THE APPRENTICE, BBC1, 9pm
WHAT an age we live in! Previously, the BBC kept its two jewels, The Apprentice and The Bake Off, separate.
They’d use the two shows to tease out the late summer and autumn schedules and, as one season changed, so would the programmes. Bake Off would end as the leaves gently began to turn gold, and then The Apprentice would come stomping in, jerking leaves off their branches and down into the gutter!
But now, as they’re on rival channels, we have the unutterable delight of seeing the two series at once. The Apprentice starts tonight and I don’t need to describe the contestants as they’re the same pig-headed idiots we get every year.
Their challenge is to make and sell burgers. Someone can’t use a calculator. Someone wants to call their team “Penultimate”. Another labels the meat as organic when it’s clearly not – which is illegal. And one team get utterly humiliated. I love it!
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?, BBC1, 8pm
THIS series can sometimes get a bit repetitive, with celebrities uncovering relatives who worked as charladies and miners. They prettily sob and sigh for the harsh life fortune and progress has spared them. But tonight’s episode is something different entirely.
The guest is Ruby Wax – who is mercifully less abrasive than I remember her being in the 1990s – and she learns more about her parents. You know how the story is going to go when she says her parents were refugees who fled Austria in 1938. Yes, you know this won’t be a dainty, bland episode.
Her parents led troubled lives in the safety of America. Her mother witnessed the horror of Kristallnacht and was often subject to bouts of hysteria. Ruby wonders if this is where her own mental health problems began.
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