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Bradley Walsh: Egypt’s Cosmic Code may sound like a pitch by Alan Partridge – but, impressively, the programme itself manages to be even odder than its title.

Naturally, Tuesday’s opening episode began with Bradley emphasising that his interest in Ancient Egypt long predates his signing of the contract for the show. Indeed, it was back when he was an apprentice at Rolls-Royce that he first realised ‘whoever built the pyramids, it certainly wasn’t the Ancient Egyptians 4,500 years ago’.

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Sharing his scorn for this discredited idea was Tony McMahon, an ‘investigative historian’ who showed up now and again to say bonkers things in an authoritative and sonorous manner. Given that there’s ‘got to be something more than mere human beings’ at work here, he boomed, the likeliest theories as to who built the pyramids boils down to a straight fight between aliens and ‘a superior advanced civilisation that has disappeared’.

Meanwhile, over in Egypt, Bradley had discovered what he called ‘a smoking gun’: if you multiply the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza by 43,200, you get more or less the polar radius of the Earth; multiply its perimeter by the same number, and you get more or less the Earth’s circumference. Not only that, but the number of seconds in an equinox is… 43,200.

Yet even all of this wasn’t the oddest thing about the programme. Instead, that came with the gradual realisation that it didn’t believe a word Bradley was saying, but was too polite to tell him. As he continued to lay out ever wilder theories – and it continued to listen patiently – a pincer movement by the narrator and a proper Egyptologist quietly explained how pyramid construction was perfected over a 100-year period.