Tune in, switch off - Playing with the fired

This was The Apprentice (Comic Relief, BBC1, March 13), but not as we know it. We heard the usual theme music and the same disembodied "Sir Alan will see you now" voice. But the man in the chair was limp: sugar mouse rather than sourpuss.

The real Alan Sugar would have described his counterfeit as a bloody disaster. Jack Dee was spot on when he said that Britain's normally most belligerent businessman came across as a Thunderbird puppet.

Sugar's a single-shot sniper to the National College for School Leadership. You can be sure he'll never be invited to give their annual lecture.

Of course, we know in our hearts that it's wrong to abuse and humiliate your employees, but it doesn't half speed things up. And it's a lot more fun. While our teacher conferences are full of references to moral purpose, Sir Alan's M-word is money, making it.

The ladies may have won this contest to design a new toy for the five to eight-year-old market with Ruby Wax's ingenious idea of Velcro play suits, but I still think the adult party version is the one we'll see in the shops. Well, certain kinds of shop, anyway.
It goes like this: you throw the dice, touch the area of someone's body as directed and you find you stick to it. Are they serious? The toy manufacturers' reservation was that five-year-old boys don't like physical intimacy. Middle-aged men would be a whole new market, Ruby.
Although they lost, it was the male celebrities who stole the show. They were led by Gerald Ratner, whose comment about his jewellery being cheaper than a prawn sandwich and less durable cost him millions. So it's great that he still has a sense of humour.

Their concept was a belt on which children could collect, hang and then swap newly invented model space creatures. Ratner was responsible for the non-existent business plan that lost the team the contest in the face of Sugar's questioning about tools and margins. But the real leader was Jonathan Ross, whose compelling personality stole each scene.

That's why Alan Sugar was no longer cheeky chappy but cheeked chappy. It was like a class with a supply teacher who couldn't control them. Real apprentices would never dare to joke about the boss's suit and shirts: "Have you been working out, Sir Alan?" smirked Ross.
I'd have had the troublemaker out of the room and moved to another reality TV programme in a flash.

Even Margaret and Nick, the fiercely loyal duo who grass up the teams each week, were diminished. Was this the same Margaret whose comment in the last series about Edinburgh University "not being what it was" led to a 50 per cent reduction in Ucas applications?
For me there wasn't enough tension - just one argument between two ladies that looked a bit fake. The teams stayed in a smart hotel rather than the Big Brother-style house, so didn't have time to get on each other's nerves. We even missed those delightful dawn wake-up calls.

So next Comic Relief, I'd say: "Sir Alan, Margaret and Nick, you three form a team for a change. This is your task. And one of you will be fired."
Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Slime and Punishment

This week a colleague found a six-minute video clip of me discussing a long-dead innovation on Teachers TV.

It set me thinking: who watches this stuff? I'd never seen it. And if it's a choice between watching me on the small screen and Desperate Housewives, I know where I'll be every time.
Perhaps the Government could consider creating a TV station for a profession with greater training needs than ours. Imagine what similar training might do for the financiers. Bankers' TV has a nice ring to it. Just think of the dramas about economics they could screen. We've heard a lot of fiction from the banks recently.

There are even ready-made titles for this toxic television channel, such as The Bill, Damages or Mad Men. And Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? might get them tuning in for pensions advice. They could have their own Crimewatch series, starring some of the more notorious City fat cats for a small price. They would have to cut those final bedtime words of comfort, "Don't have nightmares" that assure those crimes won't happen to us, because we all know they just did.

There was also plenty of crime in the highly-hyped Channel 4 drama, Red Riding. You know it's going to be complicated when you see that the cast list in the Radio Times has an accompanying labelled photograph to make sure you can do your own piece of detective work - identifying them all. The first episode was set in 1974. We deduced that by the lime green swirly wallpaper and the long sideburns on our chain-smoking, leather-jacketed journalist hero, Eddie, played by Andrew Garfield. How's that for detective work?

It was a bizarre world of extreme police brutality: savage, rabid, frothing at the mouth brutality, with distorted faces and hands squeezing personal bits that made me wince. And that was before Eddie's fingers were smashed with handcuffs. Why didn't he sue or at least run for cover every time he saw a blue siren coming towards him? Those truncheon blows looked painful. Naked and hooded in a dark cell ("Is he bleeding yet?"), this could have been a Guantanamo Bay documentary. There was even a mock execution. Z-Cars was never like this.

Mouths dripping with blood and full-vowelled northern accents, it reminded me of the Scottish play. All the grotesques in it, and there were lots, looked like those photographs of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. No wonder the North is a foreign country - and I was brought up there.

In the year this was set, the school where I taught was closed because the corrupt police and headteacher were running a prostitution racket with the Year 11 girls. The boys rioted. No, it wasn't Bradford, but an African state and a great start to my teaching career.

But given what writer David Peace believes the West Yorkshire police were up to back then, perhaps I had a lucky escape.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - This was history as soap

I once almost asked Michael Portillo why he never became leader of the Tory party. I'd rehearsed my question carefully and thought I'd send down a bouncer and hit him for a six. Did he think the problem was to do with him or his party?

But my wife jumped in with her question first, just wanting some juicy gossip about his warm and cuddly relationship with Labour MP Diane Abbott on the sofa in BBC's late-night political review programme, This Week.

I may have missed out, but my wife now has a dinner party story to tell of Michael and Diane's unlikely partnership in the school play, Macbeth.

However, it was Portillo's absence in Margaret that was more conspicuous. Despite being mentioned by Lady Thatcher in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years, as being one of her strongest supporters during her resignation crisis, Portillo was, surprisingly, written out of the script in this drama about her fall from power. Perhaps that's what the party tried to do to him as well.
This was history as soap: so many famous actors pretending to be so many memorable politicians. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I think Geoffrey Howe was really impersonating John Sessions, and surely Heseltine played himself - or was it Rory Bremner again? I kept expecting John Bird and John Fortune to pop up; in fact, I think I did spot them in the background when Hurd and Major were plotting in the dark corners of the tea rooms. But then Margaret would only ever visit those male enclaves when there was garlic on the menu. I feel the same way about the staffroom.

Margaret contained more cricketing cliches than runs by the England batsmen in a test-match special. "No ducking the bouncers. The bowling's going to get hit all round the ground. That's my style," the great lady tells her team. Ah, but that was before her trusted Geoffrey came in to bowl and complained, in that electrifying speech of his in the Commons, that she'd "broken the bats".
The other star of this piece, apart from Denis (Ian McDiarmid) of course, was Strictly Come Dancing's John Sergeant. In his autobiography, Give Me Ten Seconds, he describes the farcical moment in history when the prime minister emerges from a meeting in Paris to deliver a news conference but finds she has no microphone.

"She's behind you," shouts the newsreader to man-with-the-mike Sergeant. But before our John can say "let's tango", she's snatched it from him and is making her speech about fighting on to win. The chaos of this scene came over in the remake but nothing beats the original, so why try?
There were lots of flashing cameras, slamming of car doors and walks at marathon speed down dingy corridors when her followers tried hard to keep up. You knew they were her team because they all wore over-large owl specs, dark suits and had paunches the size of Ken Clarke.
It was a good job we were told that the dialogue was all made up or I might have believed it was true. "I will change the soul of this country. Either you are with me or you are against me. We shall prevail," she said.

I think they nicked that from the Churchill documentary on the History channel. Or was it Portillo's infamous SAS speech? I can already hear the chuckles from Diane Abbott on that late-night couch

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - the porcupine and his prey

Here's your starter for 10. Name the longest-running serious quiz programme on television. Yes, that's 10 points for University Challenge, which began life in 1962 with the sharing, caring Bamber Gascoigne. Kindly and don-like, Bamber used to spend his week reading around the questions, so he was able to deliver his answers without a glance at the cards.

Since 1994, Jeremy "Porcupine" Paxman has held court with trademark spiky shafts of disdainful disbelief. Last week's series final gleaned an extra two million viewers after finalist Gail Trimble of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, received a hammering on the internet when she was described as "the cleverest student ever to appear" on the programme.

The final involved Manchester University taking on Corpus Christi; redbrick versus old brick. It was Paxman the speed reader not Gascoigne the memory man in the quizmaster's seat, with Manchester 45 points ahead until the last four minutes, when Corpus went "like a train".

Paxman's sting punctures any sense of self worth a faltering team might have. He's used to political heavyweights on Newsnight, so students are easy pickings for the porcupine.

Do teachers such as Paxman still exist or have inspections drilled out the sadistic stream of questioning so beloved by pedants in my day? At the risk of a thousand letters of complaint, praise be to Ofsted if it has seen them off.

University Challenge is a kind of mental 300 metres. Just as I'd still be on the starting blocks after the gun was fired, trying to work out which way to run, I sat through the final simply trying to find words I recognised. The only thing more obscure than the answer was the question.

Trimble has a brain speed that beats my creaky laptop any day. By the time I'd typed "What is the answer to the most obscure question in the world?" into Google, she was on to the next round. Even when it was a question I recognised, I could feel the slow fuse of electrical impulses seeking out the relevant file buried deep in the dusty hard drive of my memory. I'd need a good 30 minutes to winkle it out, conferring or not, so Manchester, the near winners, beat me to it every time.

At least Corpus Christi's winning total was only 275 points. Last time a team managed to score more than 300, they were mocked: "You need to get out more."

Watching Have I Got News For You the same evening, it was clear Fern Britton, its guest presenter, had been watching the University Challenge final because her catchphrase was: "Fingers on buzzers, boys."

I still associate HIGNFY with Cheshire cat Angus Deayton. The fun these days is in guessing who the presenter will be and watching Paul Merton and Ian Hislop trip them up with their provocative jibes. It's founded on the chemistry between these two, teasing their victims with false satirists' smiles.

The class clowns lob punchlines back and forth. Hislop, all brain and beatific morality, ingests his victims then spits them out. Merton, cheeky schoolboy, swats gently, creating absorbing fantasies before the final deadly bite.

Each week, as I catch up on the show on comedy channel Dave, presenter after presenter gets the treatment. Perhaps Paxman could face these two baiting tormentors for a change? Take this as your starter for 10, Jeremy.