‘Is The Apprentice set to be axed?” asks a headline, and I expect you are all now anxious. “I can’t sleep worrying that I might no longer be able to watch ghastly show-offs with appalling personalities pull a small wheelie suitcase while saying things like, ‘In business I’m like a bulldog. If you mess with me I get lockjaw,’” said one reader who cannot be named because I just made her up.

“This is devastating news. Tell me it isn’t true,” another didn’t say. “Where else will I watch an over-edited reality show featuring wazzocks who say, ‘My worst nightmare is getting to age 40 with a £50,000 salary and a four-year-old Toyota,’ and who claim to be CEO material yet turn out to be so useless they couldn’t find their own bottom with both hands and a headtorch?”

Controversies that have dogged The Apprentice over the years may soon make it untenable, say “insiders”. I presume they mean contestants such as Thomas Skinner, who, it turned out, was convicted in 2011 of handling £40,000 worth of stolen goods, and Dr Asif Munaf, who was recently struck off after being accused of making antisemitic and sexist posts. A new series starts soon and already a “problem” contestant has been identified: an HGV driver who many years ago made (now deleted) posts referring to Muslims as “dirty” and women as “slags”.

• The Celebrity Apprentice review — surely it’s time the BBC ended this

Well! Who would have thought that if you actively recruit arrogant motormouths to create friction on the show to make headlines you run the risk that they might actually be motormouths in real life? Amazing. And now a former candidate has gone to the press saying that when he appeared on it they manipulated the results to ramp up the drama. Never!

I reckon The Apprentice, now in its 20th year, will be OK for a good while, as it happens. But do I think it is high time it was put out to pasture, sent to sit in the dismal losers’ café blaming the project manager? Hello? It’s now more tired than Dick Turpin’s horse.

It was great for a while but the formula has long needed a reboot, just like Alan Sugar’s jokes (Alan, there must be better pun writers). It perpetuates the dated stereotype of the power-suited boardroom ballbuster strutting in stiletto heels in an age when really people work from home in their underpants. We all know many of them aren’t interested in business anyway. They want to become influencers.

But then the show is not as lame as some. Such as, ooh, let’s see now, Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is to me about as funny as standing barefoot repeatedly on an upturned plug with my wet fingers in the socket.

• Dean Franklin: My last big expense? The £700 tux I wore on The Apprentice

How has it survived so long? How does it get the Christmas Day slot year after year? The scripts are so lazy one viewer wrote, “I’d rather watch reruns of Nicola Sturgeon’s daily Covid briefings,” which I do understand. They might be marginally less painful.

What else would I axe? Definitely I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, which I recently wrote in this newspaper was a pig’s scrotum of a show that provides all the cultural nourishment of a plastic joke shop dog poo. Obviously Love Island and Big Brother and Dating Naked because the upholstery must be an absolute horror show. Oh and the BBC’s Stranded on Honeymoon Island, whose premise, that two people marry after meeting for only a few minutes on a speed date and are then sent off on a deserted island together, is fake because the marriage isn’t even legal. Pointless.

Speaking of which, Pointless could also do with a refresh. I am fond of it but, I don’t mean this unkindly, it is quite boring. And Celebrity Mastermind. Get rid. Not the normal version; that’s an institution. But the celebrity version is so insultingly dumbed down that it asked one celebrity last month which domestic pet makes the noises “woof woof” and “bow wow”. Mind you, this may be the legacy of David Lammy, who once appeared on the show and when asked which “Marie” had won the 1903 Nobel prize for her work on radiation, replied “Antoinette”.

• Read more from Carol Midgley

Positive thinking… no thanks

Optimism may boost your immune system, a new study finds. Well, that’s me up Schitt’s Creek without a paddle. I never “got” positive thinking. I am British. I cleave more to the “if you don’t hope, you can’t be disappointed” philosophy.

If someone asks how I am, I would rather die than say, “I’m doing awesomely, thanks! Things are going really well.” What kind of fate-tempting maniac would utter such a thing? Instead I say, “I’ve been worse. Not dead yet, touch wood,” which is far more sensible.

Pessimism is unfairly maligned. It delivers a win-win. I never look forward to holidays because I dread leaving the pets, imagine the hotel will be a crap hole and the flight will be cancelled. Or worse. And then when it turns out to be really quite nice I am pleasantly surprised. An optimist, meanwhile, spends months full of buoyant expectation, which inevitably ends in anticlimax. Pessimists triumph again.

A work colleague just asked me if I had my holiday dates planned for the rest of the year and, bless him, I had to laugh. I would never be so hubristic as to plan that far ahead. The only reason I want a cremation is that it would be just my luck to be among the 0.001 per cent of corpses that are still alive. Still I can see the merit in putting a positive spin on bad news. Such as the ophthalmologist who told his patient, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is… you’re getting a new dog.”