The host as bouncy as a kid eating a sherbet fountain on a trampoline

There’s something of the overgrown schoolboy about George Clarke. Architects are meant to be proper grown-ups, and he knows his stuff when he talks of building materials and sight lines.

But as soon as he starts getting excited, he’s bouncing like an eight-year-old on a trampoline with a sherbet fountain.

Off the beaten track property programme Amazing Spaces Snow And Ice Special (C4) sent him to Norway, supposedly to discover quirky cabins and treehouses beyond the Arctic Circle, though I suspect he was really hoping to meet Father Christmas.

As soon as he arrived — and before he saw any architecture — he was running across a wooden walkway slung across a gorge with his mate Will hardie and then trying his hand at husky sledding.

When he visited the first house, a wooden construction 30ft off the ground in a pine forest, he was beside himself. ‘This is amazing,’ he kept saying, when what he meant was: ‘Mum! Mum! Can we live here? Can we?’

The double act with Will does grate a bit — with their constant matey banter, they’re like a Top Gear tribute act.

One segment, involving a trip to a saami reindeer farm, was apparently included just so we could see an amorous stag mistake Will’s fur tribute, but it was thorough, and it included insights from his friends that summed him up succinctly. Friend and gagwriter Barry Cryer pointed out: ‘You couldn’t describe anybody as “a sort of Tommy Cooper”. There was only one.’

The format was slightly disjointed. It seemed at first that comedienne Jennifer saunders, who has loved Cooper since she was a child, was presenting the story. she visited the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the files of his gags, stored in a backroom.

she soon faded from the narrative, though, and the story was told by Martin Clunes’s voiceover. Both methods were good, but it was as though the producers couldn’t make up their minds. That didn’t matter, so long as we got plenty of gags.

saunders discovered they were all catalogued and labelled neatly: 1L signified one-liners, while P stood for jokes with a personal twist.

Under 1L, she found: ‘I’m on a whisky diet — I’ve lost three days already.’ And one from the P file: ‘I was cleaning the attic the other night with the wife. Filthy dirty and covered with cobwebs. But she’s good with the kids.’

You could hear that growling laugh, like an engine turning over, as she read them.