Is it just me, or are there far too many celebrity participation shows?

They seem to be wall-to-wall at the moment. Every time you turn on the TV there’s a celeb learning to dance, skate, get fit, or cook a chicken supreme.

And now the most ludicrous to date, Splash!, which I had the misfortune to catch. We had it on primarily due to my daughter having a thing for Olympic diver Tom Daley, who teaches well-known personalities how to do it properly, before they compete with each other. It was about as riveting as an episode of Police, Camera, Action!

It strikes me that these famous types will do anything for a bit of extra exposure. Over Christmas I settled down to watch a programme about the world’s most dangerous roads, expecting it to be an interesting mix of geography and culture. But who should be in the driving seat for this trip – Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes from The Royle Family.

I didn’t sense much in the way of rapport between them, and the resulting journey, which mostly focused on her irresponsible driving and him looking nervous in the passenger seat, made for dull viewing. Max and Paddy could have made a better job of it – at least we’d have had a laugh.

Why is it assumed that dragging celebrities out of their utterly pampered comfort zone to walk to the North Pole, or climb the world’s highest mountains is what viewers want to see? I’d rather see real explorers or mountaineers toughing it out with blizzards raging around them, rather than personalities taking the easiest route with a 50-strong back-up team.

When I was growing up there wasn’t an obsession with celebrity. I don’t think we even called them celebrities – they were ‘famous people’, some off the telly or, even more famous, from films. They would do guest appearances on shows like Morecambe And Wise and The Two Ronnies, or pop up on Michael Parkinson.

They would not gather together to be shipped off to the ‘jungle’ to roll around in insect-filled tanks, swap wives for a fortnight or sit for weeks in a makeshift ‘house’ making inane smalltalk.

As a result, there weren’t any vehicles for D-listers to turn themselves into B-listers overnight. With so many shows of this type, it is clear that programme-makers struggle to find participants and end up recruiting glamour models and TV has-beens.

Celebrities have enough fun already. If they’ve got all this time on their hands – and they clearly have – let’s rope them in to do something useful, like helping in old people’s homes or with environmental projects. And, for a change, let’s not film them doing it.