THE APPRENTICE, BBC1, 9pm
KARREN Brady shakes her head in disgust this week and I think you’ll join her. The daft antics tonight are quite ridiculous.
The teams are asked to manufacture and brand a new gin and then try to get orders with various pub chains and retailers. Each side has a distillery at their disposal and some expert gin blenders, so what could go wrong?
Well, the first thing which could go wrong when dealing with alcohol is drunkenness, and that’s exactly what happens. One team wisely uses silver spit buckets when sampling the gins, but the other team just neck it all – “I have to stop drinking this,” one team member laughs. They end up tipsy, missing 19 calls from their other frantic colleague.
The other lot, although sober, are stupid. Their branding idea is to spell and pronounce “gin” wrong. Perhaps they were drunk too?
Regarding the finished product, one looks like a big bottle of Superdrug bath oil and the other looks like cheap fruit juice.
VIENNA: EMPIRE, DYNASTY AND DREAM, BBC4, 9pm
YOU’RE in good hands here. This new series is presented by the author and historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and he is never dull. His books are jammed with character and colour.
Over three episodes, we get the story of Vienna and learn how the House of Habsburg transformed it from a poky small town to “the paramount city, the city of the world.”
The dynasty used grand architecture, sculpture, music and “theatrical spectacle” to transform Vienna and use it as a way to project their own power to the world – but not without a bit of “bloodletting” and some “monstrous ideas.”
However, the Habsburg dynasty lasted for 900 years, so perhaps we’re cramming too much history into a three-part series? You may feel a bit breathless by the end.
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