Wednesday

The Apprentice

9pm, BBC One

Eighty-six years on from the first episode of The Apprentice, as a new series begins, few could blame Alan Sugar if he suddenly screamed a witty spin on the show’s beloved catchphrase – “I’m tired!” – then sprinted across the boardroom and, before anyone could stop him, launched himself, headfirst, crashing out through the high window, to spiral prettily to earth in one of those exciting looking-down-on-the-skyscraper-rooftops shots they like so much, beard gleaming in the last red rays of the London sunset. Maybe, at the last minute, a glorious big AMSTRAD parachute would open behind him, like it did for Roger Moore. Maybe not.

Actually, though, if anything, ninety-seven years on, The Sugar Man looks as ready for action as ever. But look close, and there is a certain growing restlessness in his eyes. He seems bored, edgy, filled with a hopped-up, antsy ennui: “I’m totally wired!” It is very much as though having to go through all this again, with yet another bunch of metro-berks, is precisely the last thing he wants to do.

One-hundred-and-four seasons on, The Apprentice is now into its Thunderbirds Are Go era. Where, in years gone by, the candidates were all charming wooden puppets and you could see all the wires sticking out of their heads, these days we get these soulless CGI approximations that seem to have been quickly knocked up using some 2008 software package by a sweatshop of tired 12-year-olds on a tight deadline and a low budget. As they mouth the obligatory hate-me-hate-me nonsense, it’s like listening to a tired AI algorithm that’s been fed a finite amount of words, then ordered to spew back as many gitty sentences as possible until someone pulls its plug. Among this year’s declarations come, “I’ve got my own law firm, assisting landlords dealing with problem tenants and evicting them”; “I’m gonna throw people under the bus, I’m gonna throw people over the bus, I’m gonna get ON the bus”; and “I have Size 10 feet.”

As the series begins, The Apprentice voiceover god makes one of his rare, touching, oddly punctuated attempts at pretending the show has any kind of relevancy: “British Business. Is in flux. The future. Far from certain.” But as soon as that Brexit build-up is delivered, it is forgotten, and we’re back into the same old Generation Game routine, watching them trying to make burgers and running around shouting while holding meat.

Faced with this, you have to make your own entertainment, or you go insane. Or both. After 530 years in the role, Alan Sugar’s faithful faceless secretary has a weird and sly private game going on. She’s realised that, if you mutter it fast enough, you can make the words “Rod Stewart” sound very like “Lord Sugar,” and now she slips it in whenever she can: “Rod Stewart will see you now.”

As for Sugar, Karen and Big Claude, they look close to snapping, too. For a second, at the end of episode one, I felt sure Sugar was just going to fire everyone, then give away all of his money – all except for a tiny seed fund of £600, with which he, Karen and Claude would run out into the streets barefoot, making burgers from mud and flogging them themselves, seeing if they could rebuild the multi-billion pound empire from scratch all over again, like they did when the world was young and they were gamblers. One last make or break mission. A kind of entrepreneurial version of The Wild Bunch. Maybe next year.

Sunday

The Last Post

9pm, BBC One

Of course you want to watch a six-hour drama about the lives and loves of British Royal Military Police and their womenfolk in Aden during the 1960s. Who wouldn’t? This new series was created by Peter Moffat, previously the writer behind the fine Criminal Justice, the BBC legal drama that was remade by HBO as the excellent The Night Of. But don’t go expecting any of that good stuff. This is very much in Sunday night mode: a bit Downton, a bit Midwife, a bit that one with Suranne Jones as a First World War nurse, a bit the Channel 4 one about The Raj, and..it’s a bit tedious. Jessica Raine, who must be pining for a contemporary role, offers the closest thing to life as Alison Laithwaite, restless, sweltering wife of Lt Ed (Stephen Campbell Moore). She’s been having an affair with the departing captain, and she and the whole base await the arrival of the new commander and his wife. Meanwhile, the local uprising begins to stir.

Monday

Curb Your Enthusiasm

10pm, Sky Atlantic

The Return Of The King Whinge. It’s been six years since the last series of Curb ended with Larry David exiling himself to Paris, and, without his shining example and advice on matters of etiquette and social interaction, it’s been pretty, pretty hard trying to make it through the day. Put it this way: Larry’s been offscreen so long we’ve never even seen him dealing with an Uber driver. The questions of where he’s been, what he’s been doing, and, crucially, what’s been annoying him are pressing – but sadly, no advance preview material was available for this long-awaited ninth series (unless you count the episodes leaked online as part of the recent HBO hack). But we know a few things. Larry is back in LA; he has a new project on the go; all the regular cast return, along with new guests like Bryan Cranston; and, according to co-star Jeff Garlin, “the storyline is kind of crazy...” Whatever’s coming, watching LD getting to grips with America’s Trumpian era will be a trip worth taking.

Tuesday

The Deuce

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Last week’s pilot did an excellent job of laying out the seedy Times Square 1971 milieu and introducing a raft of characters, but with episode two, David Simon’s series begins to focus, and really begins to flow. The main subject – the rise of the pornography industry – comes into view, as the women working the street have brushes with the still-illegal blue movie business, and Candy/ Eileen (Maggie Gyllenhall) gets ideas as she glimpses her first porn set. Meanwhile, some of Simon’s abiding themes – the plights and rights of the worker; the way money works to change a city – emerge, as her story is paralleled with a Sopranos-esque plot that sees bar manager Vincent (James Franco) hatch a scheme between local labourers and the mob. Littered with beautiful/gritty moments (cops rounding up the working girls, then ordering Chinese food for them in jail) and bursting with difficult ideas, this is the most fascinating drama being made anywhere at the moment. And if there’s an actor doing better and braver work than Gyllenhaal right now, they’re doing a good job keeping it secret.

Thursday

Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail

10pm, BBC Four

A repeat for this harsh, two-part documentary from 2011. Another in Theroux’s loose series of prison films, we follow him into Miami County Jail, a detention centre where most of the inmates are still actually awaiting trial. Many prisoners here, then, are still theoretically innocent, yet they are held in an unimaginably volatile environment that often breaks down into outright brutality. As Theroux wanders the noisy, dingy corridors, inmates and jailers alike are remarkably frank. Extortion is commonplace and, on the fifth and sixth floors, where the most dangerous convicts dwell in cage-like cells and the overstretched guards leave them to their own devices, life is governed by a gladiatorial code, with fights between prisoners for status and even food. The veneer of control is very thin indeed. As Theroux uses his quizzical, sheep’s clothing tactics to peer into dark corners, it’s eye opening stuff, but not exactly feelgood.

Friday

Porridge

9.30pm, BBC One

No. None of us are fit to lick Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s typewriter, but this is tragically wrong. Stripping one of the British sitcom’s key themes – characters trapped together by life – to its essence, the original 1970s Porridge, set inside the vital, universal confinement of Slade Prison, remains one the high peaks of the genre. Clement and La Frenais’s scripts were all crackling lines, wickedly and poignantly observed human interaction and surreptitious social critique. Above all, though, it was the way Ronnie Barker played the lines: a man in full flight, put his performance as Norman Stanley Fletcher alongside anything else he ever did, and it’s as if though you’re watching a different actor – the Brando of Britcom. But where Barker just flowed, everything in this pale sequel/remake is just forced. The show underscores its redundancy by encouraging Kevin Bishop into a bizarre, distracting Barker/Fletch imitation as “Fletch’s grandson,” then saws its other foot off by casting poor Mark Bonnar as a Mr McKay stand-in “Scottish Warder.” This ain’t Porridge. This is barely muesli.

Wednesday

The Apprentice

9pm, BBC One

Eighty-six years on from the first episode of The Apprentice, as a new series begins, few could blame Alan Sugar if he suddenly screamed a witty spin on the show’s beloved catchphrase – “I’m tired!” – then sprinted across the boardroom and, before anyone could stop him, launched himself, headfirst, crashing out through the high window, to spiral prettily to earth in one of those exciting looking-down-on-the-skyscraper-rooftops shots they like so much, beard gleaming in the last red rays of the London sunset. Maybe, at the last minute, a glorious big AMSTRAD parachute would open behind him, like it did for Roger Moore. Maybe not.

Actually, though, if anything, 97 years on, The Sugar Man looks as ready for action as ever. But look close, and there is a certain growing restlessness in his eyes. He seems bored, edgy, filled with a hopped-up, antsy ennui: “I’m totally wired!” It is very much as though having to go through all this again, with yet another bunch of metro-berks, is precisely the last thing he wants to do.

One-hundred-and-four seasons on, The Apprentice is now into its Thunderbirds Are Go era. Where, in years gone by, the candidates were all charming wooden puppets and you could see all the wires sticking out of their heads, these days we get these soulless CGI approximations that seem to have been quickly knocked up using some 2008 software package by a sweatshop of tired 12-year-olds on a tight deadline and a low budget. As they mouth the obligatory hate-me-hate-me nonsense, it’s like listening to a tired AI algorithm that’s been fed a finite amount of words, then ordered to spew back as many gitty sentences as possible until someone pulls its plug. Among this year’s declarations come, “I’ve got my own law firm, assisting landlords dealing with problem tenants and evicting them”; “I’m gonna throw people under the bus, I’m gonna throw people over the bus, I’m gonna get ON the bus”; and “I have size 10 feet.”

As the series begins, The Apprentice voiceover god makes one of his rare, touching, oddly punctuated attempts at pretending the show has any kind of relevancy: “British Business. Is in flux. The future. Far from certain.” But as soon as that Brexit build-up is delivered, it is forgotten, and we’re back into the same old Generation Game routine, watching them trying to make burgers and running around shouting while holding meat.

Faced with this, you have to make your own entertainment, or you go insane. Or both. After 530 years in the role, Alan Sugar’s faithful faceless secretary has

a weird and sly private game

going on. She’s realised that,

if you mutter it fast enough, you can make the words “Rod Stewart” sound very like “Lord Sugar,” and now she slips it in whenever she can: “Rod Stewart will see you now.”

As for Sugar, Karen and Big Claude, they look close to snapping, too. For a second, at the end of episode one, I felt sure Sugar was just going to fire everyone, then give away all of his money – all except for a tiny seed fund of £600, with which he, Karen and Claude would run out into the streets barefoot, making burgers from mud and flogging them themselves, seeing if they could rebuild the multi-billion pound empire from scratch

all over again, like they did when the world was young and they were gamblers. One last make-or-break mission. A kind of entrepreneurial version of

The Wild Bunch.

Maybe next year.

Sunday

The Last Post

9pm, BBC One

Of course you want to watch a six-hour drama about the lives and loves of British Royal Military Police and their womenfolk in Aden during the 1960s. Who wouldn’t? This new series was created by Peter Moffat, previously the writer behind the fine Criminal Justice, the BBC legal drama that was remade by HBO as the excellent The Night Of. But don’t go expecting any of that good stuff. This is very much in Sunday night mode: a bit Downton, a bit Midwife, a bit that one with Suranne Jones as a First World War nurse, a bit the Channel 4 one about The Raj, and ... it’s a bit tedious. Jessica Raine, who must be pining for a contemporary role, offers the closest thing to life as Alison Laithwaite, restless, sweltering wife of Lt Ed (Stephen Campbell Moore). She’s been having an affair with the departing captain, and she and the whole base await the arrival of the new commander and his wife. Meanwhile, the local uprising begins to stir.

Monday

Curb Your Enthusiasm

10pm, Sky Atlantic

The Return Of The King Whinge. It’s been six years since the last series of Curb ended with Larry David exiling himself to Paris, and, without his shining example and advice on matters of etiquette and social interaction, it’s been pretty, pretty hard trying to make it through the day. Put it this way: Larry’s been offscreen so long we’ve never even seen him dealing with an Uber driver. The questions of where he’s been, what he’s been doing, and, crucially, what’s been annoying him are pressing – but sadly, no advance preview material was available for this long-awaited ninth series (unless you count the episodes leaked online as part of the recent HBO hack). But we know a few things. Larry is back in LA; he has a new project on the go; all the regular cast return, along with new guests like Bryan Cranston; and, according to co-star Jeff Garlin, “the storyline is kind of crazy ...” Whatever’s coming, watching LD getting to grips with America’s Trumpian era will be a trip worth taking.

Tuesday

The Deuce

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Last week’s pilot did an excellent job of laying out the seedy Times Square 1971 milieu and introducing a raft of characters, but with episode two, David Simon’s series begins to focus, and really begins to flow. The main subject – the rise of the pornography industry – comes into view, as the women working the street have brushes with the still-illegal blue movie business, and Candy/ Eileen (Maggie Gyllenhall) gets ideas as she glimpses her first porn set. Meanwhile, some of Simon’s abiding themes – the plights and rights of the worker; the way money works to change a city – emerge, as her story is paralleled with a Sopranos-esque plot that sees bar manager Vincent (James Franco) hatch a scheme between local labourers and the mob. Littered with beautiful/gritty moments and bursting with difficult ideas, this is the most fascinating drama being made anywhere at the moment. And if there’s an actor doing better and braver work than Gyllenhaal right now, they’re doing a good job keeping it secret.

Thursday

Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail

10pm, BBC Four

A repeat for this harsh, two-part documentary from 2011. Another in Theroux’s loose series of prison films, we follow him into Miami County Jail, a detention centre where most of the inmates are still actually awaiting trial. Many prisoners here, then, are still theoretically innocent, yet they are held in an unimaginably volatile environment that often breaks down into outright brutality. As Theroux wanders the noisy, dingy corridors, inmates and jailers alike are remarkably frank. Extortion is commonplace and, on the fifth and sixth floors, where the most dangerous convicts dwell in cage-like cells and the overstretched guards leave them to their own devices, life is governed by a gladiatorial code, with fights between prisoners for status and even food. The veneer of control is very thin indeed. As Theroux uses his quizzical, sheep’s clothing tactics to peer into dark corners, it’s eye opening stuff, but not exactly feelgood.

Friday

Porridge

9.30pm, BBC One

No. None of us are fit to lick Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s typewriter, but this is tragically wrong. Stripping one of the British sitcom’s key themes – characters trapped together by life – to its essence, the original 1970s Porridge, set inside the vital, universal confinement of Slade Prison, remains one the high peaks of the genre. Clement and La Frenais’s scripts were all crackling lines, wickedly and poignantly observed human interaction and surreptitious social critique. Above all, though, it was the way Ronnie Barker played the lines – he was the Brando of Britcom. But where Barker just flowed, everything in this pale sequel/remake is just forced. The show underscores its redundancy by encouraging Kevin Bishop into a bizarre, distracting Barker/Fletch imitation as “Fletch’s grandson,” then saws its other foot off by casting poor Mark Bonnar as a Mr McKay stand-in “Scottish Warder.” This ain’t Porridge. This is barely muesli.

Saturday

Basquiat: Rage To Riches

9pm, BBC Two

The ingenuous, short-lived graffiti king of New York’s 1980s Downtown art scene, it has been 29 years since Julian Basquiat died from a drug overdose. By the time of his death, with the aid of influential boosters, he had become a star, but it’s hard to imagine he could ever have predicted the kind of prices his works would one day attract – this year, one of his 1982 Skull paintings sold at Sotheby’s for $110,500,000, a new record for an American artist. This profile draws a portrait of the painter as a young man, a handsome and charismatic presence, yet also a fragile personality, who grew up surrounded by racism, plunged himself into the funky punk and hip-hop cultures of his city as the 1980s dawned, and then was propelled into a different world of cash, celebrity and drugs. Basquiat’s two sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, who have never before talked about their brother for a TV documentary, contribute interviews, alongside friends, lovers and fellow artists.

LAST WEEK….

There’s a chance this already exists in a private video booth in some cosplay dungeon, and I’ve just missed it in the crowd, but I wouldn’t mind one day seeing an exciting mini-series set in the Star Trek universe exploring the heroic history of Star Fleet’s uniform designers. Specifically, a plotline exploring the urgent question of just who dropped just what into the Chief Fashion Officer’s Kool Aid around 2265, the year we first caught up with Kirk, Spock, Bones and company in the original Trek.

The latest addition to the boldly going franchise, Star Trek: Discovery, which beamed down courtesy of Netflix last week, is set one decade before Captain Kirk’s crew set out on their adventures. It looks pretty decent, with a vibrant cast, if a bit predictably dark-grim-war-in-spacey. But, to be frank, the uniforms haven’t really moved along the catwalk too much from the drab blue Thunderbirdsy boiler suits that distinguished the team in the previous square-jawed prequel, Star Trek: Enterprise, which, if I’m keeping my stardates straight (a job even Spock was finding tricky by the end), was set 100 years before Kirk’s time.

Sure, these new/old Discovery boiler suits are a little snugger and sleeker, and look a tad more rubbery, giving and hard-wearing – just the sort of utilitarian, sponge-down, stain-resistant combo, in fact, you’d probably want to zip yourself into if you were exploring the cold, strange vastnesses of space while being harried by weird and warlike enemies who are probably just misunderstood and have their own problems, if you’d just all sit down and talk about it.

But given we’re only ten years away from the Kirk era, you have to wonder: what the hell happened next? How did they make the quantum leap from this square Military Dynorod In Space look to the bright, swinging Whisky A Go Go styles rocked by Uhura and the gang?

It seems a stretch, but I guess it’s not so far-fetched. If you were to compare archive photographs of Carnaby Street circa 1956 and 1968, you would see a similarly radical change, and I’d like to think that similar dynamics are in play in the Trek cosmos. In the fantasy fashion space opera running in my mind, the climactic scene is much like the moment in Mad Men when Roger Sterling took LSD for the first time. Having let the sugar lump dissolve on his tongue, our square-jawed Star Fleet Chief Of Costume plunges into a crystal Pop Art vortex of hyper awareness and self-realisation, then wakes to find a note he wrote to himself from the very depths of his trip: “Vibrating Primary Colours! Mid-calf trousers with flares! High-top Beatle Boots! Miniskirts! Miniskirts!! MINISKIRTS!!!”

The ominous question, of course, is, after this bold breakthrough, what terrible calamity occurred in Trek society to cause them to regress to the hideous smart onesies worn by Jean-Luc Picard’s band in Star Trek: The Next Generation? A chilling vision of the future, indeed.