THE APPRENTICE, BBC1, 9pm
This week the task is party planning. The teams are each assigned a child who’d very much like a super-duper birthday party.
Their respective parents each have £2,000 to spend on the birthday bash and it’s up to the teams to create a party within that budget, and those who can create the best party while spending the least money will win.
But it’s not as simple as that: the teams can maximise their profit by urging the parents to spend a little bit more, pushing overpriced nonsense at them such as souvenir T-shirts or party bags. However, if any aspect of the party is a failure then the pushy parents can demand their money back.
One team must create a party for a little boy who likes outdoor adventure stuff, so that seems easy enough: just shove them all into a wood somewhere with rope bridges and climbing walls. But the boy's mother has a nut allergy so the last thing the team should is get a birthday cake coated in hazelnut paste, right?
The other team have a teenage girl and the project manager tries to urge horribly “girly” things upon her before she shyly points out that she’s actually quite sporty, and has no interest in lip gloss and ponies.
PEEP SHOW, C4, 10pm
Peep Show is brilliant and has been consistently brilliant apart from one poor series. If memory serves, it was the sixth where Mark tries to come to terms with being a father. That plot didn’t work and the show has wisely kept mentions of his son to a minimum since, although that might be because the baby’s mother was played by Olivia Colman and she’s now off in Broadchurch, weeping in an orange anorak.
So this series has brought back all the classic elements: Mark and Jez are living together again, both single, dissatisfied and arguing about the boiler’s settings. It is restored to its angsty, tetchy brilliance.
Viewers might have been surprised by last week’s revelations about Jeremy’s love life – with him suddenly announcing he had sex with a man, having always been strictly heterosexual apart from one woozy memory of a drugged encounter with Super Hans – and so this week attention turns to Mark’s affairs of the heart which are always far more predictable.
April, the girl Mark met in a shoe shop and pursued/stalked at her university, is launching a book. Mark uses this as an excuse to get in touch, but is discomfited when she asks if she can bring her husband along.
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