By the outrage it prompted, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 was a national disaster. If only the public felt so indignant about the sale of the Post Office, or the creeping privatisation of a beleaguered NHS… but hey-ho, cakes it is, then. 

The latest test of the nation’s perseverance and patience – a snap election called just before the negotiations for Brexit are due to start – seemed like an extraordinary act of hubris at the start. The initial billing of “Strong and stable” vs “Coalition of chaos”, was a statement that implied the Tories’ lead was so big that only by ganging together could the other parties beat it.

The masochistic reality show heralds a culture with an inferiority complex. There have been documentary re-running the race to the South Pole. Countless series place modern Britons in historical contexts where the dietary, sanitary and heating arrangements leave much to be desired. At the heart of them all is an anxiety that mod cons – radiators, white goods, frozen readymeals – have softened us. Are we simply not fit to lace the boots of our forebears?

Now back for a twelfth series, The Apprentice has recently burnished its reputation as a career launchpad. Not, of course, for the poor contestants, gurning and strutting their way to the judgement end of Lord Sugar’s finger, but for the pointy one himself. A certain D Trump, who presided over the American version, now has much grander ideas for his presiding. As yet, Lord Sugar shows no sign of leaving the programme’s would-be Philip Green-a-likes to hunt down Jeremy Corbyn, cowering in the rhubarb patch.

First appearances can be deceptive. You should notice them, take heed of them and then park them. This was the advice of Phillipa Darcy who, along with her daughter, Bertie, was interviewing candidates for a job as assistant manager for Whickam House, an estate that doubles as a wedding venue, in Channel 4’s latest fixed-rig embarrassment machine. Real candidates lined up to be interviewed for real jobs, by real bosses, and we get to see events unfold in all their arse-clenching, sweaty-palmed glory.

Where do they find them? The candidates for each new series of The Apprentice, that is. It's not as if they don't know the score by now - humiliation, first in the boardroom by Lord Sugar and his clunking putdowns, and then on nationwide television. But it makes good telly, so hoorah for series 11, with 18 more numpties vying for Sugar's £250,000 investment in their business plan.

So Gogglebox, a programme that allows voyeurs to watch viewers, has made it to series six. Rarely has telly been more knowingly “meta”. I can only think of Game for a Laugh’s catchprase, “Watching you, watching us, watching you, watching us,” but that was: a) nowhere near a true representation of how the show actually worked; b) creepy and weird.

In the end, I had to disable every auto-correction feature in my word processing package to complete the sentence. Wiggly red lines and pop-up boxes were swarming all over the words “philosophy” and “Cheryl”. But eventually the machine understood: Cheryl’s fourth album has a philosophy. Not only that, but it also has a philosopher (Alan Watts) intoning worthily on the opening track about the meaning of life, with Cheryl first speaking, then (on subsequent tracks) singing her response.

It's on later in the year than usual, but The Apprentice is back. Yippee! For the tenth series Lord Sugar and his producers have done a little tinkering with the format - enough to keep it fresh but without upsetting its dedicated fans, of which I am one - and last night 20 hopefuls lined up in the boardroom (instead of 16, as previously) to hear him run them through their paces.

It feels as though 2014 was the year in which the Twitter generation finally woke up and realised what it had done. For five years a quiet, unassuming baking competition had risen through the ranks to become the most polite BBC One ratings juggernaut in the corporation’s history. Frankly, the world was ready for a bearded ginger Irishman to throw his baked Alaska in the bin and storm off into the great British countryside.