Portrait Artist of the Year (Sky Arts, 8.30pm Tuesday)

I’m going to let you in on the best kept secret in reality TV. It’s called Portrait

Artist of the Year — but a more accurate title would be The Great British Paint Off.

It’s got everything you could ever want from a reality show. There’s a wisecracking host, celebrity guests, under the pump contestants, big reveals, and at the end of it all the lucrative prize of a £10,000 commission to paint Sir Tom Jones for the National Museum of Wales.

This year’s edition is hosted by Stephen Mangan, who in the first minute manages to crack a joke about Freudian psychoanalysis that makes his highbrow co-host Joan Bakewell laugh. Interesting fact about Joan Bakewell: she was the first person ever to be described as “the thinking man’s crumpet”.

Each episode of Portrait Artist of the

Year features nine painters who have four hours to produce a decent artwork of one of three sitting celebrities. The celebrities in this week’s episode are actors Matthew Goode and Geraldine James, and celebrity chef Andi Oliver.

The artists, like the celebrity sitters, are a diverse bunch. My favourite is Christine, who had previously been in Landscape Artist of the Year 2017, and who appears so crippled with self-doubt that it’s almost too painful to watch. There’s also a 19-year-old lad who looks alarmingly like a young Mick Jagger.

The hosts work the room, chatting to the painters, while a smattering of spectators mill about in the background like on Antiques Roadshow.