There are always signs that the end of the summer holidays is approaching: brightly-coloured gel pens and erasers that smell of strawberries appear in the supermarkets; it buckets down just in time for the August bank holiday; and TV shows appear in graveyard slots and barely any promotion.

Which leads us to Race Against the Tide (BBC2, Tues, 7.30pm), a new reality competition show that follows many of the same beats as the usual suspects – one of the only differences being it doesn’t have ‘Great British’ in the title.

I guess Great British Sandcastle Contest didn't cut the mustard with the focus groups, as it has a lot of familiar elements: primary colours; competitors blessed with an un-British amount of sunny enthusiasm; judges with ‘personality’.

It follows the rules of most such shows, just replacing sewing, or pottery, or baking with making massive sculptures out of sand.

There is also a sense of false jeopardy with a deadline, although – as the title might suggest – you could work out how long you have by looking at the tide tables.

Here though, the tide on St Andrews beach has the convenient span of six hours to go and and come back, something even novice beachcombers might find a suspiciously TV-friendly way of doing things.

Before they can get to sculpting huge fish, or handbags, or a caravan out of sand, the seven teams – each made up of a novice, or newbie in irritating telly-speak, and a pro sand-sculptor – have to compact tracts of the beach into large wooden boxes. All the better to build up and strengthen their natural sand-vas, as it were.

Each week of Race Against the Tide has a theme, and the judges have to evaluate each sculpture from a technical standpoint and an aesthetic view.

So far, so Bake-Off.

There are a couple of differences, the main one being that Race Against the Tide is, mercifully, only 30 minutes long, leaving the contestants very little time to make an impression on the viewers' minds so you end up referring to 'the Welsh one', 'the Cockney one' or 'the dungarees one' instead of their names.

You feel a bit sorry for the contestants, really, whose smiling enthusiasm might be tempered by a slightly longer running time, and over 60 minutes would have more room to be people, rather than personalities.

And you suspect that they have given up a week, two weeks, more of their lives to build stuff on a cold Scottish beach, you can't help thinking they may have wasted their time.

Meanwhile, host Iain Stirling seems to have decided that the best way of enlivening proceedings is by taking the mick out of the whole process at every opportunity.

“It's the sculpting competition no one asked for,” he says by way of an introduction, before later remarking, “yes, there are six actual grown-ups playing in the sand for your viewing pleasure”.

Which is an interesting way of getting people involved, but you can't help wondering if the limited running time might actually work against him, and the programme, as neither he nor us can get emotionally involved in it.

It all gives the impression of being a show the Beeb don't really know what to do with. Pushing it out slightly ahead of prime-time, on its second channel, for just half an hour in the dog days of summer.

It feels like the show is on shifting sands already, and it's only a matter of time before it sinks without trace.