Arts & Culture
Chilling Nazi drama returns to our screens

It’s out with the old and in with the new.

I shall miss BBC1’s The Apprentice, which reached its preposterous crescendo in December. I can’t remember who won though, I never can. This is season 12 but the winners of the previous dozen shows have evaporated from my mind like a summer dew.

It’s a strange show. There is something utterly compelling about seeing a group of utter twerps spouting business gibberish at each other into a phone held flat in the palm of their hands like a miniscule tray. But I’ve never seen anyone, anywhere, use a phone like that.

And that’s not the only thing I don’t understand – what is Lord Sugar doing behind that milky white door before he dramatically sweeps into the board room?

I think we’re supposed to imagine that he’s busily engaged in high-level business things behind a massive green leather topped desk on a phone carved out of rhino horn. But apparently, those scenes are filmed in a low-rent warehouse on an industrial estate -  in somewhere like Watford – and not a slick glass and steel monolith in the throbbing heart of the metropolis. And Lord Sugar is more likely to be killing time having a crafty fag and gently kicking a wall before being pushed through the door by an intern wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard.

Oh, and another thing that doesn’t ring true is the mysterious woman whose job it is to say: “Lord Sugar will see you now.” I really want to know her back story. What does she do when she’s not pretending to answer her defunct Amstrad e-mailer phone to tell the candidates that it’s time to move from the pretend waiting room into the pretend board room? Perhaps all will become clear in series 13. Maybe she’ll get her own spin-off show.

So that’s the old… what’s new I hear you ask. Well how about putting The Man in the High Castle in your pipe and smoking it. Yes I know it’s on Amazon Prime Video, but if you are not willing to shell out the price of a couple of coffees to keep the tax efficient (not dodging, that’s illegal) internet behemoth in business then shame on you.

Series 2 of the utterly incredible alternative history drama (very loosely based on the Philp K Dick novel of the same name) sees more running and hiding in a world where the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army have won the Second World War and split the USA up between them.

The fact that history could very well have turned out like that, were it not for my grandad tipping the balance, makes it all the more compelling.

Nazis are more scary than zombies. Fact.