If Celebrity Big Brother is Heat, The Bubble is The Spectator. Like its middle-shelf bredrin, it involves three celebrities spending four days in a media-free zone. The trio are then brought into the studio and shown a variety of media snippets. If the cuttings and clips were about their own experiences over the last four days and if Davina McCall were flashing her silky bob around the studio, t’would be familiar territory. Instead, the contestants take myriad titbits and sort the true from the forged. At no point did the producers fall into the trap of reviewing the panel’s stint in isolation – fishing for calumny and conflict. And there’s a while to go before they have to worry about running out of willing, legitimately eminent names.

It’s like seeing yourself at the end of term when we leave our very own Cambridge ‘Bubble’ to have ‘real world’ friends tell us gossip and play us songs that are, apparently, all the rage. Often we feign familiarity, sometimes we let slip that we’ve been in a ‘Bubble’ of dissertations and pub chat for eight weeks, but we always believe whatever comes our way.

The whole thing is really quite difficult. Currently, splayed across my desk is an image of Precious starlet Mo’Nique proudly flashing her hairy legs at the Golden Globes. Were I sitting in the studio, I know I’d think it a Photoshop job. The stories last week were tricky.Thomas the Tank Engine series giving our favourite automotive a gay friend for PC purposes? Alan Sugar winning a diplomatic poll of the sexiest gent in the House of Lords? Penelope Keith bitten by a mongoose? What I really want to know: which ingenious hero fabricates these stories and what would a psychologist have to say about them?

They’ve whisked Celebrity Big Brother up with Have I Got News For You and added a dollop of Mock the Week. What’s not to like? Well, the BBC has suggested that their audience have the IQ of a kettle, refusing to supply fake news clips for their own show. Sky News and ITV are contributing but the BBC will only provide archived footage. Despite the fact that the crux of the show is to sort these falsehoods from the truth? Pah.