So, apparently new game show The Box (ITV, Sat/Sun, 8.15pm/8pm) is what Gary Lineker has been doing with his time since leaving the BBC, and you can't help thinking he hasn't put his newfound spare time to the best use.

It's a high-concept thing, and as we all know, that can be a risk. In this case, the risk really doesn't have the reward.

Boiled down to it's brass tacks, The Box sees 10 celebrities each emerge from their own yellow box, rather like a Minion Doctor Who emerging from a yellow Tardis.

Once they come out, blinking, into the light they must take part in a game – working out the rules as they go along – before two of them somehow end up facing off against each other for the right to stay on the show.

Our Gal, meanwhile, lurks on the sidelines with a pair of yellow binoculars, occasionally saying the odd thing to camera, but more usually pulling a face as the celebs signally fail to grasp what’s going on.

He's an amenable presence, but Lineker really doesn't add anything to the show, and this is a show which really needs a host that can imbue it with some sort of pizzazz, or at least a sarcastic turn of phrase.

Partly because the mechanics of the show mean there are long periods where nothing much happens. The first 20 minutes of the first episode, for example, are taken up with the celebs wandering around some industrial wasteland, each looking for a yellow hexagon.

There's no time limit on them, and – initially at least – because no one know what the rules are, including the viewer, it meanders on without the prospect of an endpoint.

The nearest we get to jeopardy is morning TV presenter Ranvir Singh struggling to swim towards a yellow buoy in search of her hexagon.

Which leads to the only revelation; football hard-man Graeme Souness, a midfielder who's playing style was as tightly-wound as his perm, is actually a pussy-cat, helping not only Ranvir, but also Jenny off The Chase and former Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow get their hexagons too.

But this lack of jeopardy is the biggest problem.

Because these are celebrities, and as far as one can tell it's never explained what they're actually playing for, so the stakes are as low as they could possibly be.

There's no one here playing for the holiday of a lifetime, or money to help their kids pay their uni tuition fees, or get out from under a mortgage.

They're celebrities, playing a giant parlour game, a parlour game moreover, which takes its time to get anywhere – apart from the wandering around the wasteland bit, they have to pick teams and discuss eliminations, and all in a giant glass-walled house.

This goldfish bowl is where they all stay for the duration of the game, we're told, although all too often you get the impression they're not staying, as they all sit around wearing their big outdoor coats.

Maybe ITV has spent so much on the concept, they didn't have 50p for the meter.

By the time we get to the end game, a contest of rock, paper, scissors mixed with Deal or No Deal, it's extremely hard to get excited about the whole sorry affair.

It's show that would have been better with members of the public and a clear and obvious prize at the end of it – at least then we would know the stakes and be able to pull for the participants. They could have made a celebrity version for the a Christmas special.

As it is, it's hard to see it getting a festive showing, never mind a second series.

“Our celebrities have no idea where they are, or what they should be doing,” says Lineker at one point.

Nor, it seems, do he, the programme-makers, or the viewers.