The preview blurb for Race Against the Tide (BBC iPlayer/BBC Scotland) describes it as a “high-stakes contest”. Allow me to disagree. It is definitely a contest, one in which seven pairs of sand-sculptors compete to craft the most marvellous creations, just like The Great British Bake-Off, but with sand. Yet the stakes for each and every team are the same, which is to say, non-existent: after about six hours of mucking about with trowels, the tide comes in and flattens everything.
This irrefutable evocation of nature’s dominion proves to make for surprisingly satisfying telly. I found the creeping tide on the St Andrews beach, looming like mortality itself, to be much more interesting than the sand sculpting, or the sculptors, or the wise-cracking of presenter Iain Stirling. User experience may vary: Race Against the Tide is an adaptation of a successful Canadian format, which suggests that competitive, or even un-competitive, sandcastle-building is at least as compelling as (to take one example) The One Show.
Alas, the voting system that sees competitors exit the show seems to be even more arbitrary than on Bake Off or the Sew Off or the Great British Cucumber Challenge, probably because expertise in sand-sculpting is in limited supply. Once you’ve got seven “pros” actually participating in the programme, that can’t leave many other pros to cast judgement. Or maybe there is more to competitive sand-sculpting than I realise.
The problem with Race Against the Tide is that if there is more to competitive sand-sculpting, you’re not told about it here. The programme suffers from the same problem all of the Great British knock-offs do, which is they’re never quite sure how seriously to take themselves. Of course, that wry tone of “isn’t this all a little daft?” as pioneered by Mel and Sue, is necessary in a programme that is quite obviously more than a little daft. But there’s a balance to be struck. If sand sculpting is just silly, then what are we all doing watching it?
Race Against the Tide, at least in its first episode, was so self-mocking that it could never really expect the viewer to care. And if you did want to learn a bit about how you would go about building a 20ft sculpture of a seagull or a Bruegelian diorama, it wasn’t concerned by the details. As far as I gather, you compact wet sand in massive boxes to make a big block and then you carve away until the judges turn up. How do you carve away? No idea. At one point a bloke with a braided sphinx beard started blowing at his seal sculpture through a straw. You’d have thought the programme might have at least explained why, but it was too busy making jokes about Banksy and Vincent Sand Gogh.
Race Against the Tide is on BBC iPlayer, and airs on BBC Two at 7.30pm on Tuesday, August 18