Cards on the table. I’m a big fan of The Apprentice. I find it compelling viewing. And it looks like this new season – the show’s tenth here in the UK – will be just as compelling.
This first episode was just what you’ve come to expect from the early shows in each series. The candidates are split into two teams, boys and girls, and they proceed to pick a really stupid team name then run around for the first half-hour like a bunch of utterly clueless headless chickens making mistake after mistake. Mistakes that even my 9-year-old son can tell are mistakes.
This year, we have even more clueless morons vying for the £250k on offer to start a new business with Lord Alan Sugar. Twenty in total. I guess that since The X-Factor decided to have 16 finalists this year, the BBC felt the need to go one better. (Except that The Apprentice was filmed months ago)
The boys went with the team-name “Summit” because they’ve all “reached the top” – of their ambition, I assume. The girls chose the name “Decadent” – a name so inappropriate for a “business” that Lord Sugar told them to go away and think of a better one. I’m a bit surprised he didn’t fire on the spot the woman who came up with it and then admitted “I wasn’t sure about the actual definition.”
A definition which trusty old Nick Hewer provided – “a person who is luxuriously self-indulgent, characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline.”
Speaking of Nick, that man has the most expressive face in British TV. Nick’s expressions should have their own show.
But the biggest mistakes of the first episode involved t-shirts. The boys left £500 worth of t-shirts at the printers, while the girls paid a bloke £150 to print their t-shirts with the slogan #LONDON, then promptly sold the finished product to him for a grand total of £60.
And I thought this show was about making money, not losing it.
Then it was back to The Boardroom, where it was revealed that somehow the girls had won – or ‘got away with it’ – leaving the first bloodbath of the series to take place between the boys.
Someone got fired. I can’t remember his name. We never can at this stage.
