What to watch on TV: The Great Pottery Throw Down, The Apprentice and Penelope

This week you can be thrown by The Great Pottery Throw Down, have a nose at Christina Ricci in Penelope on London Live, and watch the Apprentice candidates struggle with children’s literature.

The Great Pottery Throw Down, Tuesday 9pm BBC2

Two words which are enough to set saliva production into moist overtime and drape a shroud of sticky cosiness onto us in anticipation of sugary delightfulness are ‘The Great…’ But the words which follow are not of this sub-genre of cottage industry British greatness, which includes the all-conquering Bake Off, the modest Sewing Bee, or the mostly ignored Indoor Falconry Fashion Show.

The latest addition to this test of classic British skills, which stand alongside uninvited empire building and sarcasm - yeah, right - is The Great Pottery Throw Down.

This search says it is the first ever search for Britain’s top potter, although that title must be held by JK Rowling, and it has the same ingredients of Nanna Bake Off, with a thoroughly likeable bunch of mud moulders spending hours supporting one another in disguised competition. Where it differs would cause Mel and Sue to faint and land on their soggy bottoms, their cheeky innuendo replaced by Cosmopolitan sex column grade chatter, this containing scenes where the potters are brazenly spanking clay. This even invites you to roll out your best Lord Sugar - when pots and bowls are removed from the oven, try to resist saying, ‘You’re fired!’

Beside these similarities and what I’d never have anticipated is a speed egg cup making challenge set to a brass band cover of C&C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat. Guys, you’re kiln me.

Penelope, Thursday 10pm London Live

Prepare to meet a woman with more snout than a lag with a tobacco field under their bunk, because in this fantasy Christina Ricci is a woman with a nose that looks like the bin of an LA rhinoplasty surgery. Her trough-adapted snout is a tough break, this schnozz sprouting after a witch’s curse kicks in to punish any daughter of Penelope’s wealthy and previously horrible family.

To break this curse this pig must kiss a frog. No, that’s the Muppets. This frog must, no, wait… This pig must kiss a prince or someone with equal social standing, like the son of an app developer or someone who can afford a garden in zone one.

This adult fairy tale has a glittering cast, with Ricci in the lead, her Penelope befriended by Reese Witherspoon, while James McAvoy might be the man to win her nose over. All the while, underhand journo Peter Dinklage creeps around, set on papping Penelope’s piggy proboscis in this London-set romcom with a heart as a big as Pen’s hooter.

Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, Tuesday Dave 10pm

What do you get if you sit four comedians around a table? Don’t shout that back. It wasn’t the opening line to a gag, just a rhetorical question to ponder. If you have four comedians sitting around a table you have Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, a non-chat show chat show where each guest brings one fact about themselves to the table, and what happens after that is anyone’s guess.

Host Davies prods and cajoles his guests - who are all too willing to share one story from their lives many might want to keep between them and their gravestone - and this first set of confessionals are delivered by Lee Mack, Olivia Lee, Nick Helm, and Katherine Jakeways.

Microphone failure or gaffer tape is how you’d stop most comics from interjecting during another’s story to take charge, but here each anecdote is given space until riffs between the five organically build and engorge the tale. And there’s a scope of tales, too, with Captain Kirk, a grandmother’s pair of racy knickers, and a horse all involved. But not at the same time.