The business community is, after all, fair game, isn’t it? A minority group everyone enters of their own free will, upon whose doorstep blame is heaped daily for some venal transgression or other, and who are generally better off than you anyway. There’s no worry about the implications of laughing at the underclass, and little chance – so far – your patronage will inadvertently spur any contestants to take up permanent residence in the media, or release a Christmas single. The Beeb may sell it with emphasis on the aspirational side of things, but it’s really just a cunningly conscience-salving chance to sneer, gawp and giggle in that righteously superior fashion we all secretly crave. Everyone’s happy, no-one gets hurt. If its creators hadn’t got sidetracked into television, they’d be running the UN by now.

Week six, and the contestants arrive at the lair of Siralan, that Doctor Who baddie manqué, for a gawp at the opulence which, we are constantly reminded, awaits one of them, and to be set the task of flogging motors in Slough. As tasks go, it doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs, and indeed this was probably the thinnest in terms of the high comedy we’d been used to so far. Fun was had at the expense of the car-ignorant girls. A saloon is one with the sticky-out bit at the end, decides Michelle. Velocity, wandering about by the road and flogging nothing, spot Invicta’s success, decide it’s all down to the natty purple sashes they’re sporting, and rush off to make some of their own – only due to on-site material shortages, they have to make do with fashioning red armbands which evoke mid-20th century German politics more than dynamic salesmanship.

Maybe there’s something in that, as most fun is provided by the car lot’s very own little Hitler, the white-haired and appropriately named John, ruling the ranks with an iron fist and regarding the assorted interloping pipsqueaks with undisguised contempt. Syed, confidently assuring a customer a car would appreciate in value over the next few years, finds himself on the end of a concentrated bollocking from the boss man. Jo, who scrawls a sale on the windscreen of one car, then fails to close the deal but leaves the vehicle in unsellable limbo, takes her dressing down from the headmaster on the chin – and, of course, reminds us several times of this fact during the rest of the programme.

Another injection of liveliness comes from the editors. Perhaps deciding this task lacks the essential lunacy of previous classics, they opt for a bit of cutting room misdirection. Invicta are bigged-up relentlessly from the start. Karen’s a sales veteran. Jo worked for MG Rover. Sam knows a bit about cars, too. How can they fail? Perhaps it’s not playing by the rules to put the production team under the same spotlight as the participants, but sometimes it’s hard not to. We are, after all, being sold the programme by them. Why shouldn’t we become sceptical, sofa-bound Siralans in the face of such televisual Wolf Spirit trickery?

And so, after the usual winding-down shots of all and sundry looking knackered, to the boardroom, in sumptuous Brentwood Wharf. After the relative lack of visual interest on the car lot, the camera team – never knowingly underlit – seize on the chance to make merry with the sinisterly glowing conference table, ably abetted by the soundtrack composer endlessly running his finger round the rim of that damn wine glass. In short order, Siralan dismisses Sharon’s winning team – ah, bet you thought they were going to lose, didn’t you? Sussed! – leaving Sam, Jo and Ansell to sweat it out over the table. Ansell’s proximity to the waist-level strip-lighting enables the crew to get a fun effect, as the glow pierces his sub-Marsellus Wallace wraparound specs to reveal furtive, darting eyes that look every bit as obviously frightened as Jo’s.

They’ve been grooming and choreographing Siralan too, though he’d be the last to admit it. Aware his gruff monotone could do with a bit more dramatic punch, they’ve taught him a trick – the on-syllable nod. Most evident when he’s uncomfortably reading a bit of pre-prepared spiel rather than freeforming, Siralan has begun to jerk his head violently to emphasise a stressed word. The cameraman follows this with a similar over-mannered nudge of the camera in the same direction. The desired effect is presumably an atmosphere of edgy tension where the Earth shudders at Siralan’s every mighty utterance. It’s not needed at all but, as a glance at BBC drama’s current repertoire of toy box visual techniques shows, things could be worse.

And so Jo leaves. Even Siralan admits it’s a shame to see her go. He gave her a chance and she underperformed. It’s hard not to agree – the last three tasks have seen very little of the early Jo’s manic instability, which is surprising, given the production team’s blatant decision to cast her as the resident clown. This week’s was the limpest. All we got was a short sequence of her inevitably scaring customers away with what only she could imagine was matey banter, presumably obtained by squeezing the footage dry. A last minute appeal against Siralan’s decision was a first for the programme, but too little too late on all counts. Making a conscious decision to “straighten up and fly right”, she abandoned her essential Jo-ness and lost it not only with Siralan, but us as well. There’s a message in there somewhere worthy of The Cosby Show.

Still, as she rolled off in the cab (looking strangely calm and collected – normal even, as if released after a term of wrongful imprisonment) it was hard not to reflect on the incidental joys we’ll have to learn to do without – the prehensile eyes, the village fête competition-winning gurns, the weird combination of the Babs Windsor squeak and the Sid James cackle (sometimes within the same outburst), the baby’s-first-coffee-enema expression on receiving the most mundane piece of info from Siralan, the random explosions of hair-and-limb callisthenics in the manner of a transvestite Rod Hull on learning there is, once again, somebody at the door. “Now I’ve gone, things are going to get a lot more tough,” she predicted, perhaps aware of her Norman Wisdom role. It was indeed hard not to feel we were going to get a lot less fun in future editions.

But maybe not. In some pokey floating casino, new barneys were being forged. Velocity’s high after their “unexpected” win on the back of flogging a couple of anti-Ribena protection kits soon turned into a spat worthy of any middle school playground during morning break. Paul, it transpired, had said something to Syed about Sharon being rubbish, and Michelle had heard it and told Sharon that Paul had told Syed she was rubbish, and Sharon didn’t like hearing people say she was rubbish, but Paul said he never. Or something. Velocity as a team was judged “finished”. This could be good.

Less knockabout and more bitter than before, this was a turning point in the series. The Apprentice law of evolution is coming in to play, with the familiar old dinosaurs starting to fall by the wayside under the weight of their own cumbersome egos, and the small, foraging rodents beginning to emerge from the protective undergrowth. Whether the likes of the taciturn Tuan, the distracted Michelle and Sharon (one of those contestants no-one really knows anything about, but somehow know they just don’t like) will last much longer depends more on what the likes of Paul and Ruth get wrong more than what they get right. The spectre of Tim the Quiet One looms large.

For the production team, things will get tougher, too. With contestants numbering in double figures, all that was needed was to get enough coverage of the numerous to-ings and fro-ings, and select the best morsels. Now, with things taking shape, more care is needed. The “dumkopfs” and larky bandits have been shorn away, and everyone still on board is ruthlessly focused on winning the prize. Whether their determination will prove sufficiently enthralling to everyone else will be down, more so than ever, to the salesmanship and sleight of hand abilities of the producers. Can they turn Tuan’s lust for glory into riveting telly? How will they cope if deprived of Ruth’s ticked-off toddler grimace, or Syed’s shifty boardroom manoeuvrings? With the stock of reliable nuts and fruits running low, miracles may have to occur between boardroom and screen.

The early signs something was about to go wrong were obvious with hindsight. The heavy publicity for the docudrama had already set it up as an Important Film, an apocalyptic “what if …?” scenario that would send shockwaves through the viewing public and, it was implied, the complacent Establishment who have taken their eye off the question of how to turn Britain’s decaying transport infrastructure around for too long. It was set apart from being just another documentary by dint of its 90 minute running time and its high-gloss production values. Being entirely fictional, it had a lot to do to keep the viewer’s disbelief suspended.

The premise was, in deference to this point, very believable. After a “minor” rail accident in Edinburgh, a one-day national rail strike over safety issues led to a completely gridlocked M25, and then, due to air traffic controllers not being able to turn up to relieve their colleagues, combined with safety-second practices employed for dealing with such situations, two planes collided over Hounslow. The interdependence of each part of the system on the other was put forward very well, but unfortunately as drama it posed a major problem.

There simply wasn’t a human “thread” running through the whole thing. Initial stories of people affected by the road chaos gave way during the second half to the luckless air traffic controllers on duty that night. The woman initially held responsible for the crash emerged as a main character, although due to the nature of the story she couldn’t be introduced until the second half for fear of telegraphing the plot. Likewise the officer overseeing the flow of traffic on the M25 stepped back into the wings after his part of the story was done. Continuity was all over the place.

Which, were this documentary real, wouldn’t be a problem. Likewise, the extended running time would have been more than justified for an event of this enormity. But the makers didn’t have the “luxury” of the events having actually happened, and became too complacent in cranking out an authentic-looking mock documentary, a genre which has been massively over-exposed in recent years. And there the problem of disbelief began – we’ve become hardened to the mock-doc style since the days of the Panorama spaghetti harvest and Alternative 3. We are all familiar enough with its tricks and techniques to sit and pick holes in the tiniest details. And details matter more in this genre than in any other.

The slew of celebrity cameos was the first, and most obvious, point of irritation. There were simply far too many. Instead of one news report, we got a montage of BBC, News 24, ITN and Sky presenters, an extended cameo from Radio 5′s traffic correspondent, and a round robin of regional faces reporting on bogus calamities. This sort of stuff is fun in Alistair McGowan’s Christmas Special or the Freeview ads, but it couldn’t help but detract from what was ostensibly a heavily serious Warning to the Nation. If the programme makers are having fun, and more importantly are seen to be having fun, how seriously are we expected to take it?

The second problem, as the cameos rolled on, became clear – presenters are seldom any good at playing themselves. Poor Gary (who is of course as blameless as Poor Nicola the controller) was the worst, but none of them were any good. To bring up an old chestnut, The Day Today never used real celebrities in unreal situations. It knew the pitfalls, and stuck to duping them, not having them act. So the backslapping cameofest seemed doubly pointless. If we can have a fictional transport minister, why not a fictional Radio 5 presenter, if they can be more believable on screen?

The minister was one of the better performances. Initially slightly pompous and defensive, in the manner we’ve almost come to expect from junior ministers, he was revealed as helpless and, after the final tragedy, resigned, and (in the talking head sections) became resigned to the political impossibility of a funding-based renaissance for British transport. A political point had been fleshed out into a believable, if not terribly rounded, character.

Similarly humanised was Nicola, the scapegoat ATC. When these and a couple of other characters were on screen (the seen-it-all M25 chief was another standout in script and acting terms) the makers had every right to be pleased with their fabrication. Others weren’t so great – the woman who lost her daughter in a road accident did a rather corny stilted tearfulness turn, and the character who turned up at the end to smugly tell of how he predicted the whole thing smugly overdid the smugness and had me switching off completely.

While flawed, the programme was certainly worth making. Maybe a non-dramatised documentary, or at least a tighter, more polished version, would have got the message across more powerfully. There’s a deliciously giddy air about mocked-up news and documentary footage (“surreal” would be the cliché to use here, and in a nice touch, several of the characters in the programme duly trotted it out in lieu of any more adequate description) which boosts pure drama and satirical comedy no end when done well, but in a programme like this, with sober points to make, can be as much a hindrance. As it was, the sagging structure and holes in the mock-doc veneer ended up detracting from the programme’s case as much as helping it – you began fighting the makers at every step (“oh, come on!”) instead of being swept up.

The lasting image I was left with was not of the (well-staged) disaster scenes, or the (often nicely understated) “human” dramatic elements such as the silent ATC-room footage at the moment of impact, but the end captions telling of how the National Air Traffic Services had commissioned a report in 1993 which predicted that a collision like the one depicted would occur at Heathrow, if current practices remained unchanged, once every 25 years, but had been dismissed, with stunning ignorance of the laws of probability, because nothing of the sort had happened in Heathrow’s 50 years of operation thus far. Such blithe dismissal of the cumulative weight of decades of inaction and making-do by the authorities was the programme’s main point, and it deserved to be made more strongly.

Writer, critic, gourmet and erstwhile biographer of Dickie Davies, Jonathan Meades made his perennial return to BBC2, presenting a programme on the subject of surrealism. Meades’ loyal fans were slavering in anticipation, knowing what was in store – a witty, belligerent, confrontational visual essay, full of both high and lowbrow cultural reference points, elegantly photographed and edited into a highly entertaining mini-epic, a welcome relief from the unadventurous, Mark Lawson-fronted, blandly reverential drear that has typified the channel’s “arts” output for over a decade. This was more of the same, but also, appropriately enough, rather disconcertingly different.

He’d lost a hell of a lot of weight for a start. The comfortingly familiar pudgy, Bunterish figure declaiming al fresco to camera in black suit and sunglasses had dramatically changed. Change of a less superficial nature was also afoot. Most of Meades’ work for BBC2 of late (two series of Further Abroad, plus one-off specials on subjects as varied as Belgium, Birmingham and the Victorian era) have all centred, admittedly rather loosely, around the theme of architecture. Here though, Surreal Film (as it was billed in the majority of TV guides, resolutely refusing to play along with Meades’ playful cryptography) did exactly what it (almost) said on the title card. This was not only a personal meditation on surrealism, but also, as Meades explained in his Independent column, an attempt to put surrealism back on the TV screen.

But surely we’re already wallowing in the stuff? You know, zany comedy, dark drama, adverts etc? The answer, from Meades, was yes and no. Opening with a montage of news reporters mouthing the word “surreal”, always inappropriately, to refer to real events, he quickly settled on a refreshingly blunt definition of the word – “it means bizarrre”. This is the great thing about Meades’ programmes – he can, and does, impose a bloody-minded authority on the reflected version of the world he creates on screen. The Surrealists With A Large S, ie the loose coalition of largely Catholic European painters, writers and aesthetes-without-portfolio who gathered in the 1920s and ’30s, were also keen on such authoritarian measures. Having decided they wanted to break boundaries, free the unconscious mind and destroy reason, they then set about writing definitions, manifestoes, remapping the world, and any other number of beaurocratic activities hopelessly at odds with their supposed raison d’être. Needless to say, this all gets short shrift from Meades, especially their self-appointed leader, Andre Breton, who as Meades points out, was himself “no artist and not much of a writer”. Other sacred cows of Surrealism are knocked for six – Dali was covered here more for anecdotes of his bizarre social habits and traditionalist, right-wing beliefs than his art, while Magritte, whose dreary visual puns have become the embodiment of most people’s snap idea of what Surrealism means – the Guinness surfers ad world of crazy juxtaposition – doesn’t even merit a mention. Surrealist paintings hardly appear on screen at all, which, given this programme is meant to tie in with an exhibition of Surreal art at the Tate, counts as another winning piece of contrariness from the man.

These stalwarts of O-level art history summarily dispatched, Meades then embarks on his own surreal journey in the company of various resolutely British characters – Alfred Hitchcock, Alice Liddell (here alternately aged and young), various other Lewis Carroll characters including the March Hare as portrayed by Christopher Biggins (hammily excellent in this and several other parts – and as a veteran of both high art cinema and seaside pantomime, a cunningly appropriate piece of casting to boot), a Brummie canine cab driver played by Michael Fenton-Stevens, and Marco Pierre-White demonstrating, at length, how to cook an egg. Many of these elements led absolutely nowhere, but entertainingly so for the most part, mixing trad surrealist props (nuns, corridors, trains) with excruciating verbal and visual puns and wilfully obscure directorial quirks borrowed from the likes of Bunuel and Lynch, these latter occasionally threatening to swamp the programme entirely before a semblance of order was somehow restored. The whole thing veered between a personal meditation on surrealism, a compendium of its preoccupations and stylistic tics, and chaotic scenes of defiantly pointless buffoonery. It all finished with Meades on a hillside from his childhood (along with the weight loss, the autobiographical element was, appropriately, to the fore) directing the excavation of a chalk figure of a bishop buggering a donkey. Earlier in the year Meades had in fact made a public appeal for land on which to really do this, but by the looks of things he had to settle for a faked version, which overlooked the end credits to the strains of late-period Syd Barrett, a fitting summary of the Meades take on “bizarre”.

This was, of course, a monstrously self-indulgent programme. But this was not the offensively wasteful, creatively barren self-indulgence of Johnny Vaughan’s ‘Orrible, or an evening devoted to text messaging, or any other instance of recent BBC managerial folly you may care to mention. The indulgence was purely on the part of skilled programme makers given carte blanche to come up with something unusual and interesting within a very loose brief. Like it or not, it certainly delivered on that score. Anyone tuning in expecting the traditional BBC arts format of paintings in a gallery plus large man standing in front of them explaining their meaning would have been sorely disappointed. The paintings weren’t there, and the explanation, if there was one, was merely that any wholesale explanation of this subject is doomed to failure. Even the large man had been put on hold. (A more conventional standing-before-the-pictures format, held at the Tate exhibition, was aired on Monday night, and in characteristic Late Show style it was both uninvolving and uninformative.) But at a time when talk of “taking risks” in television usually means little more than importing a particularly salacious reality format, or working a couple of topical headlines into a soap storyline, here was a reminder that some risks really are worth taking.