The Apprentice Review

t’s an obvious question: why is a site like this covering The Apprentice? If you’re asking it, I can’t give you an answer that you’ll appreciate, but I’ll go for it anyway.

It’s, basically, the one reality show (perhaps outside of The Mole in the States) that we’ve ever got massively interested in, not least the various international flavours of it. And while it’s, inevitably, decreasingly about business and more about people trying to get on the telly, we’ve found ourselves writing about it for the past few years, and feel compelled to carry on.

And from the off, the writers this year (and you’re not telling us there isn’t a writer involved somewhere) have pulled a terrific wheeze, by changing the name of the main character. It thus robs us of the terribly unfunny phonetic spelling of Sralan Sugar, but we’ll try and think up something equally unwitty for Lord Sugar. Hopefully, his title will change as the years roll on. Baron Sugar? King Sugar? The end game here offers many opportunities.

The opening episode, then. It’s never particularly great. Inevitably, it has to focus on one or two people who instantly stand out as not going to last a few weeks, and generally chucks out the one who stands the least chance of gracing the cover of Heat magazine. Or the toff. Or both.

You do get Lord Sugar banging out lines in his introduction, set to be replayed 12 further times throughout the series, that surely he should have called bullshit on. “You all look good on paper”, the old growler muttered. “But so does fish and chips”. Yikes.

Still, the people here, at least the ones allowed in front of the camera for episode one, were the usual bunch of egos. “My first word wasn’t mummy, it was money!” chipped in one idiot, surely unprepared for the life of YouTube ridicule that faces him from this point on. “Everything I touch turns to sold”, piped up another. Sheesh. They should write Lord Sugar’s lines for him next year.

So then. After the women’s team decided to name themselves after, er, a failed moon mission, Team Apollo, the men came up with Synergy, the kind of bullshit word invented for Powerpoint presentations and nothing else. And with the task being sausages to sell (it was clearly a vegetarian’s special), Apollo picked Joanna as their project manager, while Synergy plumped for Dan.