When Dick Cheney accidentally shoots a friend while out hunting in Texas, and Al Gore becomes such a toast of the Sundance Film Festival that there is now even talk of his running again for the White House in 2008 (if he can buy up enough of Florida’s voting machines by then), you wonder if it is possible to invent anything that is more implausible than real life.

Now along comes Martin, one of five candidates in Five’s new series, Selling Yourself, to tell us that the reason he quit his previous work and entered this knockout beauty contest to win a job as an estate agent is because he “now wants a job with prestige”. Ha ha ha!

The old ones really are the best, aren’t they? The only way Martin’s quest for the respect of his peers could be any more implausibly adrift would be if he’d said he wanted to become a journalist.

The man offering the job was Vito Rausa, a big cheese at a West London estate agency, who said, “This job is not about selling bricks and mortar, this job is about selling a dream . . . I want somebody who I feel wants to be the best.” This makes Rausa stand apart from most other bosses of West London estate agents, who mostly seem to be looking for young men who wear tie-knots the size of tricorns and whose hair is so alarmingly well lubricated that their personal accident insurance policy becomes void if they stray within three metres of a naked flame.

Selling Yourself — in that fashionable manner of modern television commissioning, in which almost every new programme is the bastard love-child of other successful shows — is The Apprentice sleeping with The X Factor, with Dragons’ Den chipping in to contest paternity.

Helping Rausa to choose his new employee are two job interview experts, who also conform to the swiftly established Simon Cowell stereotype favoured by The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den: unsmiling, hatchet-faced, humourless and needlessly aggressive. They aim to give the impression that they don’t use knives when they eat: they cut their food with their tongues.

Just as all punters on reality shows now believe they know how to act for the cameras (with startled over-enthusiasm, as if someone is applying a cattle-prod to their genitals: they talk like Muhammad Ali before he entered the ring, only without Ali’s ability to deliver on his claim that “I am the greatest”), so the judges, too, feel there is an established template.

The worry is that the surly attitude of TV reality show judges will become so commonplace that you won’t be able even to place an order in a sandwich bar without getting grief from the server behind the counter (“Chicken? Do you think that was an impressive sandwich to ask me for? No lettuce? No coleslaw? What were you thinking? I’m sorry, but to me you’re just not a natural sandwich-eater. That’s why I’m directing you towards soup. Or maybe a fruit plate”).

The set? Iconic Eames black-leather-and-aluminium desk chairs, big glass table, Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, Le Corbusier chaise longue, all planted around an airy, glass-walled loft space, like a photoshoot in a late 1990s edition of Wallpaper magazine. Tension is drip-fed into the show via a soundtrack that makes a nod to those of The Apprentice and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Striving for its own who’s-turn-is-it-to-be-shafted catchphrase, Selling Yourself swaps The Apprentice’s “You’re fired!” for “The job is not yours”.

Selling Yourself is a neatly mixed formula of familiar reality-show elements, enhanced by its reaching a happy (for one candidate) conclusion at the end of each week’s episode, instead of having to wait for months for Donald Trump or Alan Sugar to find their new recruit.

But this kind of television cross-fertilisation is now so rampant that in a few years’ time some other commissioning editor will borrow an idea from Who Do You Think You Are? and transfer it to television programmes, launching a series that traces the genealogy of television shows.

You could see the thinking behind Love in a Foreign Climate (ITV1), a warm documentary that followed three Englishwomen who found love abroad (“going long haul meant more than just a lengthy flight”), what with it being St Valentine’s Day and all. But wasn’t it somehow against the spirit of the film actually to broadcast it on St Valentine’s night? You know, celebrating the power of romance by broadcasting a film about romance on the one night of the year when romantic people are supposed to be too busy being romantic with each other to watch telly?

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