Danny Dyer makes all other game show hosts look like mugs

There are people in this country – people who work for this very newspaper – who believe that The Masked Singer is a work of genius. That it has taken the standard TV talent show format in which singers perform for a panel of judges and added a brilliant twist, namely that the singers are minor celebrities in expensive fancy dress.

I do not share this belief. For me, there is a light entertainment show far more enjoyable, and that show is The Wall (BBC One).

If The Wall was presented by anyone other than Danny Dyer, it would be a bog-standard game show of the type once churned out to follow the National Lottery draw on Saturday nights. But the casting of Dyer was a masterstroke. You could enter him for the Turner Prize as a piece of performance art.

The Wall is an inanimate object and yet Dyer speaks to it like he’s accusing it of spilling his pint and eyeing up his wife. He growls his catchphrase – “Drop ’em” – with an intensity that would shame the great Shakespearean actors. “I really, really hope it’s gonna behave,” he says of the Wall, managing to make it sound like a threat.

In the second edition of The Wall Versus Celebrities, as in every episode of the quiz, Dyer gave it the full Cockney Geezer. If this is a Lorraine Kelly-style persona (Kelly successfully argued at a tax tribunal that she was a separate entity from the ever-smiling, perma-friendly ‘Lorraine Kelly’ of daytime TV) and Dyer secretly speaks the Queen’s English, then he’s never let it slip.

The contestants, former Coronation Street actress Sally Lindsay and The Last Leg presenter Alex Brooker, were playing for “serious readies”. The questions were “nutty”. And as for the voice reading out the questions? “The lovely Angela Rippon – ravin’ sort, she is.”

The questions on The Wall are a good mix – a few that have you yelling at the TV because the answers are obvious, others that require brainpower or pure guesswork – and Lindsay made a creditable job of it.

But there’s one other element that makes The Wall work, and it’s the human drama of watching an ordinary couple agonise over winning or losing a life-changing amount of money.

With a celebrity version, all of that was lost because the stakes were so low. Lindsay and Brooker had a guaranteed amount for their good causes, which meant a distinct lack of tension.

Still, as Danny Dyer put it in a way that only Danny Dyer could: “Come on, Wall – it is for charity, you MUG.”