After defying all expectations and beating out the celebrity competition to lift the Glitterball trophy on Strictly Come Dancing, Bill Bailey still has a knack for making surprising career moves.
Enter the latest addition to his hopscotch TVography: the BBC reality show Bring the Drama, which gently guides eight acting hopefuls with little to no experience, plucked from thousands of applicants, into the heart of the thespian world.
They're all amateurs, there are weekly tasks and the man at the helm of it is prone to the odd gag said candidates often simulate laughter in response to. Sound familiar? It's The Apprentice but with a moral calling still intact and, perhaps, an actual point.
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For years now we've all been happy to laugh and scoff at the hapless bunch of arrogance personified whom Lord Sugar and his ghoulish sidekicks rail over the hot coals week in, week out in some soulless boardroom.
But now, in its 18th series, it has become a show whose genuine success stories are few and far between. It's not like Dragons' Den, where they can just endlessly point to Levi Roots and his Reggae Reggae Sauce success story, while hoping everyone forgets all four Dragons said no to the Tangle Teezer way back when.
Listicles numbering the various success stories of The Apprentice winners are rivalled by listicles numbering the various ways said winners have parted ways with Lord Sugar. The biggest prodigy to dodge Sugar's pointing index finger seems to be Tim Campbell from the first series, who's simply found his way back onto the show.
It's not just that The Apprentice doesn't hold the secret hatch to a seat at the table which it claims – the accusation of false promises could be levelled at much of reality TV – it's that the whole reason it exists now seems to be as a thinly-veiled drubbing of its candidates for us, the scoffing public.
It might be hard to fathom, after a whopping 18 series, that cherry-picking catastrophically bad businesspeople to demonstrate their wretched business acumen on national television is rather mean-spirited.
Enter Bill Bailey and his new Apprentice-style show, which looks to improve access into the cut-throat acting industry and give a lucky three the opportunity to bag an agent.
Off the bat, Bailey's brand as the jolly entertainer is a superb fit and he mercifully sets apart his somewhat-mixed benchmark for banter by not cracking any of the gags at the expense of the amateurs.
He also has his very own Baroness Brady in casting director Kelly Valentine Hendry, who is firm but even-handed and actually has the capacity to crack a smile.
"This industry is skewed towards privilege," she tells the BBC cameras. But she's still no-nonsense and prepared to offer a glimpse of the rejection-forward reality of being a jobbing actor. "I thought that audition was… adequate," she concludes after one read through. Gulp.
The area where BBC Two's new offering falls down is that it, unfortunately, doesn't really do what we might expect of a reality show entitled Bring the Drama, in that it doesn't have any of said drama.
Instead it pushes a convincing argument for why all this casting and rehearsal business is something done behind very firmly closed doors. Not only is it so very rarely as good as the finished product on our screens or stages, but it's at times quite tedious.
There are whole beats spent doing things like handing out scripts, reading said scripts and thinking about delivering said scripts. It does leave you with the conclusion that there's probably a reason this hasn't been made into a format yet.
An acting coach enters the fray during the first episode. For those who are prone to healthy doses of second-hand embarrassment, watching this truly very likeable bunch do things like deliver a monologue while gesticulating with a windscreen wiper might not quite jive with you.
But, all that said, Bring the Drama is coming from a place of warmth and kindness while also pointing to the lofty, seemingly unscalable walls encircling showbiz. Hopefully it does prove to be a jumping off point to bigger and better things for its candidates.
While it may not be the best format reality TV has to offer, neither is The Apprentice really any good anymore and at least this doesn't leave a sour aftertaste. Perhaps the way to solve all of this over at the Beeb is to plonk Bailey and Hendry into the boardroom's swivel chairs instead.
Bring the Drama is available on BBC iPlayer and continues on BBC Two.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
