THE APPRENTICE, BBC1, 9pm
THIS week’s task is my favourite. It’s the one where the candidates are given a list of items, and an old London A-Z, and set loose to find them all. Whichever team manages to get the most, whilst spending the least, will win – with some big penalties incurred for missing items.
The items on tonight’s shopping list are all connected to Alan Sugar as it’s his 70th birthday. Some are obscure, like the “scarlet doeskin” he wears in the House of Lords, and others are commonplace, like a Tottenham Hotspur scarf, while others are quirky and collectible, like an old Amstrad computer. There’s also a Jewish pastry, so you’ll wonder why they all go rushing and puffing into a Turkish supermarket to find it …
As usual, the women argue; this week they even argue about who’s been arguing! Every week I shudder at what a bad example they’re setting young girls then I realise no-one is using this chaotic mob, male or female, as role models.
MAN DOWN, C4, 10pm
TONIGHT’S episode isn’t as brilliantly mad and funny as last week’s series opener, but I suppose you can’t have everything.
Much of the show is devoted to flashbacks of Dan’s childhood. These have been prompted by the discovery of his schoolboy diaries (which his mum enjoys reading out to the other pensioners at her retirement home) and it moves Dan to try to provide a similarly happy childhood for “Simon Bridges”.
But what made Dan’s boyhood so wonderfully happy? It was a bear. A lovely bear he took for walks, snuggled up to in bed, and even took baths with. So why were his Mum and Nesta always barging in to snatch the bear away from him? What was so wrong with Dan’s bear? When you find out, and when Dan suddenly remembers, it provides a brilliant, screeching, embarrassing finale.
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