Give me The Restaurant over X-Factor any day, writes blogger Dan Wainwright.

There’s something so much more captivating about super-chef Raymond Blanc’s search for a new business partner than there is about a group of wailing teenagers crying about how they want to make a better life for their mothers or children.

I’m not completely heartless, I have nothing but admiration for a young person looking to improve their family’s lot in life. I just don’t get why they can’t do that by passing their exams, applying for a job and working for a living.

If you apply for a job you could have, let’s say, a 10 per cent chance of getting an interview.

If you apply for the X-Factor you stand around in the freezing cold, alongside 182,000 others who hate you for having had the same idea as them before you face the four smuggest people on TV outside of Dragon’s Den. And then at the end of it all, for your trouble, is Simon Cowell telling you from behind his veneered teeth and absurdly high trousers that you can’t sing for toffee.

If you think I’m being unreasonable I’m not talking about the contestants who think they’ve got a good chance of winning a talent contest and just give it a go. What I don’t like is watching the snivelling as they say that “this is my last chance”. It’s like buying a lottery ticket and thinking that the jackpot is the only way you’ll ever pay the mortgage.

And before you ask why I’m watching it, it’s on all the time. There’s Xtra Factor, ITV 2 repeats, ITV 1 repeats over and over again. I can’t escape it.

For those who make the shortlist there are the usual plaintive cries set to Snow Patrol as they implore the audience to put them through “because I just can’t go back to being a receptionist again”. Why not? What was so bad about it? Why couldn’t you look for another job if you were so desperate for a change? For the gamble and the risk these kids have taken, abandoning their jobs as Bluecoats and the like, they’d have been far better knuckling down, doing a night class and actually finding a career they liked. Even if her dream comes true is Rachel Hylton really going to make a better life for her five kids if she’s away on tour the whole time? It’s when she says she wants them to know their mother was “someone”. They’ll think she was someone if she tells them, she’s their mum, they’ll always think she was someone.

On the contrary I love The Restaurant. It’s a show where people with a well thought out dream and a business plan risk a little, but not everything, for their chance to do something they’ve obviously had to get good at before they applied. Raymond Blanc takes all the financial risks of the business going belly up although you do have to quit your day job. At least it’s all been planned through though and only eight couples do this rather than the 100 plus at X Factor boot camp.

I love watching the contestants’ faces as they sit enraptured while Blanc guts a fish in front of them, wearing the same blue shirt every week, or talks about all the delicious smells and tastes, presumably not masked by the pong of that unwashed shirt, that made him want to become a chef.

And I love his inspectors, especially the terrifying Sarah Willingham, who takes the unimpressed no-nonsense of Margaret from The Apprentice and stares in disbelief when she didn’t get the right cutlery.

The best reality TV show will always be The Apprentice, even if the big man’s name gets abbreviated more and more with every series. He’s just Suralun now.

When it comes to someone pursuing a dream that didn’t come to them from the pages of Heat magazine, I’ll go for The Resturant every time.

But that’s because I can’t sing.