Richard II's goose and Sir Alan's headless chickens

Last night's TV reviewed: The Apprentice; Child of Our Time; Al Capone and the Untouchables; Clarissa and the King's Cookbook; Great British Menu

When the clash of civilisations comes, will it be on the desert plain and feature two armies, fiercely held beliefs and bone-crunching weaponry? Or might it come in a Moroccan souk, and feature Michael Sophocles, “a nice Jewish boy” who turns out to be “half-Jewish”, trying to buy a kosher chicken from a Muslim butcher and have it blessed in the name of Allah? The exchange with the butcher – “Who blesses the chicken?”; “A holy man”; “I have to have that chicken blessed” – was, like much of last night’s The Apprentice (BBC One), funny and very wrong. Perhaps it will be spliced into an al-Qaeda training video.

Staggering ignorance notwithstanding, this was the best/most compulsive/did-they-really-just-do-that? episode yet: the two teams had to buy a list of items supplied by the Chief Growling Gnome. They were supposed to haggle fiercely for the keenest deal although it is hard to imagine anyone in their right mind wanting these things at any price. One was an alarm clock in the shape of a mosque, which woke you with a strident call to prayer. The second was a downright rude cactus. The third was a cowhide, complete with tail. The bone of contention, however, turned out to be that kosher chicken, of which there was no shortage; decapitated before your eyes for added freshness. Michael and Jenny (who had swathed her copper hair in a pink scarf in order to pass as a local) soon found a willing poulterer. He raised his cleaver. The chicken shut its eyes. "Stop! Stop! Stop!" cried Jenny. "I have to have the chicken blessed by someone from the mosque." The chicken opened one eye, hopefully. Michael clarified the position - "religious like this" - and he crossed himself. "Say the word 'Allah'!" "Allah!" said the poulterer affably and chopped the chicken's head off.

It shows how extreme this series has become that what would once have had me punching a cushion – Lee McQueen’s catch-phrase “That’s what I’m talking about” – is subsidiary buzz to the lip-smacking warfare. For all their battle talk, the contestants are strangely meek: Michael bangs on about destroying any foe that dare cast a shadow over his Palm Pilot, but when confronted over a misdemean-our his wounded belligerence is less Gordon Gekko, more Scrappy-Doo.

This week, Jennifer, principally known for being Irish and wearing a hideous shiny mustard blouse, led the losing team. Modelling her approach on their shopping list, Jennifer's team ran around like headless poultry: wild flapping, some blood-spilling and no evidence of higher brain function. She neglected to check the provenance of two tagine pots (tut tut). The Berber bedspread, bought under a ruse that Alex and Claire were unlikely boyfriend and girlfriend, was too expensive. Alex’s tentative grip of French – “ Je voudrais le petit déjeuner” – would have made his fans sigh dreamily. Can the nation get over Alex please: for “brooding hunk” can we substitute “duplicitous whiner”? Jenny (and her python-swallowing-mongoose face) tried, and failed, to bribe a man stringing tennis racquets into not stringing the opposing team’s racquets. Lucinda ran around in an impractical pink pashmina. The drama pounded relentlessly on, until the climactic finale in which two people were fired. Devoted viewers have learnt that nearly every series will also contain the predictable "unpredictable" moment of a double firing.

In the boardroom, Sir Alan was on terrific form, restoring faith in his omniscience after the wrongful smiting of Simon a couple of weeks ago and coming to a slow rolling boil. "Jenny, you are a lady of the world. Slightly older than the people here." Jenny did not take this amiss. She smiled. "It's my birthday, Sir Alan. I'm 36 today." "Congratulations," said Sugar grimly. "Are you telling me you don't know the term 'kosher' is associated with Jewish people?" This, Jenny conceded, was, indeed, the case. Sugar said he was flabbergasted, and turned to Michael, who had described himself on his CV as "a good Jewish boy". Under questioning he wasn't so sure. Sir Alan suggested he judge Michael’s credentials by making him drop his trousers. Racy.

Do you remember the film of a killer whale playing with a seal? Sugar said, "Is it true that you went to a halal butcher and he made a prayer over it. Is that right? Are you having a laugh or what? I don't know why you didn't go the whole hog and find a Roman Catholic priest to take the butcher's confession. It's unbelievable!" Michael protested that he was only half Jewish. At this point I caught sight of Nick's face. He was looking at Sugar as if he had suddenly heard ticking. Nick evidently knew the danger signs because, at this point, Sugar went off like a non-mosque shaped alarm clock. "If any of you are interested in staying in this process, you'd better start opening your mouth. I don't give a shit! I'll fire three of you! I'll fire all bloody five of you! Don't bother me at all! You open your bloody mouth or I'll make some quick decisions now." All five opened their mouths simultaneously and began to blame each other.

Jenny, having confessed that she didn't know there were any Jewish connections to the term, insisted she had ceded to Michael's greater knowledge because of his "Jewish roots", a sly bit of blame-dodging that earned her the Order of the Stubby Finger. Sir Alan fired Jenny for general snakiness ("I think she was a bit of a snake")– and, I reckon, being horrible to Lucinda. The tartan beret will always get you. Jennifer was writhing to escape, first trying to blame Claire (“she’s a Tasmanian devil”) and then Michael for the team’s loss. She said if Sir Alan wanted a liar, meaning Michael, she’d rather not work for him. Bad move: he fired her; his appetite for condign retribution not yet sated. Happily, Jennifer claims to be "the best salesperson in Europe", so we don't need to worry about her future too much. His remark to Michael – that his “overenthusiasm” reminded him of himself at that age – recalled his misty-eyed identification with Syed a few seasons ago. It’s a very weird form of retro-narcissism. Could Margaret have a word?

Nick Hewer couldn’t understand Michael Sophocles’s faith-based ignorance – “I'm a Catholic," whispered Nick to Margaret. "You're a Protestant. We know what kosher is and Michael doesn't! He did classics at Edinburgh." "Edinburgh," said Margaret sadly, "isn't what it was." Now there are eight. One day, instead of consolatory hugs and kisses, fire-ee and survivors will punch one another out by Frances’s desk in reception. Claire says her inner rottweiler is stirring (she’s hardly been a docile labrador). Raef has mutated into the Noël Coward of spreadsheets, dressing-gowned, quiff at full height, and given to lilting soliloquies about “integretaaaay”. A mystery: the contestants’ house seems huge, yet the boys sleep three to a room. It’s either a reverse Tardis or Raef is starting a secret quiff sex cult.

Also on BBC1, Rhianna was worrying about her appearance. “I just don’t like my body-shape,” she explained. “I think I look really fat.” The surprising thing here wasn’t that Rhianna seemed perfectly slim to the rest of us (after all, we’re pretty used to such unnecessary female anxiety on TV by now) but that she was seven years old. Rhianna was speaking in Child of Our Time, the series presented by Professor Lord Robert Winston, which has returned for its latest look at a selection of Brits born in 2000. The subject for the first episode was gender, and the conclusion perhaps won’t have come as a great shock to most parents (or non-parents) watching. Gender differences, it seems, go deep – which is presumably why they’ve proved harder to eradicate than some feminists once hoped.

Early in the programme, the children were faced with an identical drink in two different bottles. Without exception, the girls plumped for the pink one labelled Princess Pop, the boys for the Rocket Pop in its manly blue. All the children but one then claimed that “their” drink tasted nicer. Later, they were invited to dress up in whatever clothes they wanted, and again headed straight for masculinity and femininity in their most traditional forms. For the boys, this meant looking tough – or, more specifically these days, as if they came from South Central LA. The girls opted for a faintly alarming emphasis on glamour, including mini-skirts and fishnet tights.

For Professor Winston, this was proof of how much things have changed in the last few decades. I’m not so sure. On the one hand, celebrity culture is certainly more widespread, and the idea of glamour probably trashier. On the other, I bet a similar experiment in the 1960s would have seen the girls going for the dolly-bird look – and in the 1920s, dressing like flappers. Come to think of it, I’m also not sure about Winston’s wider claim either: that Child of Our Time is a rare example of solid science on prime-time BBC1. There was a scientific point, I’m sure, but there was also an element of “Children Say the Strangest/Funniest Things”, about owning pet frogs and being fat. This BBC version of 7 Up, with the BBC following a bunch of children as they grow up, revealed depressing stuff we probably knew: very young girls want to be thin, boys want to be rich. One on one, girls gossip, boys are silent.

Winston’s point was that in a postfeminist age when most parents proclaim open-minded parenting, the reality is that little boys like things in blue and little girls like stuff that’s pink. Only one boy bucked this trend, but he was bound to grow up interesting – his parents, though separated, still lived in the same house. Despite his dad’s admirable right on-ness, he rode a black bike not a pink one. The programme definitely offers plenty to chew over, and is often good fun. Yet, in the end, those claims to scientific rigour are undermined by its own main quality. It gets such revealing interviews with the children (and their parents) that the participants come across as a group of completely different individuals rather than as a collective example of anything. As a result, most of the evidence we’re given feels firmly in the realm of the anecdotal.

Elsewhere, Clarissa and the King's Cookbook (BBC4) was part of their medieval strand. The cookbook, with recipes by Richard II's own chef, was the first ever written in English. Clarissa Dickson Wright is the antidote to Nigella Lawson. She is bulky and bloodthirsty, amusing and cultivated. "Patience," she said, sitting by an open fire waiting for a watched pot to boil, "is a great virtue for cooks. Not necessarily for chefs." She has also gone further than most television cooks in acknowledging the truth of Nietzsche's remark that there is no feast without cruelty. Where her colleagues tend to pull a neatly trimmed fillet out of the fridge to prepare their dishes, Clarissa has been known to go out and hunt her raw ingredients down before putting them in the pot, and there's something self-consciously defiant about her refusal to blur the connection between meat and animal, in deference to contemporary squeamishness. So I couldn't help but feel that she rather ducked a challenge here, in which she prepared a meal from a scroll of the court of Richard II called The Forme of Cury ("cury" being a way of saying cooking, rather than a chicken tikka with a side of aloo gobi).

There was an opportunity here to really test our sometimes arbitrary demarcations between protected species and edible ones. The scroll includes a recipe for heron, for example, and a recipe for beaver, helpfully categorised as a fish by the clerical authorities to get round the 242 days of the year on which meat was forbidden. Clarissa could even have cooked porpoise in broth, though it's true that the scroll doesn't go into a great deal of detail about technique. You wouldn't forget that in a hurry, would you – a group of medievalists tucking into grilled porpoise. Instead, Clarissa opted for a goose recipe. "Take sage, parsley, hyssop and savory, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes and fill the geese therewith and sew up the hole that no grease come out and roast them well." The result, she declared, was "elegant, expensive and sophisticated cuisine", and I don't doubt that it was to a medieval diner.

Richard II was fastidious, an epicure and a pretty snappy dresser. The sweeping sleeves of his doublet, it is said, were hung with "15 silver cockles and 30 mussels and whelks in silver gilt". Which you might describe as top dressing. Clarissa cooked the goose stuffed with fruit, river fish with sweet-and-sour syrup and pears poached in wine as served to the king. Apparently, one of Richard's feasts cost the equivalent of £58,000 for food and £10,000 for table linen, which might even make a non-dom blink a bit. But in terms of contemporary cuisine, it looked like goose-studded porridge, without any Heston Blumenthal finesse. I wasn't entirely sure about the aigre-doux of fish either, topped with a kind of mulled vinegar and provoking from Clarissa's assembled guests the kind of polite murmuring that all cooks dread.

If you want to see what Richard II might be serving up now you have to watch Great British Menu, which this week reached the South-west England heats. Curiously, the recipes have been getting quite medieval: slices of beef served on a jelly of white wine with chervil and sultanas, and wild pigeon cured in birch-sap wine. But when it comes to plating up, the modern chef can do a lot better than a mess of pottage plopped on to a big slice of stale bread. Chris Horridge – who seems to believe that haute cuisine can cure cancer – serves his food on a roofing slate, while his opponent, Elisha Carter, opts for weirdly morphed bowls.

As food programmes go, Great British Menu isn't bad, breaking away from the kitchen to look at small food suppliers. But it's hard to imagine watching it every day without being driven mad by the redundancy of the format, the way it repeats the fundamental information again and again and again, not to mention coating everything in a gummy sauce of chef rivalry. "They're always arguing, those two!" chuckled Jenny Bond in her infuriatingly mumsy voice-over. Yes, but only because the producers kept telling them to, I suspect, so they could sprinkle more finely chopped banter into the mix.

Finally, something genuinely unexpected did happen on TV last night: after several failed attempts, with Al Capone and the Untouchables Five’s True Story series finally achieved its aim of debunking a piece of received wisdom. Ask most people who brought down Capone, and they’d surely say Eliot Ness, the head of those prohibition-enforcing incorruptibles. In fact, as last night’s documentary showed, the man really responsible was, rather disappointingly, an accountant from Washington. Frank Wilson it was who spent over a year preparing the case that got Capone jailed for tax evasion.

So, why do we think Ness was the hero of the piece? The answer, of course, is Hollywood – which in turn has drawn on the 1957 book Ness “co-authored” with a journalist called Oscar Fraley. (“Don’t get scared if we stray from the facts,” Fraley advised, before adapting Ness’s 21-page memoir into a hugely popular piece of American folklore.) Sadly, Ness didn’t live to enjoy his mythical status. By 1957, ironically enough, he was an alcoholic, who’d met Fraley in a bar and who died at 54, just before the book came out. His death passed unnoticed by every newspaper in Chicago.