On the box: The Apprentice | Dirk Gently | The Savoy

Certain phrases do it for me. "It's Friday, it's five to five..." used to do it, but now I wait all year for the last remaining candidates to be summoned to the landing just a few steps from the summit of Sugar Inc from where His Lordship solemnly intones: "I've asked four of my trusted colleagues to put you through a rigorous interview process."
For "trusted colleagues", read corporate bastards, and as I say every year during The Apprentice, I mean that as a compliment.

For "a rigorous interview process", read a search-and-destroy of the CVs, with the flamethrowers aimed at the eminently
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unsuitable, the toweringly deluded and the out-and-out liars.

This time round, the biggest boasts have been made by Stuart "The Brand" Baggs, typically: "I'm not a one-trick pony, I'm not a ten-trick pony – I've got a field of ponies." But the biggest boaster was up against the biggest bastard, Claude Littner, who grabbed the metaphorical rope given to Baggs by the production team, rounded up all the ponies and turned the lasso back into a sturdy noose.

"'Stuart Baggs, The Brand'? What on earth does that mean?" roared Littner, with extreme prejudice. As Littner's bull neck tensed, Stuart's podgy cheeks wobbled with fear.

He'd already cocked up in other rooms, addressing interrogators by their first names or forgetting them completely when Bordan Tkachuk went for the kill, producing the proof that he wasn't quite the telecoms whizz he'd claimed. Lord Sugar was apoplectic.

"You're full of shit," thundered the boss-man, who was regretting having kept Baggs at the expense of Liz Locke. (I'd also been sorry to see Liz go, though must confess for reasons entirely unrelated to business acumen.)

I love this last-but-one round of The Apprentice more than the final (it's tonight), more than the final of The X Factor, which last Sunday left me feeling corpulent and ashamed (did I really spend 12 successive weekends anticipating the moment when Simon Cowell's nostrils would flare with moppet money-lust?).

But since Paul Kemsley, he of the Sugar tribute beard, quit the process, I've yearned for a new bastard the equal of Tkachuk (whose name sounds like a gun being cocked) and, of course, Littner.

This year – hurray! - I got two: Alan Watts, possessed of a fiendish smirk which I'm convinced hides a forked tongue, and Margaret Mountford, the old Apprentice hand back in a new role and relishing it. Of Chris Bates' constant referencing of his uni degree, she quipped: "It'll be in a frame and I bet his idea of a fun night is to sit and admire it." Give Mags her own show. Hell, give her doubting left eyebrow a show.

I like comedies, I like dramas. Comedy-dramas I've never been sure about and Dirk Gently has all but convinced me they don't work. The eponymous hero is a detective who believes in "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" but after this outing, even he'd struggle to make a case for that hyphen straddling the two genres.

Gently is the creation of Douglas Adams who was working on another of his cases when he died. This one began with a missing cat and ended with what seemed like the attempted murder of the three attractive leads, Stephen Mangan as Gently, Helen Baxendale and Darren Boyd, who was in the recent Whites with Alan Davies and seems to be cornering the market in sidekicks to curly-headed fools. They all survived but surely the show won't.

The soundtrack twanged with Randall & Hopkirk-esque harpsichord (or did that pair use a spinet?).

The hero chugged around in a Leyland Princess. But Dirk Gently lacked drama, despite blowing all of BBC4's special-effects budget for 2011 on a warehouse explosion, and it lacked comedy with not one halfway funny line – this only making me yearn for the return of Mangan's Free Agents from last year and scour Amazon for a cheap box-set of Baxendale's Cardiac Arrest, deadly certain laughs of the darkest hue.

Back in my days as an ambulance-chasing reporter, an old colleague had a ritual for greeting slow news days, which he'd nicked from an old movie.

"There are eight million stories in the Naked City," he'd say, "but we've got nane o' them." There must be a fair few hundred stories in The Savoy, but either the new Canadian owners of the famous London hotel insisted on a bland documentary portrait or the producers didn't bother to look down the folds in the sofas for them.

The first of this two-parter was full of cliche ("faded grandeur"), meaningless statistics ("2500 square metres of leather wall-lining") and contrived drama.

Would the refurb be finished in time? Of course it would. The Canadians suggested some team-bonding, and a staff mantra to be recited daily: "I am Savoy." W

hat would Alan Whicker have made of that, I wonder. Whicker used to be criticised for spending too long amid such, er, faded grandeur – but in his hands this documentary would have been a classier affair, and he would have found us some characters.