Here we go again then, another series of The Apprentice (BBC1), number 11. A new batch of tossers descends on the capital – by car, by tube, by plane, by Eurostar, by boat up the Thames (where the hell are they coming from, Paris and Greenwich?) – with their wheelie suitcases and their soundbites.
“I’m disgustingly ambitious,” says one. Certainly disgusting.
“Every single morning I wake up with a surge of adrenaline round my body.” Also alone?
“I’m like a Swiss army knife of business skills.” Very hard to get out, are they?
“I’m a captain at the front of a cavalry charge.” You’re a captain of twattery, fella.
“I want the cars, I want the girls, but most of all I want …” A slap?
Lord Sugar alights from his private jet. You haven’t actually been anywhere, have you, Alan? Just sitting in there waiting to come out, to remind everyone that you’ve got an aeroplane. Then it’s into the back of the Rolls and off to the boardroom. “When I started my business, I loaded the lorries, I designed the product, I stood on the production line …” Yeah, yeah, I think the world knows by now, you started with very little, worked really hard, did everything, did really well, now you’re a peer with a private plane. It’s just lucky this isn’t the United States, or he might be an actual candidate to take over the running of the country. [Shudders]
Time for a few soundbites of his own. (Well, he says them, I don’t know if he thinks them up by himself. Maybe there’s a string on his back that you pull and release and out they come, though sometimes the string gets a bit stuck and requires a little unjamming). “Supply and demand, this is what this is about,” he tells them, assembled in the boardroom. “I’m demanding the answers, you better bloody well supply them.” Good one.
And he’s not looking for a friend … hang on, I know this one, if he was he’d get a dog! Oh, no, that was a previous series. This time it is: “If I wanted to be loved, I’d go to Tinder.” Ha, swipe left.
The first task is to buy fish at Billingsgate market, make it into something, then sell it to the public for lunch. All of which feels very familiar. Certainly there have been fish, markets and lunch before. And shouldn’t they be – as Paul Mason wrote here – waging war on Facebook? (Yeah, Captain Cavalry, hop on your horse and charge at General Zuckerberg). Or designing their own hook-up apps, trying to set fire to Tinder? Something a bit more 21st-century, and more interesting than simply buying stuff, selling it on and hopefully making a few quid in the process?
Losing a few squid in the case of Team Versatile, who leave their calamari out in the scorching Camden sun and have to bin them. Somehow they do manage to turn in a profit, though: £200.29 between the nine of them, or a little over £22 each for a long day’s work. That is still better than Team Connexus (it means united in Latin, apparently, but also it sounds a bit like “connects us” if you say it fast, so it’s very clever and works on all levels), who make a profit of £1.87 in total: 20p each for a day’s work! What’s “effed up big time” in Latin? And what happened to all the Swiss army knives and disgusting ambition? £1.87 is “a disgusting result”, says Sugar, preparing to point a finger.
Oh, there is something new. Karren Brady – Baroness Brady now – is still there, but Nick Hewer’s gone. Tired, not fired, apparently, and replaced by Claude Littner, who was already on the show – you know, Torquemada from the interview round. I suspect he’s not really as nasty as he would have us believe. Littner – plus Sugar, the tossers and the programme-makers, for that matter – obviously haven’t heard that nice is the new nasty. Do they not watch the Great British Bake Off? It’s like when you’ve made a bunch of friends at school; suddenly the playground bully doesn’t matter so much any more.
It will be easy to get sucked in. And it will continue to do well, I’m sure, which is why it has been exactly the same for the past decade. That doesn’t make it relevant, though. The Apprentice is now as fresh as a box of poor-quality calamari that has been left in the sun all day. And I’m not so tempted any more.
