Syed Ahmed: Hot Air? Sky One

Tycoon ITV1

There is a growing consensus that business should pay for the safe disposal of its waste. But what about the makers of reality television shows about business?

There need to be even stricter laws governing their industry’s waste disposal, because as time goes by it is having quite a dangerous impact on our environment.

You see, the by-products of reality television shows about business are not the same as normal reality TV.

When a series of Big Brother ends, the contestants have a few days to appear in Heat magazine; after that they are loaded on to a municipal truck and taken to the dump. Some of them get sorted into the “plastics” bin, or “cardboard — interesting as”. The rest decompose quietly into the earth, leaving behind several sets of silicone breast implants like jellyfish stranded on a dirty beach.

But the contestants discarded from The Apprentice are not so easily disposed of. The waste this series produces is on a scale with Sellafield: it has a toxic, nuclear, half life. These contestants don’t just fade away, they glow with a greenish tinge of avarice and ambition.

So they have to go somewhere, it’s just that we have yet to find a way of safe containment. Putting them back on TV has proved ill-advised. Of the contestants from the first two series of The Apprentice, we have so far been exposed to Paul Torrisi’s Property Prophets, Saira Khan’s Temper Your Temper, James Max’s Property Pensions, and Ruth Badger’s Badger or Bust. You can almost imagine the recycling guidelines stuck on a pinboard in the kitchen of the Apprentice production offices: “Old contestants, especially the ‘characters’, should be recycled in a digital channel somewhere. And can everyone please remember that we don’t have the budget to spend on extra consonants, so the title of any recycled shows must be alliterated. Thank you.”

Last night Sky One did its bit with Hot Air? a one-off about Syed Ahmed, already past his sell-by date from Apprentice 2 . The result, like all the Apprentice knock-offs, feels wistful. The producers knew that we all got a lot of enjoyment out of watching Syed being humiliated in The Apprentice, and thought they’d repeat the exercise. It sounded as if it should have been a fun evening in, but it wasn’t. Something — or more precisely, someone — was missing.

Syed was there, of course, his familiar cockiness intact. And, as in The Apprentice , he had an innately comic scheme to sell: the Vortex Body Dryer. The camaraderie with other teammates was substituted by Syed’s bullying of an elderly engineer called Peter.

What else did we need? Oh yes, Sir Alan Sugar. For all his faults, Sir Alan really is televisual gold. Without him, Hot Air? did not seem to have much to live for. Without The Apprentice ’s deadline of a job offer, without Sir Alan’s magisterial put-downs, we were just watching a bumptious young Asian bloke, naked and wet, stand in front of a hair dryer. Hot Air? was the sad spectacle of the boy expelled from school, still larking about, but with no one to watch or care.

The show did try to replicate Sir Alan, by wheeling out Duncan Bannatyne — a so-called dragon from BBC Two’s entrepreneurial series Dragons’ Den. Spawn of business reality TV show crossed with spawn of business reality TV show — oh, the horrible, incestuous mutations! As if this wasn’t bad enough, at exactly the same time on ITV1, Peter Jones, yet another entrepreneur from Dragons’ Den, was doing a full-on impersonation of Sir Alan in his new show Tycoon. This is such a shameless rip-off of The Apprentice that it makes me wonder whether Mr Jones made his millions selling dodgy Rolexes.

Didn’t business invent patents to avoid this sort of thing? I mean, at least when ITV nicked the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing format, for Dancing on Ice, they had the courtesy to put a pair of skates on it.

Tycoon borrows brazenly from The Apprentice, including the tremulous, to-camera shots of the contestants saying: “I want to be the next Tycoon.” Mr Jones even seems to have dug up Jo from Apprentice 2, or a woman very like her: frizzy-haired, manic-eyed and tearful. Like I said, you can’t recycle this kind of thing.

What we need is to stop Apprentice effluvia from mutating, breeding and spreading across our screens. If someone invented a way to do that, they would make their fortune.

Marr can laugh at himself

The final part of Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain was the one duff note in an otherwise great series — I think it was that the past 15 years don’t feel like a far-enough country to merit this kind of historical sweep. But it was to Marr’s credit that one of the best jokes was on himself. After the fall of Saddam, Marr cut to a clip of himself in his old job, as the BBC’s political editor, giving his on-the-spot verdict on the Iraq War. He said that Tony Blair has become “a stronger Prime Minister as a result”.

BBC old guard living in fear

Wanted: a new presenter to host Crimewatch. Also reported missing in the same incident, a white male aged 59 who goes by the name of Nick Ross, last heard of resigning from Crimewatch after 23 years. But supergrasses inside the sinister “BBC” organisation say it may be related to the recent disappearance of Moira Stuart. Police are searching for a corporate psycho who targets anyone with a few wrinkles. Paxman, be very afraid.

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