Sugar-coating a bitter pill.

It seems somewhat foreign to me that even at the depths of a global recession, the BBC continues to reassure us that 'everything's alright', by providing us, the disheartened public, with an evening of watching rich people make even more money. This Wednesday, and every Wednesday forever, we will be blessed with an evening of (un)reality TV as we watch genuinely abhorrent people resorting to cutthroat tactics in order to win a job.

Escapism? It doesn't really sound like it to me. Go to your local job centre and you can see the same thing happening. The only difference is that the people are far less attractive and there's no SurAlan to sit in an aluminium boardroom next to Richard Curtis and a more butch version of Germaine Greer.

After a brief rundown of the contestants, who unusually are all 'out to win', the sexes are split and challenged to make as much money as possible by cleaning people's stuff for them. Unfortunately for the two groups, their upper-middle class upbringing has rendered them incapable of cleaning anything, and no amount of shoe polish or Turtle Wax is going to change that.

The boys decide that their best tactic is to give up on the slightly more profitable shoe shining, and to take a taxi across Greater London to help the more inept members of their team to clean cars badly. The girls are faring even worse, resorting to the tactic of blaming everyone else for their own bone idleness. And their accountant seems to be having some difficulty understanding... accounting.

One typically feminine slanging match later and we're treated to the comforting familiarity of Alan's firing ritual. Predictably, dopey Anita is kicked out. With her unconventional arrangement of facial features, it seems that Sugar is going to be firing the women in reverse order of objective attractiveness.


It was a close call really. My money was on the one who looks like a cross between Vic Reeves and Alan Carr.