

But first, a note about terminology. Celebrity as a concept has been redefined. It now exists at a level of dilution that even Andy Warhol might find banal. Celebrities, as defined by celebrity editions of game shows and television contests, are people who are famous for being almost famous.

Shall we take a look? The host of Lego Masters is Melvin Odoom. Melvin, it says here, is a comedian and DJ. He was one of the first celebs to go overboard on Strictly Come Dancing in 2016. Here, dressed in an elf suit and faintly hypermanic, he is very good.

Then there is Joe Swash. Joe was famous for a bit on EastEnders, and won I’m A Celebrity …. Get Me Out Of Here in 2008. Joe was on hand in the jungle the other night when Harry Redknapp donned the crown of thorns. Joe is a cheeky chappie.

Alice Perrin is the star of Tattoo Fixers. (She has pet rabbits and a fine art degree). Spencer Matthews is from the enhanced reality show Made in Chelsea. He has a well-groomed beard. Rob Beckett is a comedian who used to host the I’m A Celebrity spin-off show. He has teeth. Joel Dommett came second in I’m A Celebrity .... And Warwick Davis is actually quite famous and, as his child partner observes, “quite small”.

Does it matter that the celebrities are famous only for being celebrities? Not really. Here, they are merely adults, acting the goat and trying not to upstage their junior Lego masters. Everything else is the Bake Off thing of artificially induced tension, challenges done against the clock, and small mishaps treated as world-ending catastrophes. Oops, the Lego has fallen over.

The adults in the room — scientist Fran Scott and (vice-president of design, The Lego Group) Matthew Ashton — keep everything moving along nicely, as if it matters. “Creating the feeling of Christmas using plastic bricks is not going to be easy,” Fran says. “They’ve got to create round baubles, they’ve got to create fluffy snow, spiky Christmas trees….” It’s jeopardy, Jim, but not as we know it.

Meanwhile, in the final episode of Mrs Wilson, Alison Wilson (Ruth Wilson, playing her real-life grandmother) is getting closer to uncovering the truth about her late husband Alec (Iain Glen). The trouble is, the closer she gets to understanding his life the more implausible it becomes. Was he really a spy, betrayed by double agents? Or was he just a fantasist and a crook, or something in between?

The evidence doesn’t seem to be conclusive, and Alison seems to change her mind a few times on the question of whether his stories should be believed. In the end, it becomes Alison’s story, not Alec’s.

She, like Alec’s other wives, was kept in the dark and left to bring up the children, and belief in her partner became a matter of faith.