Executive decisions

TV REVIEW:  The Apprentice TV3 Monday, Lipstick JungleLiving, Monday, Griff Rhys Jones on Anger  BBC2, Tuesday, Off the RailsRTÉ1, Wednesday

FRUITS FROM THE SUITS! Bananas, apples and oranges! And the gentleman in the saturated pinstripe jacket and the uncomfortable-looking tie is selling it by the soggy box-load for a paltry 100 bucks.

Well, well, TV3 has nabbed The Apprentice, the hugely popular hire'n'fire show, the UK version of which annually sees Sir Alan Sugar stepping out of his helicopter long enough to torture a handful of wannabe entrepreneurial types, boost the Beeb's ratings and eventually hire some chirpy chappy to wash the polystyrene coffee cups in the basement of a megalithic office-block.

Now, however, we have a spoonful of our very own Sugar: businessman Bill Cullen, self-made millionaire, sell-out author, the boy from Summerhill who was flogging Christmas decorations on the streets of Dublin when he was six years old and now, 60 years later, is estimated to be worth more than €120 million. Cullen, an affable bloke in a two-tone shirt, appears to share Sugar's penchant for university-of-life candidates rather than their mortarboard-balancing rivals, with the first casualty to face Cullen's firing finger being a rather demure young man from Co Mayo with a masters degree, who didn't exactly sparkle on Dublin's Moore Street, where Cullen, somewhat inevitably, set the candidates' first "task".

The Apprentice is a huge amount of fun to watch. The 14 candidates, all hunting that €100,000 year-long contract in one of Cullen's businesses, are instantly recognisable types. There are the bullish, shambolic blokes, running around a rainy Dublin town with their bunches of wilting bananas like balding toddlers in buttoned-up shirts, their ubiquitous wheelie-bags (which they all have to bring to the firing party at the end of each episode in case they get the sack) doubtless full of new Marks and Sparks socks that their mammies have bought them. And then there are the women, who, despite baptising themselves "Team Phoenix" (I'm not sure if the rising-from-the-ashes metaphor is such a hot start), appeared competent in that clickety-clackety way of debonair material girls with jaunty scarves and burning ambitions. Episode one was all very sisterly, and the girls deservedly won the task, but the trailer for next week showed them getting their teeth into each other's hemlines, so the entertainment is clearly about to start in earnest.

There is something about this home-grown Apprentice that makes it a little less snarlingly humiliating than it should be, however: Bill Cullen himself, who, for all his acumen and competence, comes across essentially as a decent geezer rather than a cut-throat capitalist. In fact, it is his partner, Jackie Lavin, a glamorous cat in a belted mac, and one of Cullen's two co-adjudicators, who seems the more ruthless.

Anyway, this is one to watch, if only to play spot-the-scenery. So far, it's all been manly hugging, giddy Champagning and everybody giving it 110 per cent (a phrase that sets my teeth on edge, and one that passed like a virus between these television virgins as they began their search for Cullen's approbation).

WEALTH AND THE GLITTERING spoils of success littered the box this recessionary week with an almost fruity inappropriateness. Nowhere were they more in evidence than in Lipstick Jungle, the new seven-part New York-based drama from Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell. The series, with a breathtaking lack of originality, traces the antics of three female friends as they navigate the highs and lows of their sparkling careers and somewhat tarnished emotional lives.

They are vile creations, all of them. Victory (Lindsay Price) is a fashion designer whose shoe count is higher than her IQ and who, because her edgy designs are going unappreciated, cries and cries and cries till her pretty little eyes are almost in need of a surgical lift. Oh no! Hold on! The tears have ceased!

Victory's multi-millionaire boyfriend has just had a cupcake flown from New York to Tokyo for her on his private plane! Oh, that's all right then, who cares about the art (or the environment)? Then there is Nico (Kim Raver), a competitive magazine editor who looks like she's been on a diet of staples rather than a staple diet.

Frustrated with her academic husband (lamb's-wool pullover, always losing his glasses), Nico resorts to a spot of vigorous East Village shagging with some skinny boy-child who wrote his phone number on her thigh (hey, at least he can hold a pencil).

Meanwhile, Wendy (Brooke Shields, who seems to have lost both her charisma and her eyebrows) is playing Mother Earth to the restive cabal. A busy lady, Wendy is a successfully mummyish film producer who placates both spoilt stars and her drippy-hairy stay-at-home husband, cleans up after the cat, and still finds time to drape herself over various Manhattan balconies snivelling about her lot with her overpaid, over-made-up, self-indulgent mates.

What a sorority of vapidity. Still, the script isn't bad, and at least it motivated me to find the Living channel button on the remote control.

APPARENTLY, ANGER IS the great taboo. I didn't know that. I thought hurling the cat around in great swirls of wrath, stomping around the block and screaming at the toaster was what everyone did - but no, it turns out I'm wrong. Anger, jumped-up, I'm-the-centre-of-the-universe-and-you-bloody-well-ought-to-know-it anger, was the stuff of Griff Rhys Jones on Anger, a dull confessional on the state of the comedian's inflated temper.

Rhys Jones is a choleric man: his resigned wife said it, his rosy teenage children said it, his former PAs and agents said it, and, Christ, Rhys Jones himself spent an hour telling the world what a crosspatch comedian he can be, rolling around on the floor and kicking his feet up and down like your bog-standard toddler in Tesco. In my humble opinion, GRJ gets to vent his spleen all over his family and staff simply because he's rich enough and powerful enough to get away with it - try "acting out" in a less hospitable environment than your scatter-cushioned London home or your sleek yacht (another temple to his fits) and see how far you get, mate.

What Rhys Jones failed to illuminate was why he was so bloody angry in the first place and why it would be of the remotest interest to anybody except whatever poor ciphers had to lend their ears to his latest egotistical outpouring.

There was a smattering of science to bolster Rhys Jones's confidences: apparently eunuchs are awfully mild-mannered chaps(?), while body-builder blokes who use steroids to bolster their pecs have shorter and more violent lives than their counterparts snoozing on the sofa.

The kind of rages that GRJ is prone to can have devastating effects, as we learned from writer Craig Brown, who seemed an entirely reasonable and even-tempered individual but who comes from reckless stock. Brown's grandfather, a man given to daily fits of pique, usually after a libatious supper, got so cross with his wife one evening that he marched upstairs and shot himself in the stomach, staggering back downstairs to say, "Now look what you made me do", before popping his blood-splattered clogs. Tsssk, GRJ had really better keep his greying hair on.

OKAY, 'LET'S POP YOU into the bodysuit" and "fix your fashion foibles". Off the Rails has returned, with spanking new presenters Brendan Courtney (thankfully muted by a kerchief) and Sonya Lennon (underneath a tumultuous hairdo). Apparently, the show has a new format. I obviously wasn't paying attention to the old format, but this current incarnation of the fashion series smacks heavily of Trinny and Susannah, and I'm sure I detected a whiff of Gok Wan in there too.

Relying heavily on the ubiquitous makeover (a pretty scientist who dumped her 1980s wardrobe and unleashed her potential via a bra fitting and some great shoes), the show chugged along happily enough. But in a television genre as frenetic and over-crowded as a credit-crunch bargain basement, Off the Rails somehow fails to make an impact. For all you fashionistas content to blow the contents of the deposit account as if there was no tomorrow, here is the news: black is the new black, and purple is the new black, and you can wear lace at any age - oh, and keep it simple (or maybe tart it up, I can't remember).

In this age of economic uncertainty and faltering hemlines, it's reassuring to know that Brendan Courtney's finger is on the pulse of the latest trends.

Isn't it? All right, where did I put granny's mantilla?

tvreview@irish-times.ie