Gregg the foodie is as off-putting as chocolate-flavoured crisps: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

Inside The Factory 

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Chat show maestro Terry Wogan used to say the worst guests weren’t the drunks, the George Bests and Oliver Reeds. Neither were they the morose divas who answered every question with a terse shrug, such as Anne Bancroft.

The real troublemakers were the hyperactive show-offs who couldn’t shut up or sit down for a moment — Robin Williams doing handstands, Freddie Starr gabbling like he’d just discovered triple espressos.

Old Tel would have hated Gregg Wallace. The former greengrocer is frantic with excitement for every moment he’s on screen in Inside The Factory (BBC2). It’s exhausting to watch, and it must have been tiring for the film editors, because they grabbed any excuse to ignore him.

The former greengrocer Gregg Wallace is frantic with excitement for every moment he’s on screen in Inside The Factory (BBC2)

No sooner had Gregg declared his intention of kayaking along a potato conveyor-belt at the Walkers crisp processing plant in Leicester than the documentary cut away to an Olde English kitchen where historian Ruth Goodman was frying sliced King Edwards.

And when Gregg banged through a door and shouted that he was in ‘one of the craziest rooms I’ve seen’, the cameras switched smartly to a pub in Brighton: presenter Cherry Healey was issuing the drinkers with nose-plugs and betting they couldn’t identify crisp flavours without smelling them.

It was all rather like a boozy wedding party, where people start talking loudly about anything that pops into their heads. The result was disjointed and noisy, not so much a programme as a headache with pictures. There must be an interesting documentary to be made about crisps, but this didn’t come close.

In a backroom at Walkers, a man in a white coat was trying to develop crisps that taste like cheesy beans on toast. He did this by eating cheesy beans on toast and describing the ‘flavour journey’ to his underlings. That’s all the explanation we got.

To be fair, it’s likely that crisp flavours, like the Holy Spirit or the rules of bridge, cannot be defined in mere words. That’s why bizarre taste experiments are occasionally unleashed on the market — none odder than the chocolate-flavoured crisps that Tudor’s briefly attempted to sell in Scotland.

Inedible they may have been, but choccie crisps were one of the few moments of interest in this hour-long episode. Ruth talked about the Eighties fad for hedgehog flavour, too, faked with herbs and pig fat.

This show could have been much better if she’d been sent in search of all the really strange tastes. But Ruth didn’t know about pickled onion, gammon and pineapple, bacon and mushroom, pizza, even vanilla ice cream... all flavours that have been rejected with a public chorus of ‘Eurghh!’

Craft: I Made This

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Heavy metal drummer Chris evoked the same reaction with the scented candles he makes from wax and essential oils. His favourite aroma was the must of a sweaty biker’s old leather jacket.

Presenter Clemency Green turned pale when she got a whiff of it, on Craft: I Made This (More 4). She opted for a lighter hint of cut grass. That seems sensible: when the neighbours drop round, it’s better for them to sniff the air and think of freshly mowed lawns than to wonder whether you’re having an affair with a Hell’s Angel.

Candles were one of the easier projects on this new DIY series, Craft: I Made This (More 4)

Candles were one of the easier projects on this new DIY series. At the difficult end, woodworker William Hardie was showing us how to make a wooden bench without using nails, by weaving planks into a lattice. William’s the kind of earnest chap who goes into poetic rhapsodies when he picks up a chisel: ‘That connection between hand and eye is a wonderful antidote to our modern lifestyle.’

It’s refreshing, though, to have a real person instead of a TV personality, fronting a show like this. Until now, arts and crafts on telly meant watching Kirstie Allsopp gather her family around her at Christmas to admire her homemade tinsel.

Whether anyone will actually make the miniature Victorian greenhouse, constructed from leaded panes of glass with a soldering iron, isn’t really the point. What matters more is that candles reeking of biker body odour never catch on.