Lord Sugar will see you...briefly

I missed the first series of The Apprentice because I thought it was a serious programme about business.  

Oh, how wrong I was.  

Ten years later, with a format which has not changed in all that time, and we’re off again on what has now become one of my televisual highlights of the year.  Actually, that’s not quite true, this year they jazzed it up with a shocking twist; in the first episode, as the sacrificial lambs lines up in front of Lord Sugar in his Napoleonic chair of over-compensation, he chucked in a curve ball: 4 more contestants!  Cut to open mouthed shock, a swelling of synthesised drama-strings and a triumphant grimace from the big man himself. 

“So fucking what?” thought the rest of the nation as one.  Four extra widepersons to not give a damn about.  Truly we never really remember any of their names until the sixth week, I couldn’t even have told you how many oiks normally start, I suspect this change had only been introduced to allow more cannon-fodder for Alan to fire whenever he “bladdy” well wants.

Three weeks in and five candidates down, we’ve settled into the comfortable schadenfruede of seeing a group of well groomed young men and women who, in reality, probably work very hard, and of whom we are inherently jealous, big themselves up to be knocked down by the wrecking ball of Alan’s meticulously scripted and horrendously delivered put-downs.  The irony of the show is that Lord Sugar, the man who gets to fire these idiots, actually has very little to do with them: they’re selected by the producers, allocated their weekly humiliation the little Lord, then let off the lead with Nick Hewer (the man, the legend) and Karren Brady following their every move whilst occasionally demolishing the fourth wall with a powerfully raised eyebrow.  At the end of the task they reconvene in the boardroom, find out who lost, bitch about each other, the team leader selects the two candidates who they feel performed worse than they did and, without ever having seen any of them in action or spent any time with any of them, Alan points one out at random.  It’s a complete lottery.

What’s remarkable about The Apprentice is how little it’s changed.  True, we’ve gone from  simply being an “Apprentice on a six figure salary” to receiving a £250,000 business investment, meaning it’s essentially Dragon’s Den dragged out for 10 weeks, and we (sadly) lost Margaret in favour of the far less convincing or likeable Karren, however other than that NOTHING has changed.  And all the better for it, every year the candidates make THE SAME mistakes, and it’s that attrition of errors which makes it so addictive: we know WHAT to expect, we just don’t know WHO to expect it from, be it confusion between feet and inches, failure to grasp the difference between Halal and Kosher, or some casual xenophobia (“Do the French like their children?”), you can see it coming a mile off.  The tasks are variations on a theme (sell something, invent something, make an advert (always a crowd pleaser)) before the hotly anticipated Interviews.  Ah yes, the penultimate week when the shell-shocked suits are thrown before Alans mates to receive a mauling, culminating in a complete character assassination by Claude “The Bastard” Littner, the man who once had a candidate doing an impression of a pterodactyl for reasons I can’t recall.  For 8 weeks previously the contestants have received lecture after lecture from Captain Amstrad about how to behave in business, only to be torn to shreds by a man who, if he were to behave like that in a genuine corporate environment, would be dragged before HR and instructed to attend a communication skills workshop.

The pretence of corporate legitimacy gave way after the first season and now what we have is simply a production line of reality TV pantomime villains, arguably the most successful Apprentice Candidate ever was Katie Hopkins.  There are suggestions that the show is past it’s prime, certainly the US version has long given up the ghost, however I suspect that was due to a lack of awareness from the contestants and the same error I made: that this was about business.  And whilst it’s inevitable that, one day, the series must come to a close, either when ratings fall far enough or when Lord Sugar (I remember the “Sir Alan” days) finally decides to head out to pasture, I will be sad to see it go.  For all it’s pretentions, for all it’s predictability and for all it’s faults, it serves one purpose: it allows me to look at those with drive, ambition and commitment to work and think to myself: losers.