Last Night's TV: The Apprentice, BBC1<br />Location, Location, Location, Channel 4

(getty images)

The Apprentice finally reached the boring interview episode this week, or rather the episode that you always think will be boring but then turns out to be more interesting than you expected because of the aggression of Sir Alan's crack team of rottweillers, all of whom have been trained to take a curriculum vitae between their teeth and shake it ferociously until the loose bits fly off.

And when they get bored with that, they start using the candidates as a chew-toy, an experience that makes even the toughest of them adopt that blinking, I'm-not-going-to-give-you-the-satisfaction-of-seeing-me-cry look that Lucinda seems to have permanently fixed on her face. "If it is interviews today then, yeah, I'm nervous," said Lee "Come On!!" McQueen. "Because obviously you're going to go and get an arse-chewing from top people within Sir Alan's businesses." And, sure enough, before long one of Sir Alan's satraps – the beady-eyed one who runs the computer firm Viglen – had fixed his teeth into Lee's rump over a bit of embroidery with his university record. He'd even phoned up the institution in question and arranged for them to fax over proof that Lee had exaggerated.

The most lethal of these attack- dogs is Paul Kemsley, who appears to shave with the same razor that gives Sir Alan his weirdly uncommitted beard. Paul delights in wrong-footing the candidates. Spotting that Lee, in canonical David Brent style, had talked of the importance of humour in the workplace he invited him to share his popular "reverse pterodactyl" impression. Lee stood up, waved his arms like a startled chicken and squawked loudly, fatally eager to take advantage of this ice-thawing overture. Kemsley's smile vanished from his face like a cow-pat sliding down a barn-door and Lee was left flapping, trying to pull off that tricky transition from clowning animal impersonator to serious business executive. But he didn't suffer alone. "You're not a very good negotiator, are you?" asked Paul, after establishing that Claire had received only a £27,000 bonus after adding (she claimed) £8m to her employer's bottom line. Oddly, though, Claire seemed quite excited by the rough stuff."There's something quite powerful about him, something quite Neanderthal," she said later. "I should have just leaned across that desk and sucked his lips off."

Meanwhile, Alex was in another windowless interrogation chamber being condescended to by Claude, a monumentally sniffy nit-picker who looks at all the candidates as if they've pitched up to the interview with a smear of dog shit on their chin. He'd noticed that Alex was so desperate to pad out his CV that he'd included "English (fluent)" as one of his languages, an attribute that Claude didn't appear to feel was particularly noteworthy for someone born and brought up in Bolton. When confronted, Alex, who could pout for Britain, huffed and sighed gloomily. He even managed to look sulky when Karren Brady – brought in to add a bit of feminine empathy to the interviewing team – upbraided him for being too charming and good looking, the closest she got to giving anyone a hard time.

In the end, Lucinda got the bump, taking the taxi ride alone after Sir Alan, in a fit of indecision or soft-heartedness, decided to let all four candidates go through to next week's final. I don't imagine the bookies lost a lot of money on Lucinda's departure, since it was clear that most of Sir Alan's proxies thought she would fit into his organisation about as well as a porcupine in a balloon factory. "You look to me as though you're frankly unemployable," said Claude, after scanning her CV, while Paul questioned her long-term commitment to the Sugar game plan. "How does Sir Alan know that after three months you're not going to go off and open a yoga retreat in a cave in Nepal?" he asked, the classic threat display of a boardroom male when confronted with a splash of fuschia. Unwisely, Lucinda shared her doubts with her colleagues: "Do I want to be a permanent employee with very little diversity?" she mused aloud in the waiting room. "I'll be crawling the walls... I'll be driving everyone mad." Proven track record on that front, certainly, but as it turned out the problem won't arise.

Location, Location, Location has returned for yet another season, though I'm afraid my review copy didn't reveal how they planned to get round the awkward fact that Phil and Kirstie are now helping their clients to get on the property snake, not the property ladder. A falling house market probably won't affect this series anyway though, since its chief pleasure lies in the gap between people's deranged sense of interior decor and the presenters' spirited attempt to talk up a sale. "This room is so unsuitably furnished," said Kirstie, opening the door to a compact Luton two-up, two-down. You could say that, given that she had to step over an armchair to get through the front door.