How obsessed do you think you already are with the forthcoming series of The Apprentice (which starts on Wednesday)? Pretty damn obsessed, I bet. I know I am. I’ve read all the advance articles, mucked around on the BBC website, read Sir Alan Sugar’s book (and actually seen the first new episode, got a bit over-excited and had a small argument with Sir Alan at the press conference, but that’s not really a quotidian experience).

However obsessed I might be with The Apprentice, though, I could never be obsessed enough to have found The Apprentice: Tim in the Firing Line (Sunday, BBC Two) in any way interesting. Now that’s a fairly startling turn of events. One thing reality TV shows never do is show you how the contestants fare after the reality TV show finishes — despite it being the bit all viewers are insane with curiosity to see. Nasty Nick after he left Big Brother, Paul Danan after Celebrity Love Island, George Galloway after Celebrity Big Brother — the minutes, hours and days they spend coping with the after-effects of their TV exposure are all lost. So in reality TV terms, to have given the winner of last year’s Apprentice, Tim, a follow-up show is like the first footage of the afterlife.

Alas, to the inevitable consternation of several major religions, it turns out that the afterlife is a very dull BBC Two documentary with practically no Sir Alan in it at all. Presumably, being rich, Sir Alan has his own private afterlife sorted out, one to which we will never be allowed access.

We watched Tim make a couple of phonecalls, wear nicer suits, work a 70-hour week and generally sacrifice his life to capitalism — while his sad-eyed four-year-old was filmed looking out of a window for him, never to see him come home before midnight. The only good bit was when Sir Alan tutored Tim’s PR skills by holding an imaginary press conference, and took questions from Ugly Women Weekly and The Tosser’s Gazette.

I would have liked to have seen that sequence go on a little longer. I can imagine Sir Alan having a rip-roaring fight with the imaginary stringer from the imaginary Tosser’s Gazette, and possibly shoeing him in his imaginary nuts.

Surprisingly for a shonky Channel 4 documentary on the Celts, The Celts (Saturday) had no footage of battle scene re-creators in tartan trousers running at each other, shouting, swirling Celtic Moods panpipes or bearded actors pretending to do Druidic sacrifice in a bog. Oh no, hang on — it did. All the time. Everywhere.

God, you’ve got to hate shonky Channel 4 documentaries on the Celts. Ginger warriors blah blah blah, intricate metalwork blah blah blah, left clinging to the fringes of Western Europe yadda yadda. After two interminable hours, with no fresh research or scientific spin, the viewer went away with very little. We saw a re-creation of a post-battle doorway, decorated with the severed heads of the Celts’ enemies — a fresh look I’ve yet to see on any makeover show.

There was also a sketch of another one of the Celts’ post-battle décor ideas — a huge wooden framework, in which the serried ranks of the defeated dead would be nailed up, headless, and left to rot. Around a month in, when all that was left was bones and tatters of fur, it looked exactly like most parties at London Fashion Week.

I also enjoyed seeing the burial chamber of a Celtic king who was buried with a 70-gallon container of wine, and laid out on a solid bronze bed. Presumably he was too pissed to notice how uncomfortable it was. Or maybe he’d died of being uncomfortable, and they’d just back-filled his bedroom with topsoil. But no mistake — this was a pointlessly “zappy” documentary, which deserved to have a load of battle-scene re-creators in tartan trousers run at it, shouting.

The South Bank Show (Sunday, ITV1) “did” Japanese anime and manga — a fairly cursory trot around the subject, but you can’t really complain when Melvyn Bragg introduces a show that has footage of a giant rat having sex with a cartoon spacewoman.

I tell you what, though — they showed footage of one anime film, Steamboy, that I feel we will all want to see. It is beautiful, lush, rural Victorian Britain. Birds twitter in the trees of this elegantly animated green and pleasant land. Then an evil, moustachioed inventor comes screaming across the fields in a souped-up and terrifying steam-roller of death. He is pursuing a Cockney urchin, who is trying to make his escape on a mutant penny-farthing — until he gets crushed between the steam- roller and an oncoming steam train. In just 30 seconds I realised it was my most favourite film. It made The League of Gentlemen look like Last of The Summer Wine. With the sound down. In your nan’s house.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• Alicia Keys lets rip
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes