The Apprentice (BBC1) | iPlayer
Ten Years of the Apprentice (BBC1) | iPlayer
Homeland (C4) | 4oD
The Great Fire (ITV) | itvPlayer
The Knick (Sky Atlantic)
It’s hard to believe that it’s 10 years since the first The Apprentice was aired. It feels so much more like 20. There was a celebration last week of this great cultural milestone entitled Ten Years of the Apprentice. It looked back on the legions of arrogant know-nothings who hoped to learn how to be a business success from the man responsible for the Amstrad E-m@iler Telephone.
What was striking was how everyone looked and sounded the same, regardless of the year in which they featured. It was as if time had stood still, an impression only deepened by the unchanging grey stubble that Alan Sugar wears like an advertising slogan: I’m too busy to shave.
The only notable variation was that the apprentices started out sucking up to Sugar by calling him Sir Alan and then continued sucking up to him by calling him Lord Sugar. Progress of sorts, if only for the boss. The format too has stayed unapologetically the same. Why mess with a proven formula, you might say. Because it’s insufferable and grows more so with each passing year, would be one answer.
But you don’t get where Sugar is with that kind of negative outlook. And where is Sugar? In that absurd celestial boardroom, explaining that he doesn’t like bullshitters or arselickers. Which is a bit like going to the Amazon rainforest and announcing that you don’t like creepy crawlies.
Because The Apprentice specialises in the recruitment of first-rank bullshitters and arselickers. Some of the more physiologically and morally flexible competitors are even able to perform both acts at the same. Take, for example, the clone clown who informed us in the new show that: “I walk the walk, I talk the talk, and I dance the dance.” Does even he know what he means? Any more than the chap who described himself as “a mix between Gandhi and the Wolf of Wall Street”?
They’re all just words, and words appear to have no meaning to this group of aspiring entrepreneurs other than as stuff to fill the space between introduction and sale. After all, the female team named themselves Decadence because they thought it had something to do with “decade”.
And remember, the conceit is that these people are the cream of the crop, which makes you want to weep for the prospects of those who didn’t get this far. But at least it infuses some sense of purpose into the competition, because we worry where else they could earn a living if they don’t get to work with Sugar.
The one small novelty this year is that the contest is theoretically tougher as there are four more contestants. Again, because they all look the same, it was hard to get any sense of extra bodies.
But one who did stand out was a Colombian called Felipe. “Felipe’s strategy,” explained Felipe, “is to be Felipe.” Ever vigilant to the dangers of being someone else, Felipe reminded himself of who he was by the inspired mnemonic of referring to himself by his name, Felipe. With that sort of ingenuity, he should go far.
Here’s a question. Could you imagine The Apprentice without Brady? Karren that is. Who else could sit to Lord Sugar’s side so convincingly and make disapproving faces to the camera when an apprentice makes a complete berk of himself? Some people are just irreplaceable.
Now contemplate Homeland without Brody. That is the hollow prospect that confronted us in the first episode of the fourth series of this drama from the frontline of what George W Bush dubbed the “war on trr” – a struggle so vicious that it obliterated vowel sounds.
A Brody-less Carrie has become CIA chief in Kabul, where she looked skittish and confused, as if she’d received a motivational talk from Ed Miliband. It was her birthday and she marked it by ordering the blowing up of a wedding party in the Pakistan tribal areas. Although that didn’t exactly get the celebration going, there was at least a birthday cake.
Overall, however, the atmosphere was decidedly flat, as if no one, least of all the scriptwriters, was quite sure what to do next. It’s debatable whether there was any need for series three, and if there was a need, it didn’t make much effort to show itself. But it’s really hard to see, dramatically speaking, why there’s a series four.
As with Titanic, much of the plot of The Great Fire was revealed in its title. And very soon into the piece it became clear that the Pudding Lane baker’s was an accident waiting to happen. Sparks kept leaping out of its fireplace with catastrophic promise.
Elsewhere, alas, there were precious few sparks to be seen. There was instead lots of dialogue such as this line, spoken by one courtier to another: “Perhaps the king should know how depleted the royal finances are.” Or perhaps just tell us instead.
I’ve never seen 17th-century London look so neat and clean. So neat and clean, in fact, that everyone’s hair could have walked straight into a shampoo ad without any attention from a stylist.
But while it may not have been a slave to verbal or historical verisimilitude, it did sport a first-rate cast in Andrew Buchan, Rose Leslie and the great Charles Dance. The latter two, of course, were late of Game of Thrones, whose high mortality rate provides the labour market with a fast-moving stream of actors.
No doubt the GoT connection adds glamour, but it also draws comparisons, and in this case it wasn’t flattering.
The Knick is a new drama series about a brilliant surgeon (Clive Owen) in New York in 1900. It opened with Owen waking in a brothel and then injecting cocaine between his toes in the back of a horse-drawn taxi. In other words, we gathered that this guy’s bedside manner was going to err on the side of maverick.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it looked amazing – all crisp period detail and gallons of dark arterial blood. But if it was bracingly fresh in appearance, it was all too hackneyed in set-up. The one twist is that Owen’s doctor is a racist, unwilling to work with the black doctor who is desperate to learn from this genius with a scalpel.
But what edge that provided was lost by the black surgeon being a paragon of decency and forbearance in the long tradition of black supporting roles in American dramas. How much more interesting if he’d been the one shooting coke between his toes. Now that’s the kind of apprentice I could root for.
