Ageing, as you'll know from following Sir Terry Wogan's career, can be a cruel business and the most terrible symptoms, apart my very specific problem that I seem to resemble fellow knight Salman Rushdie a bit more every day, are increased grumpiness and a tendency to repeat oneself.

Looking over my recent work, I seem to be exhibiting these side-effects most intensely when it comes to business training, having moaned, variously, about: (i) those silly teambuilding courses in kendo, horse whispering and totem pole carving, which aren't really about business, or building team spirit, but simply a way of using company money to indulge in a manager's preferred hobby; (ii) those babyish ice breakers that require trainees to fall back on to each other, relate quirky facts about themselves, and so on; (iii) those mindless personal development courses that include sessions on “how to listen” (“you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion”); and (iv) the painfully slow pace at which most courses progress, with trainers assuming trainees have the intellectual capabilities of chicken feed.

Indeed, reflecting upon all this moaning, and the upset I have caused individual training professionals, I feel a certain degree of guilt.

Though this shame is not a result of having been so relentlessly negative. If anything, I'm embarrassed at my timidity, having held back from conveying even harsher views out of fear that they are a result of the sheer number of courses I attend for the sake of this column.

But I realise now that swaths of business training really are profoundly moronic. If the aim of good teaching is to take complex subject matters and convey them in an accessible way, the aim of too many business courses is the opposite: to take incredibly simple ideas and attempt to make them sound complex.

And to demonstrate what I mean I have trawled through The Training Pages, an online directory of 26,131 courses, and can today present you with a list of Britain's most Mickey Mouse training courses, in reverse order of idiocy:

6. One-day firewalking seminar, offered by Academy of High Achievers Limited.

The central problem with this course is not that some equivalent events have ended in disaster - remember the fast food workers in Florida who redefined the meaning of “flame-grilled” when they suffered severe burns during a corporate firewalk in 2001?

The issue is that firewalking is simply not the “powerful metaphor of personal growth” that the organisers claim it to be. Everyone knows how it works: the skin on the soles of human feet is some 25 times thicker than on other parts of the body, which means it is not painful to cross wood embers or ash, which are poor conductors of heat. Frankly, a walk to an office stationery cupboard would be more inspiring.

5. Managing the Brittas Way, online course, offered by Absolute Quality Training Ltd.

Remember those afternoons at school when teachers, exhausted by your gormlessness, would stick you in front of an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, under the pretence that it might teach you something useful about First World War?

Well, this is the corporate equivalent, based around BBC TV Series The Brittas Empire and aimed at conveying key management lessons. The same company offers a “training” course in series two of The Office, and it is surely only a matter of time before people are watching High Street Musical in the name of management education.

4. Work Life Balance, one-day course, offered by The Learning Architect.

Someone needs to sit down with the organisers of this course and explain that achieving a greater balance between your personal life and career essentially involves working less, and that studying to do so is somewhat paradoxical - like trying to lose weight by switching to a diet of battered Mars bars. Maybe it's a joke: you book only to be told on arrival that you need to go home and take a day off.

3. Lone Working, one-day course, offered by Sheridan Associates.

I have three objections to this course, the first of which is that it includes a “comprehensive workshop dealing with the personal safety issues of lone working”.

As an occasional solitary worker, I realise accidents do happen - this afternoon I dribbled coffee all over my pyjamas, for instance. But I don't think people need training in it.

And neither do lone workers need sessions on “self-awareness” - if there's one thing you're aware of after spending 11 hours in a room alone, it is yourself.

But even this module sounds more worthwhile than the proposed session on “what is violence and aggression?”, presumably aimed at lone working professionals such as security guards. There are cheaper ways of getting this question answered than going on a £495 course: walking around Luton Town Centre after 6pm, for instance.

2. Manual Handling, half-day course, offered by The Key Consultancy Ltd.

Basically, this appears to be a training course in ... picking things up, which is incredible given that most human beings develop the skill at the age of nine months.

The organisers do their best to make the proceedings sound worthwhile by saying it is “aimed at all difficulty levels”, which presumably means trainees are taught how to pick up objects of a range of shapes and sizes, but I'm afraid I'm nevertheless going to declare it Britain's most moronic training course.

At least, I was going to do so, until I found myself thinking “what will be next - a training course in breathing?” and discovered...

1. Transformational Healing Breathwork, one-day course offered by Gillian Bowles Consultancy & Training.

Apparently, this £55 seminar, which includes materials, lunch and refreshments, is aimed at “clearing subconscious blocks and relieving stress”. It's enough, I think you'll agree, to take your breath away.

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