Lorraine Kelly's Norwegian Odyssey review: Lorraine’s sponsored holiday is the TV equivalent of a screensaver

It's the kind of television you have on when you're doing something else – the ironing, say, or renewing your car insurance, or even just scrolling on your phone.

Every so often you'll lift your head and see a cliff, or a field, or a lovely clear stretch of water and you'll think to yourself 'ooh, that looks nice', before returning to whatever it was you were doing beforehand.

Basically, whatever you do when the ad break happens in a show, you do for an hour here – which is partly because this is an hour-long ad.

It's sponsored by a cruise company, and we get lots of lovely drone shots of one of their vessels steaming past the sea-cliffs and through the fjords of Norway.

We even get an extended sequence where Lorraine gently goggles at the skill of the ship's captain, as he turns the boat around in a very narrow inlet called Trollfjord – it's hard to get excited about a maritime three-point turn, but morning TV's sweetheart Lorraine does her best.

This sits uncomfortably with one of the over-arching themes of the show, which is the pristine beauty of Norway's landscape, and the unrivalled majesty of its wildlife; you can't help wondering what damage is wrought on fragile ecosystems by taking massive cruise ships into tiny spaces purely so you can prove it's got the turning circle of a Fiat 500.

Especially when Lorraine's 'odyssey' is effectively a catalogue for the excursions you can take once your cruise ship has anchored in a more suitable surroundings – most of which have an ecological theme.

She sees orcas off the port bow, and visits the Sami and their reindeer herds, trying out the smoked meat inside a traditional Sami tent, agog at the concept of nose-to-tail eating.

By the time her Sami guide had entranced Lorraine with traditional singing, or loiking, you almost wonder if they are deliberately trolling her – to use the modern sense of the word, rather than the mythical Nordic sense – but it's all so charmingly lovely you can understand why Lorraine is so taken with the outdoorsy-ness of it all.

Then she's off to a seaweed business, harvesting straight from the sea before trying a prawn and seaweed salad, and then an early-morning trip to see some sea eagles.

These huge birds are fed frozen herring by Lorraine's guide this time, but she is quick to reassure us that 'ecologists' have okayed it.

And soon she's dropping in on Halvar and his farm-to-fork restaurant in the fastnesses of Norway's far north.

Although it looks like it's on the outskirts of the back of beyond, it's the type of restaurant where plates are anathema and you get 23 bite-sized dishes.

One of which is a lamb lollipop, which is served on a bed of charred lamb bones. Apparently, this is to “remind the diner of the animal's sacrifice”, which is a nice idea but surely the whole point of cooking is to remove all semblance of blood and sinew so you don't immediately turn vegetarian.

It's all very picturesque, but unlike the fjords, it's a show with hidden shallows. After all, one of the drawbacks of having your travelogues made as – and I'm quoting Channel 4 here - “brand-funded documentaries is that you can't do anything that might upset the brand.

Which is also why you get nothing that would really stop you in your tracks, put down the iron or file your tax return, and actually watch the TV. By making it so anodyne, you feel the sponsor is actually doing itself a disservice.

It's the TV equivalent of your computer screensaver – and you wouldn't spend an hour watching that, would you?