Personal Services Required (C4)

The car crash was so immediately apparent that it seems too obvious to accuse RDF, the makers of Personal Services Required, of all the usual charges of creating a manipulative, conflict-riven freak show. They’ve heard it all before anyway: they make Wife Swap. And anyway, Personal Services Required was funny. The producers found two strange company CEOs who ran their businesses from home; businesses that, if you believed them, were world-class and conquering but seemed a little more local and precarious. The CEOs would audition three would-be assistants to help them in the battle to maintain their domestic-based empires.

Suzi, the PR maven with designs on being the next Max Clifford, was loud and obnoxious. As a PR exercise, you had to wonder on what level she judged taking part in this could be construed a success. She treated her first “assistant” Anne Marie like a skivvy. “I don’t see it as part of my PA role,” Anne Marie said of Suzi’s demand that she peel a potato.

It was Anne Marie’s refusal to take Suzi’s daughter to work that drove Suzi over the edge, but you shared Anne Marie’s bafflement: how were they supposed to PR anything with phone leads trailing out of windows and no equipment. Nigel, Suzi’s “energy therapist” – as vexatious and punchable as you’d anticipate – noted that Suzi’s and Anne Marie’s energies were not “harmonised”.

In Cheshire Melanie was getting on equally badly with Peter, the strangest man on television this week, who didn’t want a PA as much as a “platonic wife” who would do his washing, iron his large white pants, wash out his strange minibuses with leopard-print seats and help to manage his “speed-dating company”. Somehow he had acquired three girlfriends – who are you? One question: why? – who the PA would be required to coordinate.

It started all smiles (Peter likes the ladies), but when Melanie was late he sat seething until her arrival, when she told him off for not being more accustomed to lateness. He tearfully confessed to being made to feel like he was in the wrong. Into the toxic brew was thrown would-be male PA Mikey, an apparently sweet chap Peter assumed to be gay. This assumption seemed to set off bizarre self-doubt within Peter: “Do you find me camp and possibly gay?” he asked. “I’m not gay, I’m not gay.” Mikey seemed alarmed. He hadn’t assumed anything.

It appeared that Melanie and Susie would get on: they both looked spookily similar and were not shy of boasting of knowing Max Clifford. But then they met Max and, horrors, Suzi confessed to being “in awe” of him. I hid behind the sofa out of sheer embarrassment, from where I heard Melanie, her would-be PA, demolish her: “You’re too self-righteous and need to be bought down a peg or two.” Mikey beguiled Peter and Suzi who, with her daughter, seemed to be in a kind of sexual thrall to him. Mikey got a job offer from both and turned them down. Wisely.

Marco’s Great British Feast (ITV1)

It might be unfair to glide over the smiles and ease of Celebrity MasterChef (Andi Peters, a clear early favourite with his gorgeous banana muffins), but it was superceded by the scowlfest of Marco’s Great British Feast, in which the chef Marco Pierre White glowered across the nation in his search to create a meal that would somehow define what it is to be British.

If MasterChef was competitive and colourful, MPW’s show was Deliverance-made-culinary with MPW stalking around the country terrifying animals and vegetables. Obsessing about “regional sourcing” and the like has made self-righteous, humourless fools of many.

The way MPW made rabbit casserole made one want to step in to protect the safety of carrots. He cooked a meal for a pub full of people – including one very rich fish pie – and his mood darkened when some food historians derided his unadventurous menu. He seemed tired and barely coherent, unsurprising as his round-UK odyssey seemed sort of pointless. He was only after some ingredients for starters and it was a journey he didn’t seem to enjoy much, apart from stopping to pat a donkey, his favourite animal – and landing a very impressive conga eel.

When MPW was preparing the recipes he eyed the camera as if he was intending to do the viewers some serious GBH. One sensed he would not let the snitty food historians sleep quietly in their beds: “They looked like the Addams Family,” he sneered. If it gets nasty, the historians should set some Highland cattle on him: this Billy Goat Gruff was terrified of them.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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