In Bake Off’s stifling tent, hysteria is rising faster than the cakes . . .

Hard to recall now, but for a few days back in the summer it was hotter in Britain than the Med. and in The Great British Bake Off (C4) tent, the heat was getting to people.

alice was brandishing an electric fan like it was her oxygen mask. Henry was wiping rivers of sweat from his face and Steph wrapped a soaking wet tea-towel around her head, like Hilda Ogden having a nervous breakdown.

Presenters Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding seemed to be succumbing to heat stroke, too.

Their opening skits and links have been growing ever more surreal this series, but now they veered into outright delirium.

at the start of the show, Noel pretended to find 4ft 11in Sandi asleep in the cutlery drawer.

Later, they both wore pink oven mitts for a game they called lobster arm-wrestling.

Then Noel donned a headdress that looked like a boiled crab.

It probably all made sense at the time, but we were left with the impression that, after eight weeks, the show reached its quarter-final stage in a state of near-hysteria.

The mood swings were affecting the bakers, too. Picking up the recipe for the technical challenge, a Moroccan pie made with flaky warqa pastry, 20-year- old university student Henry swaggered: ‘If anyone has heard of this, I will get naked — I’m that confident.’

at the other end of the emotional scale, Steph was in tears because she thought her warqa pie wouldn’t cook in time. In the end, she did better than Henry, who kept his clothes on even when he realised that some of the others did actually know what they were doing.

Perhaps all these are symptoms of a show that been running too long this year.

By now, we ought to have reached the final, but there are two more episodes to go. It began with more contestants than ever — remember dan? and amelia? Of course you don’t: they left weeks ago.

Dublin Murders (BBC1) will need a very long run if viewers are ever going to work out what the pickled heck is going on.

The first episode was confusing enough — why was detective Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) interrogating her partner rob (Killian Scott) so tearfully in the creepy archives dungeon in that opening scene?

Come to that, why does a modern police station have an underground labyrinth for its files, set in a rusty cage and lit by a single light bulb? It looks like a former KGB torture room that the Garda bought in a dodgy land deal.

Even stranger, why is there apparently an oil refinery on the station’s roof?

It adds to this show’s impression that the whole of Ireland is one bleak industrial estate.

Now we discover that Cassie is hiding a secret identity. a mysterious ghoul is stalking her, to ensure that she doesn’t revert to her old name, Lexie.

This is especially confusing, since rob is also disguising himself: he’s leading an investigation into a murder in the woods, without telling anyone that he was involved in an almost identical case at the same spot 20 years ago.

Nobody recognises him, not even former friends, because he’s changed his name. He used to be called adam.

It’s a brilliant ruse, which even fools the gossipy old woman in a mobility scooter — and she appears to remember the birth of every baby in Ireland since Val doonican was in nappies.

Perhaps she’s just baffled by the size of the cast, nearly four dozen of them.

By the time we work out what’s really going on, even Bake Off will be over.