Since when did cooking walnut cake in a rush become a sport?

Alas, here we are in 2012, the year of the London Olympics, when sport shall be shamelessly shoehorned into every gasping lungful of human life, including all your very favourite television shows.

Even ones about baking.

Last night’s Great Sport Relief Belief Bake Off was the latest.

Whatever next – Rogue Baboon triple-jumping? Sherlock does, er, BMX racing. Or flapjack volleyball? Mmm, actually . . .

All week The Great Sport Relief Bake Off has hauled into the kitchen a dozen half-baked celebrities, shackled them in aprons and challenged them, against the clock, to see who can make the best bakes.

It’s been like watching CCTV footage of a WI splinter group training camp.

Last night’s serving, for the last place in tomorrow night’s final, saw the heat turned up on singer turned fashioned designer Pearl Lowe, veteran weather forecaster Alex Deakin, historian Alex Langlands and the journalist Anita Rani.

They were set three tasks: to cook a crumble, to bake a coffee and walnut cake, and to concoct 24 miniature tarts.

Deakin cooked a crumble whose soft fruit filling had all the appeal of a pair of edible underpants.

Overdressed Pearl Lowe, who stopped drinking seven years ago, confessed that these days she ladles the booze into her puds instead. Her crumble was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit soggy.

Pearl is wed to Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey. I’ve noticed he’s filled out a bit lately.

Anita did herself proud with her walnut cake, with judge and presenter Mary Berry enthusiastically hailing her cake with the words: “There’s a nice amount of ‘give’ in it.”

Added fellow presenter Paul Hollywood: “I think it would win a village show.”

Then again, so would a novelty potato shaped like Aled Jones.

And so to the tarts . . . “I’m really pushing myself with these tarts, it’s beginning to show,” confessed Alex Langlands in faux tension-building Masterchef style.

While weatherman Alex Deakin’s white chocolate mousse tarts were greeted with Mary Berry’s suitably meteorological quip: “No soggy bottoms here.”

Which was nice. Unless, of course, her comment was meant as a possible side effect of one of his tarts.

In the end, though, it was Anita who made it this trendy baking lark look like a piece of cake, sailing through to tomorrow’s final.

It’s all for a great cause – Sport Relief. Makes plenty of dough for all the right reasons.

But baking being baking and the slow process that it is, there was little in the way of sporting edge to proceedings here – except that watching it felt to me like a marathon.

There was a lot of waiting around and lingering shots of people staring into ovens, but quite frankly I can get my fix of this type of thing by hanging about in a queue at Greggs.

There was none of the tension and heartbreak of Masterchef. There was no journey, nothing for our celebrities to really lose that might have turned this into more of a kitchen sink drama. And without the drama it was just kitchen sink.

The final of The Great Sport Relief Bake Off is tonight. I shall be contributing by phoning up with my bank details, before dashing off to participate in my new, far more sporting and exciting hobby – flapjack volleyball.

Ben Bentley