If you love hair-raising horror, this holiday is just the ticket

How’s this for creepy? In a Turkish museum, deep in the mountains of Cappadocia, the curator collects locks of women’s hair and hangs them from the ceiling like cobwebs.

when blind travel presenter Amar Latif walked in, the tendrils clung around his head in the way that seaweed wraps itself round the face of a drowning man.

Galip, the former shopkeeper turned curator, whose fetish has driven him to amass 16,000 hanks since 1979, murmured: ‘For me, touching women’s hair is like touching silk.’

It was a horrible sight. Imagine how much worse it must be in darkness, with a heightened sense of the rustling sound of the hair and its decaying odour.

That wasn’t what I was expecting from Travelling Blind (BBC2), a one-off documentary that promised to show us a different way of experiencing the world.

It started off conventionally enough, as Amar visited the bazaar in Istanbul and was entranced by the hubbub around him — the bubble of coffee, the clatter of merchants’ carts, the shouts of the carpet salesmen.

Amar had a comedian with him, because TV guidelines now make it compulsory for any documentary filmed abroad to take a secondrate stand-up along. In this case, it was sara Pascoe, one of the interchangeable faces from every TV panel game, whether it’s Mock The week or Taskmaster.

But while he was an experienced adventurer, who runs a world travel company and once crossed the jungles of Nicaragua on foot, she was a stressed-out introvert with a terror of strangers.

sara’s outlook is, of course, the sensible one. stay at home and you won’t encounter weirdos who want your hair.

But her anxieties meant she had little to offer the show. Crossing a mountain pass in a cable car, or collecting honey from a treehouse, she was almost too frightened to breathe. Even in the bazaar, she was begging to escape back to the hotel. It wasn’t an act, and the producers were callous to imagine we’d laugh at a woman having a series of panic attacks.

In the end, a local tourist guide called senem did a much better job, a loud lady with big hair who stepped in to drag Amar round fish stalls and flower markets. The two of them laughed and flirted them- selves stupid. sara watched from the sidelines, desperately wishing she could go home.

Here’s a serious message for the Beeb: for pity’s sake, stop sending comedians on holiday. we’re fed up with it.

For years I’ve been praying aloud that the corporation would also cancel the annual humiliation of The Apprentice. Any entertainment value in watching half-wits make a pig’s ear of artificial business challenges evaporated long ago.

Alan sugar, a man with a head like a mouldy walnut, doesn’t get any more lovely with the years. Thankfully, he made only a token appearance on Celebrity Apprentice ( BBC1) before sending two teams of highly able candidates to organise lastminute charity cabaret dinners.

This show is far more enjoyable when those involved know what they’re doing. Amanda Holden’s team roped in simon Cowell, Alan Carr and Robbie williams, all at 24 hours’ notice, impressive by anyone’s measure.

Comedian Russell Kane proved a maestro in a crisis, sorting everything from the floor show to the canapes, and even did an impromptu turn on stage when an act went AWOL.

For the first time in an age, I thoroughly enjoyed The Apprentice. For the next series, let’s have contestants who can rise to a challenge. Inspiration beats incompetence any day.