The minute Mark Butcher was selected for Just The Two Of Us, the pro-celebrity karaoke championship unfolding nightly on BBC One, the bookmakers installed him as favourite. Now that’s what you call blistering confidence — and broadly shared across the nation, you would have to say, in the Gough/Ramprakash era, when people are resoundingly of the opinion that there is no limit to what England cricketers can achieve, as long as you keep them off a cricket pitch.

Alternatively, of course, the bookmakers may simply have observed that Butcher had been drawn to sing with Sarah Brightman, the 23 million record-selling soprano, rather than with, for instance, Carol Decker, from T’Pau, who, along with Tony Christie, looked very much the short straw among the professional partners — a hunch that proved accurate when, in the company of the hapless Gregg Wallace from Masterchef, Decker was decked in the first round. T’Pau? T’Phut, more like.

Still, “Butch”, as I think we’ll feel increasingly comfortable calling him as the week goes on, gave a handy account of himself in a poised version of Crowded House’s Weather With You. If anything — if I may essay a little musical criticism of my own here — I thought Butch’s voice was more suited to the material than his slightly eerie partner’s stagey vibrato. At this rate, it’ll be Butch asking the searching questions of Brightman rather than the other way around, so all credit to the big man for that.

With Darren Gough in the audience, it was good to hear Butch pay tribute to him and Mark Ramprakash for “putting cricket on the map”, in the sense of demonstrating that it isn’t just “dull people standing around in a field”. Not a bit of it. Some of those people standing around in that field are relatively interesting.

Butch certainly interested the judges on this occasion, not least Stewart Copeland, the former drummer with The Police. Part of what Copeland said he liked about Butcher’s chutzpah was that, alone among the eight celebrity contestants who started, the Surrey captain was “not a professional entertainer of any kind”. Spoken like a true cricket-lover.

And what a dream for Butch to find his game subject to critical scrutiny by Tito Jackson, who as well as being a bona fide pop legend in a bowler hat, could smoothly pass for Muhammad Ali in long shot. Come the marking, Tito warmly awarded Butch (in Tito’s own words) “a healthy five”. That’s five out of ten, you understand. You dread to think what constitutes a sickly score at home with the Jacksons.

Nevertheless, Butch and Brightman topped the table at the end of the judging phase, along with Natasha Hamilton from Atomic Kitten and someone I’d never heard of, and the cricketer sailed through on the public phone-vote. Given that the field still contains Julia Bradbury from Watchdog, at least one tone-deaf geezer from EastEnders and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s mum, you’d back Butch to be carrying the flag for interesting cricketers for a few nights yet.

In keeping with a ritual that has become as integral a part of this time of the year as dumping your Christmas tree in a neighbour’s skip, Five is taking us nightly to the World’s Strongest Man competition in Sanya, China. There, in the only sporting contest where the expression “pulling up trees” (Christmas or otherwise) has a literal, rather than purely figurative, application, men with implausibly large muscle groups are dragging lorries along with their teeth in front of impeccably uniformed audiences waving thunder sticks.

Timeless stuff. Nevertheless, at the risk of sparking a controversy or even a late-night visit from someone the size of a bungalow, aren’t some of these elaborate, TV-ready tests of strength so contrived as to be pointless — and to invite mockery, even? Impressive as it always is to see a Finn in a leotard carry a white hatchback 30 metres against the clock, wouldn’t it be simpler to drive the thing? And hats off, obviously, to anyone who can hoist a beer keg across distance without bursting the keg or themselves. But, in the end, isn’t that what the landlord is for?

Still, even with these reservations, it ill-behoves any of us to turn our noses up at an opportunity to see, in action, the likes of Elbrus Nigmatullin. He sounds like a prescription drug (indeed, I’m convinced I once took Nigmatullin three times a day for five days, or, at any rate, until the infection cleared up), but he is, in fact, the strongest man in Russia. Quite possibly he is also the strongest woman in Russia, but if so, no one is saying anything about it.

Because he is relatively short, the commentators, not unpredictably, insist on calling Nigmatullin “the pint-sized Russian” when surely, at the very least, he’s the full, four-litre, jug-style carton. I mean, he’s small, but, boy, is he broad and you’d have a hell of a job squeezing him on to the door of your fridge. Some respect, please.