THURSDAY 15 MARCH
Entertainment
Comic Relief Does the Apprentice
9:00pm - 10:00pm
BBC1
VIDEO Plus+: 8863
Subtitles, widescreen
1/2
It's one of those programme ideas that sounds like a plum from the word go: take the best reality-TV format of the lot, only in place of the usual wannabes, get two teams of sweating celebs to jump through hoops for Sir Alan Sugar instead. Only Comic Relief could make such a thing happen and the result, judging by a rough preview DVD, promises to be almost shamefully entertaining. For a start, there's what we'll call Rupertgate. The men's team starts out as Alastair Campbell, Piers Morgan, Danny Baker, Ross Kemp and Rupert Everett - a fine cocktail of personalities - but Everett spends the entire time looking like a frightened whippet and whingeing about the cameras (did he think it was a radio programme?) and by day two he has vanished, much to Morgan's disgust ("He's choked!"), leaving the team a man down. It's a bad start on a task - arranging a charity funfair - that brings the teams literally to blows in a wonderfully undignified fracas, and includes the delicious sights of Alastair Campbell defeated by a stapler, and pop star/ footballer's wife Cheryl Cole confronted by a vat of raw squid. God bless Comic Relief.