Remember Watercolour Challenge? Competitive tea-time Channel 4 painting show, lots of British retirees with the cheapest possible haircut holding easels up against unseasonable breezes, judged by a local artist-in-residence and overseen by Hannah Gordon? Tonally quite close to watching cricket, in the combination of burbling, quiet chit-chat and enforced breaks for tea? Wasn’t gripping exactly but your grandad liked to fall asleep to it? Closest thing the late 90s/early 00s really ever had to ASMR? Remember that?
Well, now we have Celebrity Painting Challenge (Thu, 8pm, BBC One). Alongside the likes of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – still in his difficult detective-who-keeps-getting-foiled-by-Jack-the-Ripper bearded phase, I’m sad to say – there’s Jane Seymour, Phil Tufnell, George Shelley, Josie d’Arby and Amber Le Bon, who is always introduced as “DJ Amber Le Bon” the way you assume Ben Kingsley insists on his “Sir”. These six celebrities are being tasked with the Bake-Offification of yet another hobby, after The Great British Sewing Bee and The Great Pottery Throw Down: painting, in which all the shapes of a Bake Off are assembled in a room rather than a tent and legally everyone is forbidden from giving a distinguished handshake.
The format is this: each week, the celebrities are given a light-hearted warm-up challenge where they paint on easels in a studio, then have a fun-and-perky art lesson with “mentors” Diana Ali (northern, cheery) and Pascal Anson (who, with his moustache and red boilersuit, is destined for a handful of @hot_4_pascal 12-follower Twitter fan accounts that veer into a realm so horny they get banned). Host Mariella Frostrup stalks through the studio making conversation. After the allotted time is up, in a move that often feels a lot like “Hold on: am I actually watching an art class? Did I accidentally tune this channel in to a foundation college art class? Is the TV broken?”, judges Daphne Todd and Lachlan Goudie come by and absolutely rip every piece apart, shattering everyone’s dreams and confidence as they do so.
In the hands of anyone but the BBC, this whole thing would veer off somewhere different: Arg from Towie painting grey-white blobs on his cheeks and forehead; Love Island’s Grace using a tanning sprayer to fill in vacant white space on an overly large canvas; Bubble, exhumed from the Big Brother crypt, holding a brush and some enamel paint pots in front of his jeans like two balls and a dick. But having all the celebrities here taking it very seriously adds a certain element of … well, not excitement exactly. Or any sort of feeling of tension at all. But … no, hmm, lost it again. I mean they’re definitely all … there.
Is this an exciting show? At some points, it feels like a very literal exercise in watching paint dry. But the tea-and-biscuits bonhomie of the assembled celebrities, the tight-lipped smile Llewelyn-Bowen does when he’s criticised and the fact that I genuinely quite like Phil Tufnell’s art make it watchable, at least. And anyway, who said all TV has to be exciting? What’s wrong with painting on a canvas so gently your grandad falls asleep to it?
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