If I had three wishes, they would all involve getting Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford to stop making television programmes together. Every time they do it, they diminish what made them so great on The Apprentice. Whatever comes afterwards is simply a disappointing follow-up. It’s The Hangover 2. It’s the Stone Roses reunion. It’s the American version of The Returned, but even worse because now the only characters are two furious old people who wander around telling everyone what a disgrace they are.
Alas, they’re back again tonight, fronting Nick and Margaret: The Trouble with Our Trains. It’s a show where, accompanied by familiar Apprentice-style plinky-plonk music, Hewer and Mountford peer and sneer at a gigantic and complex piece of infrastructure as if it were that daft lad from a couple of years back who wanted to make Pants Man a thing. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but it’s basically an hour of Nick and Margaret rolling their eyes a lot and not solving anything.
The Trouble with Our Trains is the follow-up to other ghastly peek-through-your-fingers catastrophes such as Nick and Margaret: Too Many Immigrants?, Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits, and Nick and Margaret: Are You Poor? Do You Have Fleas? Get Out of My Sight. These shows have all broadly followed the same formula – pick a subject, parachute Nick and Margaret in to scowl at it, and broadcast the results.
This might have been OK, were it not for two insurmountable problems. First, the subjects tackled all tend to be myopic and Little Englandy and grabbed from the latest front page of the Daily Express (which at least means that we might soon get to see a show called Nick and Margaret: Do Hats Give You Diabetes?). Second, and most heartbreakingly, it turns out that Nick and Margaret are awful people.
And, really, this is genuinely heartbreaking. They’re terrible people. They’re the sort of people that you have to keep an eye on at dinner parties, because they start shouting their iffy views after a couple of sherries.
Watching them berate benefits claimants or tut at immigrants just makes you feel as if you’ve been duped for all these years. Because they seemed nice enough on The Apprentice, didn’t they? Well, maybe nice is an overstatement but, compared to the bad Bond-villain meanness of Alan Sugar and the full-blast blowhard idiocy of his various candidates, at least they seemed human. Sure, they could be icy at times, but only to those who deserved it.
But what these subsequent programmes have demonstrated is that Nick and Margaret are actually like that all the time. They weren’t being perceptive or clever on The Apprentice; they were merely directing their one-note derision at people we had been primed to dislike. In truth, it seems, disappointed contempt is their default setting. They’re entirely incapable of emotional modulation. Put them in front of the needy or the desperate, or even a train, and they’ll act in exactly the same way.
There is a place for Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford on British television. But, on the basis of the shows they make together, that place is a sitcom about two people who blunder around hating everything. Because, watching the shows they currently make together, what they have isn’t insight, it’s a neurological condition.
