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“Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit if there are footprints on the moon”.
No, Alain de Botton doesn’t have a new TV show on BBC One, it’s the return of The Apprentice. Of sorts. For no longer is Lord Alan Sugar offering Britain’s brightest business prospects the chance to become the titular apprentice, instead he’s offering £250,000 and the ultimate business partner: himself.
But don’t expect Lord Sugar to be an equal partner, he’s not “Saint Alan, the Patron Saint of Bloody Losers” after all (although the rate at which Lord Sir Alan Sugar of Clapton is going through titles, it’s surely only a matter of time before he achieves sainthood) instead he wants to form an “uncivil partnership” and help his new partner help him make money.
With the stakes raised, you would be forgiven for worrying that Lord Sugar may have vetted his candidates a little more carefully - but worry not. The decision to air the first two episodes of The Apprentice on consecutive days seems to have been a shrewd move by the BBC. The opening episodes of show are rarely the best, as you struggle in the early stages to remember who’s who - to sort the knobs from the nobodies.
Episode One offered ample examples of both. The candidates were separated into teams of boys and girls, as per tradition, and given one day in which to make as much profit from £250 worth of fruit and vegetables products as possible. Before doing so, each team chose particularly lacklustre team names: the boys became Team Logic and the girls became Team Venture.
Following the custom of the candidates with the most inflated ego rising to the top, both teams elected ‘knobs’ as their leaders, with Melody Hossaini leading Team Venture and Edward Hunter leading Team Logic. Melody, coincidentally, has been ‘personally trained’ by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, and what the Dalai Lama doesn’t know about business ain’t worth knowing.
The Boys Team’s decision to make Orange Juice proved to be a fatal one. Their contrasting success with Tomato Soup was no match for the Girls and their Fruit Salad and Vegetable Pasta. Captain Ed Hunter’s insistence on forgetting any of his accountancy skills ultimately cost him his place on the show, as his brash and confrontational style of management marked him out from his safely anonymous team mates. It also put an end to any hope for Sugar-Hunter Enterprises, the escort agency Sir Alan has been destined to begin ever since he became Lord Sugar.
This didn’t stop Edna Agbarha from auditioning for the role of Head call Girl in Episode Two, when she delivered her team’s presentation to a bemused technology convention dressed sultrily in black with elbow-length gloves whilst channelling the spirit of Madam Whiplash. In spite of firmly placing herself in the knob category in Episode One, Edna led the Girls to their second win of the series. This time each team had been tasked with coming up with a Smartphone App to be released onto the market, with whichever one was downloaded the most earning its team victory.
Despite the Boys team, led by Leon Doyle, having a better product (well it made a bit more sense, anyway) and largely more successful pitches, they fell down when their ‘Slangatang’ App, based on stereotypical regional and national slang, was seen as tantamount to a Hate Crime by one technology magazine. Thus the Girls’ “quirky” (read: crap) ‘Ampi Apps’, which consisted of a series of unrelated noises, was declared the winner.
Soon, in the Boardroom, it was Team Leader Leon, ideas man Glen and tag-along Alex in the firing line. This was after Jim, the Northern Irish hero of these two episodes, used a combination of Irish charm and Jedi mind control to (justifiably) escape the boardroom. He’ll go far. Lord Sugar, identifying Alex as something of a non-entity, made it all square with one knob and one nobody fired so far.
And so The Apprentice has begun. Sure, except for the final prize, very little has changed, but why tamper with a winning formula? While The Apprentice may be more and more about the idiot candidates and less and less about business acumen, it remains one of the most socially acceptable forms of Reality TV on the box and, more importantly, one of the most entertaining.
The seventh series of The Apprentice continues on Wednesdays at 9pm on BBC1, followed by You're Fired on BBC2 at 10pm.
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