Trump revives regular folks’ ‘Apprentice’

New York — Donald Trump isn’t firing “The Celebrity Apprentice,” but he’s bringing back the regular edition of the show with 14 ordinary job-hunters plagued by the economic crisis.

NBC and Trump said Wednesday they want to put America back to work with the show, which is expected to air this fall.

The original civilian version of “The Apprentice” premiered in 2004, then two years ago was replaced by the “Celebrity Apprentice” format.

“But since the economy went down the tubes, people have been saying, ‘Would it be possible to bring back the original?'” Trump said. “In a way, it’s more important now than when we first did it.”

Trump’s revived “Apprentice” will recruit candidates who have lost their jobs, are stuck with jobs they don’t like just to get by or have finished college with no offers in sight.

The only common denominator: “Everybody has to be smart,” Trump said. “They all have to have brain power.”

Marie Osmond cancels week of Vegas shows

Las Vegas — Donny and Marie Osmond are canceling their shows this week at the Flamingo Las Vegas hotel while she copes with the death of her son.

Marie Osmond’s publicist Alan Nierob said Wednesday that it’s been a difficult time for the Osmonds, and the performer felt like she needed to spend more time with her family. The Osmonds returned to the stage March 9 after funeral services for 18-year-old Michael Bryan.

Los Angeles police have said Bryan died Feb. 26 of an apparent suicide after jumping from the eighth floor of an apartment building. Autopsy and toxicology results are pending.

Nierob says the Osmonds will miss five shows before the Donny & Marie show resumes performances March 23. The show is dark Sundays and Mondays.

‘Killer’ game show starts uproar in France

Paris — A state-run TV channel is stirring controversy with a documentary about a fake game show in which credulous participants obey orders to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a man, who is really an actor, until he appears to die.

The producers of “The Game of Death,” broadcast Wednesday night, wanted to examine both what they call TV’s mind-numbing power to suspend morality, and the striking human willingness to obey orders.

“Television is a power. We know it, but it’s theoretical,” producer Christophe Nick told the daily Le Parisien. “I wondered: Is it so important that it can turn us into potential executioners?”

In the end, more than four in five “players” gave the maximum jolt.

“People never would have obeyed if they didn’t have trust,” Nick was quoted as saying in the paper’s Wednesday edition. “They told themselves, ‘TV knows what it’s doing.'”

The experiment was based on the work of late psychologist Stanley Milgram, who carried out a now-classic experiment at Yale University in the 1960s. It found that most ordinary people — if encouraged by an authoritative-seeming scientist — would administer ostensibly dangerous electric shocks to others.