Ten doughnuts for elevenses! It’s lucky seaside calories don’t count

When you go to see an elton John robot in concert, you’ll want all the hits — starting with Sprocket Man and Don’t Go Breaking My Parts.

Susan Calman was in Skegness, ‘Meccano centre of the universe,’ at the start of her Grand Week By The Sea (C5) when she discovered the superstar in kit form, on display at a model exhibition.

With a red boater and glittering glasses, the replica was unmistakeable, even though his face was a blank yellow sheet of Meccano. ‘That’s elton John,’ she exclaimed.

The model-maker, an elderly gent with a marked German accent, corrected her politely: ‘A copy, yes.’ Perhaps he was worried that the likeness was too convincing.

The robot, seated at a metal piano, took five months to build. Susan wondered why the inventor chose elton. ‘Other musicians are difficult,’ he explained, ‘ because nobody recognises them.’

I’m not so sure. Most people would know John Lego and Paul Meccaney.

This was Susan’s first visit to Skeggie and she was intent on cramming a fortnight’s fun into a day. Skipping along the seafront like the town’s Jolly Fisherman mascot, the little Scottish dynamo bought a windbreak on the promenade and set about demonstrating how to nab the best spot on the beach. As any north Sea holidaymaker knows, windbreaks are the easy bit. Wrestling to get the deckchair settled in the bracing Skegness breeze is the real challenge.

Susan didn’t hang around on the sand long enough to try that. She was straight off to Butlin’s, where she donned a red coat and joined dance rehearsals, before dashing to an amusement arcade for a go at the mechanical camel races.

Then it was elevenses at a doughnut stand, where the wind whipped her fiver out of her fingers. She had to chase it halfway down the pier.

When she returned, Darren the doughnut man was waiting with a bag of ten. ‘Seaside calories don’t count,’ he assured her.

Good job, too, because it was battered cod and chips for lunch, with a piece of fish ‘the size of a newborn baby’. Thank heavens Calman became a comedian and not a midwife.

The pleasure of her shows is the sheer amount she packs in to every episode. Susan’s like a ten-year-old on a school trip who drank a litre of pop on the coach and is liable to explode if she isn’t allowed to run riot till she drops.

Later, I bet the camera crew put her on the back seat under a blanket and let her sleep all the way home.

equally hyperactive, Gregg Wallace was grinning and gurning his way along a production line for railway carriages on Inside The Factory XL: Trains (BBC2).

But with train and Tube strikes crippling public transport, this was the worst time for Gregg to be chuntering with joy about the 30 million rail journeys Britons take each week.

no one, though, not even Susan, could have been more excited than Gregg as he inspected a half-built carriage and found it had space for both lavatories and bicycle storage.

Co-presenter Cherry healey had the more interesting assignment, as she visited a smelting works at the foot of Ben nevis to discover how aluminium was produced. Then she investigated the hS2 tunnel boring machine, currently digging a ten- mile tubeway at the snail’s pace of less than two inches a minute.

Gregg, meanwhile, was happily occupied with trying to imitate a train klaxon. It’s e flat, then G flat. he kept getting it the wrong way round.

Gregg, it’s nee- nah — not nah-nee!