The Apprentice (BBC One)
For pity’s sake, someone take this show and put it out of our misery. Stagnant, moribund, drained of imagination, wit or entertainment, The Apprentice now typifies the worst of BBC1’s output.
When the series began in 2005, based on the U.S. original starring a has-been named Donald Trump, its British presenter Alan Sugar was still in his 50s.
Now 77, he might be younger than either of the American presidential candidates but that’s about the best you can say for the old boy. As the final dragged towards the finish line, Lord Sugar looked less like an aggressive entrepreneur and more like a doddery head of the family, trying to decide which of his scheming young relatives was going to inherit the remnants of his pension.
The finalists, gym owner Rachel Woolford and pie shop boss Phil Turner, were smarming up to him as though a bit of fake politeness might earn them first dibs on the family silver in the cutlery drawer. That’s always an unedifying sight.
As he announced the finale and encouraged the contenders to pick their teams of ex-apprentices, Great Uncle Alan looked more like Young Mr Grace on Are You Being Served?
In the end, the winner was Rachel. Last year’s winner also ran a fitness business: Marnie Swindells, who went on to open the Bronx Boxing Club. Maybe the show should be renamed Alan Sugar’s Next Gym
Phil could have pointed out that the model hasn’t worked out too badly for Jeff Bezos at Amazon – but why waste his breath?
As he announced the finale and encouraged the contenders to pick their teams of ex-apprentices, Great Uncle Alan looked more like Young Mr Grace on Are You Being Served?
He shuffled into the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, with Karren Brady and Tim Campbell on either side — pretending to be his business assistants but possibly his nurses. I’m glad I wasn’t there – the temptation to call out, ‘I’m free!’ would have been overwhelming.
When he attempted a joke, summing up the head-to-head as ‘pies versus pies-lates’, even Baroness Karren couldn’t raise a smile. The pun might have worked better if he’d said ‘pie-lates’ or just ‘pilates’, but in any case none of those deserved to make the edit.
The real problem is that the generation gulf between investor and business novice is now too wide. Sugar freely admitted he didn’t really understand either of the firms in which he was proposing to acquire a 50 per cent stake.
The burgeoning popularity of gyms was, ‘out of my era, but my children and now grandchildren do frequent them all the time,’ he announced. Someone should warn him that parading your ignorance of current trends ceased to be wise, about the time that High Court Judge James Pickles paused a trial to ask, ‘Who are the Beatles?’
It’s normal, of course, for businesses to have a ‘sleeping partner’ but you don’t want one who has nodded off in his armchair mid-afternoon with a plaid blanket over his knees.
Worse, he completely failed to grasp Phil’s business plan for branching out into pies by post, with online deliveries rather than High Street premises as the focus for expansion.
When the series began in 2005, based on the U.S. original starring a has-been named Donald Trump , its British presenter Alan Sugar was still in his 50s
‘By post? I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘If you think you’re going to build up an online business, it’s not going to happen.’
Phil could have pointed out that the model hasn’t worked out too badly for Jeff Bezos at Amazon – but why waste his breath?
In the end, the winner was Rachel. Last year’s winner also ran a fitness business: Marnie Swindells, who went on to open the Bronx Boxing Club. Maybe the show should be renamed Alan Sugar’s Next Gym.
Audience figures for The Apprentice have been more than respectable this year, with an average of nearly 7 million viewers per episode, 1.6 million of them aged 16-34 – the Beeb’s most desperately coveted demographic.
But Alan Sugar is no Attenborough, a national treasure venerated more with every passing year. If the show is to survive, it needs a figurehead whose business nous is more valuable than the £250,000 he is willing to front.
Even that investment is a depreciating asset: since the money first appeared on the table in 2010, inflation has reduced its value by about a third. A cool quarter of a million quid back then would now be worth about £370,000 in today’s terms.
Asif was sent on ‘inclusiveness training courses’ when filming concluded, after he wrote on social media that Zionists (ie Israeli Jews) were ‘a godless, satanic cult’
Since both the money and the mentoring are worth less than they used to be, the only reason to watch is for the personalities – and this year’s bunch were pitiful, a smorgasbord of stupidity.
Pick of the crop was an oaf called Asif, who kept reminding everyone he was a doctor: ‘I’ve got an extremely high IQ, I’ve got an extremely high bench press and, to top it off, I’m quite good on the eye.’
Asif was sent on ‘inclusiveness training courses’ when filming concluded, after he wrote on social media that Zionists (ie Israeli Jews) were ‘a godless, satanic cult’.
He doesn’t appear to have learnt his lesson: yesterday afternoon he tweeted, ‘Pray for the children of Gaza orphaned by the bloodthirsty fascists,’ and, ‘Their genocidal tendencies know no bounds. The Zionist project is demonic & deplorable.’
Unsurprisingly, he was not among the ten contestants invited back for the showdown. His presence would have been an embarrassment. But the whole show is an embarrassment to the BBC. It can’t go on like this.
