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announces, unwittingly dismissing every single one of them in the process.
    Once Alan’s set the weekly task—flower-selling for the opener—the focus shifts to the candidates themselves, as we watch them bicker, argue, scheme, moan, boast, brag, grandstand, plot and spout marketing bollocks until you want to squat on their chests and punch their jaws through the floor. By the end of the show, you’ll want Alan to fire the lot of them. Preferably into the ocean.
    Speaking of the candidates, whatever the collective term for a bunch of turds is (I think it’s a ‘fistful’ of turds), it applies to both The Apprentice’s fourteen entrepreneurs and a scene in Michael Howard: No More Mr Nasty (BBC2) in which we’re treated to the sight of John Major, William Hague, Kenneth Clarke and lain Duncan Smith sitting round a table offering advice to Michael Howard.
    Warning: the programme also contains repeated, severe close-ups of Howard, who has more than a touch of 10 Rillington Place about him, plus a talking-head interview with Anne Robinson, whose face now appears so tight and Botoxed she seems to be pushing it through the taut skin of a tambourine toward the viewer. Beware. Beware. Beware.

Mrs Spoon from Button Moon
    [26 February 2005]
    S orry to ruin your morning, but you’re going to wither and die. There. I’ve said it. Forget all the aspirational stuff you’ll read in the magazine supplements—your destiny consists of yellow hair and liver spots. In fifteen years’ time you’ll have a face like an elephant’s kneecap and an arse like a chamois leather drying on a radiator. Your mirror’s going to vomit each time you walk past. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
    Unless, of course, you bump into Nicky Hambleton-Jones, presenter of Ten Years Younger (C4 ). Essentially an hour-long commercial for Botox, Ten Years Younger is one of the cruellest shows around. Each week a dowdy, wrinkled member of the public is subjected to a series of ritual humiliations. First, they’re paraded around the streets while members of the public guess how old they are (the answer is consistently upsetting). Then they’re set upon by a team of experts who pick them apart in finer detail—pointing out their jowls, their shabby hair, their rubbish taste in clothes and their ham-fisted excuses for make-up.
    Thus psychologically broken, they’re offered a lifeline: Nicky and Co. offer to shave a decade off their fizzogs courtesy of a haircut, a makeover and a faceload of plastic surgery. This week, it’s not a member of the public, but a celebrity-well, Sherrie Hewson from Emmerdale at any rate. Sherrie’s fifty-four years old but the average street-plodding schmuck reckons she looks fifty-seven. Hardly a disaster, but that doesn’t stop Nicky, who charges on regardless.
    I say ‘charges on’, but there’s nothing particularly charged about Nicky. She’s slightly synthetic and ethereal: the ghost of a listless graphic designer. Weirder still, for someone fronting a show about facelifts, her own face is almost entirely featureless. She looks like Mrs Spoon from Button Moon. She looks like a baby new potato in glasses. She looks like Michael Jackson’s mugshot snap. But most of all she looks like a Crayola sketch drawn by a very very stupid child. There’s a Ten Years Younger spin-off book in the shops right now: the front cover features a simple cartoon drawing of Nicky Hambleton-Jones, and curiously, it looks more like her than her actual photo does. She’s a freak. How dare she tell other people what to do with their faces when she hasn’t grown one of her own?
    By the end of this week’s edition, Sherrie looks and feels like a million dollars—but the surgical bill can’t have been far off. And you can’t help suspecting that any surgical procedure carried out on behalf of a TV show is going to be performed with far more care than the average snip—‘n’—slice facelift. If I had one done, knowing my luck