Bring on the recession

Prompted by James’s hopes that we’ll see no more of The Apprentice, here’s my list of programs we can use the recession as an excuse to get rid of…

1. Location x 3: easy one to start. Doesn’t it make you queasy when you remember the sexual innuendo they dressed the presenters in? Plenty of reasons why this goes: high smug-factor, the aggressive goading of first-time buyers to get ‘on the ladder’, an even more offensive spin-off show that judged the best places to live (= most middle-class, least diverse, what a surprise), the fact that one of them now advises the conservative party on housing policy, the attempt to make box-ticking sound like a fun thing rather than the bureaucratic waste of time it is, and most of all for its popularisation of the phrase ‘the wow factor’, which my employer has now adopted as a slogan to describe the added value it gives to its ‘clients’. Mmm, classy.
2. All the other property programs and their miserable, humiliated prey: amateur property tycoons, incompetent DIY enthusiasts, holiday colonialists, small-minded aspirants with a vision of a chrome kitchen, neighbours badgered to do up their street by someone who moved cannily into the online dating business in 2006…
3. Top Gear: I’ve been watching this show so long I remember accidentally recording it over Prince’s Purple Rain guitar solo in something like 1985. It jumped a whole load of sharks a while ago
4. Secret Millionaire: this shouldn’t need justifying either (actually this list is too much like shooting fish in a barrel): poor people learn that angels exist, rich people learn that poor people deserve help (‘What you gonna do?’ says my Marxist colleague, ‘Convince them one by one?’)
5. Noel Edmonds’s guess-what’s-in-the-box show. They should shift this to Newsnight and use it to demonstrate sub-primes. What’s in the box? NOTHING

Oh dear, this is far too easy. Celebrity chef shows, Wife Swap, Who do Celebrities Think They Are? Celebrities wandering round the world shows… It’s all of TV, basically.

Any other suggestions? Or ways to adapt these shows to make them suitable for these cash-strapped times?