Wonderland: High Society Brides (BBC2, 9pm); Prince William’s Africa (Sky1, 8pm).

THREE weeks in and the current intake of would-be entrepreneurs in The Apprentice are proving especially incompetent.

As one of Lord Sugar’s observers, Karren Brady, pointed out last week, the females are an embarrassment to their sex as they argued, argued and then argued a bit more. Teamwork was absent come firing time as they cheerfully bickered some more in a bid to save themselves from being kicked out.

Now wonder candidate Joy Stefanicki looked relieved when Lord Sugar pointed his finger and told her, “You’re fired”.

The marketing and PR director is better off out of it.

The candidates’ CVs, we were told at the start, reveal an investment banker, an ex-marine commando, a surgeon, a cleaner and someone who once sang in front of President Bush Sr. Quite how the latter qualifies you to do well in business is beyond me.

The tasks coming up in this series include opening a fashion boutique, flogging crisps in Germany, taking tourists on open-top bus tours around the capital and designing and marketing a new cleaning product.

Last week, they had to invent a new beach product. They came up with a towel with built-in pillow and water holder.

Not too bad. But the girls, in between bitching, decided on an unwieldy contraption on which to place your book while reading on the beach.

There isn’t a contestant that I want to win. They’re a dislikable bunch, which makes for entertaining TV but, if I was Lord Sugar, I wouldn’t want to employ any of them.

Tonight, they have to run a bakery. Cue jokes about turning flour into serious dough. As both teams came back with dismal sales figures last week – unsurprisingly, the girls sold no beach book holders – they can only do better. At least, that’s the theory.

IF you’re upper crust the place to announce your engagement is not The Times or even The Beano, but the Girls In Pearls page of Country Life magazine.

The Wonderland documentary High Society Brides tracks down five women featured on those pages.

Arabella, who featured on the page in 1990, admits, “I really enjoy all the stuff that the Women’s Lib people fought against. I love baking, I like cooking, I care about curtains.”

Brought up with the ambition of marrying someone with a stately home or a large country estate, many of these women discovered that the wedding ring was not so much the expected happy-everafter ending as the beginning of a rollercoaster ride through modern married life.

As the Dowager Duchess of Bedford – featured in 1960 – puts it, “There is a price to pay for everything. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The film follows the lives of five of the women who have appeared on the page over the past 50 years, including Kate Sackville-West, who grew up in Knole, one of the largest houses in the country, and Henrietta Tiarks, the Fifties It-girl who married a duke.

PRINCES William and Harry and have been doing a pretty good job of continuing their mother’s legacy.

They’ve made a real effort to visit her charities, and in 2006, they set up their Princes’ Charities Forum, to give greater support to a number of their favourite causes. Tusk Trust, based in Africa, is one of those.

The documentary, Prince William’s Africa, follows the heir to the throne on his first official visit to Africa as he heads to Botswana to see the work of the trust.

It’s been 20 years since the charity, which aims to protect Africa’s wildlife from threats such as poaching, was set up. The Prince, accompanied on the trip by presenter Ben Fogle, finds out what’s been achieved.

But it’s not all serious stuff. He also challenges Fogle to take part in a fundraising marathon in Kenya. And the celebrated adventurer’s not one to turn down a challenge, particularly when it involves some sort of endurance task.