Reality Bitesize: The TV catch-up IndependentThe Apprentice
The story so far...
Lord Sugar's job hunt is the TV equivalent of the children's game The Farmer Wants a Wife, except that we don't all get to pat everyone's favourite Labour peer at the end of it. This series has been somewhat bereft of the characters and witticisms of previous offerings (nothing yet to rival Sugar's Stradivarius/bongos simile of last year, nor the revelation that he used to be trainee bugler in the Jewish Lads' Brigade) but Sugar continues to preside and crow over his crop of obsequious lumps like an angry teddy bear who has watched too much Blackadder. And that's enjoyable enough.
The contestants have so far made their own adverts and their own sausages, both of which were mainly padded out with sawdust; they've managed and marketed fashion boutiques ("Stella, stand in the window and beckon them in") and they've induced one of Planet Earth's most heart-rending spectacles: Nick's exasperated face, the one where his eyes roll back in his head and his mouth looks like an upside-down U.
Heroes/villainsIt's a rather uninspiring herd this year – with no one quite odious or inept enough, there are always plenty of pretenders to Ruth Badger's throne. Manchester's most successful glove puppet, Alex Epstein, whose on-screen soubriquet was "Unemployed Head of Communications", provided some light relief with his bombastic yammerings and claim that he had originally conceived the idea of the bendy bus.
Removing all the other bores leaves us with Stuart "The Brand" Baggs – whose flair for litotes has raised him to practically a demigod in my eyes – and Liz Locke, who is just really fit. And the closest to normal that anyone on The Apprentice has come.
What happens next...Predicting the outcome of The Apprentice is like watching US election results roll in – there are some special swing states that make all the difference. One of these is my favourite episode, which airs on Wednesday, broadly known as The One Where They Have to Flog a Load of Old Crap As Quickly As Possible.
