Looks lovely if nothing else: Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips reviewed

To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed travelling around Britain while exchanging light banter and using the word ‘iconic’ a lot. In Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips, the Strictly judges are driving a Union flag-bedecked Mini through such telegenic staples of heart-warming TV dramas as the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish Highlands.

For the opening episode, the choice fell on the Cornish coast, which certainly helped the programme achieve its primary aim of looking lovely. But this, as it transpired, was just as well — because for a fair amount of the time, not much else happened. In Newquay, the pair donned Top Gun shades and joined a crab fisherman on his boat. Unfortunately, as the waters were a little choppy, they weren’t allowed to do anything beyond noting how annoying it must be to be a crab, having to ‘do chassés all your life’. They then headed to the oldest mine in Cornwall where, like parents on a family holiday, they tried hard to get us excited about the fact that it has Britain’s ‘last working steam-powered beam engine’ (although without either showing us the beam engine or explaining what one is).

In between, they stuck doggedly to the running joke that Craig drives too slowly for Bruno’s liking, and Bruno too fast for Craig’s. They also sought to inject a note of jeopardy by pretending that any wrong turn would lead to catastrophe — rather than, say, a slight delay.

As you might expect, though, the two old troopers did liven up considerably whenever there was an audience around. At Porthcurno’s weird but gorgeous Roman amphitheatre (built in the 1920s), a handful of spectators was all it took to get them dancing energetically to a sea-shanty group.