Baggsy; you're fired!

It’s a good question, because much as I love Nigel's food writing, the decision to put his Simple Suppers (BBC1, Wednesday, 8.30pm) on One while the twice as watchable Nigella remains on Two can only be down to the fact that an adaption of his autobiography Toast is a jewel in the Beeb’s Christmas season and they want to make sure everyone knows who he is.

Admirable as that may be, I’m not sure this series has entirely worked. Obviously filmed in the summer, the suppers in question have mainly featured out-of-season vegetables or the kind of ‘leftovers’ that to a normal person are luxury ingredients.

(Really, Nigel? You have a loaf of artisan bread and half a kilo of expensive French cheese “hanging about” at the back of your fridge?)

This week Nige was trying out “adventurous ingredients”. But when one of the starring adventures included (wait for it) ROASTING new potatoes, things started to feel a bit strained.

Still, none of it really mattered. Simple Suppers was only the starter before the main event, the day the whole nation had been waiting for; the sacking of Stuart Baggs.

There’s probably no one left in the country who believes there’s a real job waiting for the winner of The Apprentice (BBC1, Wednesday, 9pm) but it gets more entertaining by the year, mainly due to the ridiculous statements the contestants are encouraged to film at the start of the show.

So they came, the final five, and stood halfway up a staircase waiting for Suralan’s grand entrance – out of a lift this week, which made me wish they’d made a bit of an effort and winched him in from the floor above a-la Ann Widdecombe. It was the semi-final week, after all.

But it wasn’t to be.

Instead we had to make do with the return of Claude, Bordan, that other bloke and the always fabulous Margaret. Sorry, Miss Mountford.

What a joy it was to have her back, ostensibly to assess the candidates' character, but really to see how well she could do at maintaining her poker face when faced with nonsense like Jamie’s claim to be “a key cog in a wheel”.

“Any wheel?” she replied, icily. And don't get her started on his missing third nipple (the moment that certainly sealed Jamie’s fate.) Stuart “I’m only 21!” Baggs, of course, greeted her like a long-lost friend. His first but by no means last mistake.

But if you wanted to know what Margaret thought of him, it was summed up marvellously by the moment Suralan asked the team what they thought of him. Margaret closed her notebook, put her pen down, glanced at Claude and grinned.

It was Claude who had the most fun with Baggsy, asking the question we’d been dying to ask. “Stuart Baggs the Brand? What ARE you talking about?”

There was part of me that occasionally felt sorry for him, so obviously had he been set up for this moment.

Face it, we all know he was only saved last week so we’d have the joy of seeing him slapped down this week.

But then he’d say something unimaginably stupid.

Like – in response to Claude’s emminently reasonable “you’re not a brand” - “I think I might be.”

Given the 11 weeks of nonsense that The Brand has been allowed to spout, we were expecting something special from this show. No less than a total demolition of his credibility. But when it came, it was something of an anti-climax.

He claimed to have a telecoms licence for his company. He’s actually got an ISP licence. It might have been more impressive if Bordan, The Man Who Knows Technology, had known that the P in ISP means “provider” and not “protocol”.

Still, as is often the way in these interviews, it was how he handled it that did for him. Faced with this bare-faced lie on his CV, he could have held his hands up.

He is, after all, only 21. Has he mentioned that?

Instead he sweated, copiously. Then he tried feebly to distract Bordan by asking him what his name was, and when that didn’t work, he desperately tried to steer the conversation away from the car crash that was coming. It failed, gloriously.

Suralan, sick to his stomach that he’d let the TV people talk him into keeping Stuart for so long, ordered him out of his boardroom. Never has he said the words “you’re fired” with so much relish. You could almost hear the cheering.

Shoe-in Stella sailed through the interviews by dint of a) actually being quite good and b) not having exaggerated or lied on her CV.

Poor Joanna the cleaner fell victim to the “not having any experience” trap, but no doubt will be running the North of England's biggest cleaning contract by January.

And sad-eyed Jamie tripped himself up with his own negativity.

No one believed him when he said he'd been certain he was going to make the final; he had the air of a whipped puppy from the start.

Which just leaves revered theology scholar Chris, a man who could make describing a plane crash sound like the shipping forecast.

It remains to be seen whether what we thought were hideous errors were in fact the genius business decisions Suralan thinks.