Every Wednesday night for the past ten weeks a cataclysmic battle has raged between a beloved programme and my political beliefs. As a committed Marxist, I feel endless guilt about innumerable injustices on an hourly basis. Between 9-10 however, my conscience gets an hour’s rest when The Apprentice comes on and Alan Sugar’s craggy grin purges me of compassion.
Afterwards, I’m left feeling desolate, troubled. Hours have been spent scouring The Communist Manifesto trying to locate Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s views on The Apprentice to no avail, so I go on living my life assuming it’s okay to indulge my inner corporate vulture. Undoubtedly Marx and Engels would find it difficult to resist this immensely enjoyable series which has given Apprentice fans (do we have a collective name like Benedict Cumberbatch’s admirers? Wallies maybe?) everything we could possibly want.
Despite being in its eleventh series, The Apprentice is still a fulfilling watch that offers us the chance to laugh repeatedly at egotistical white collar criminals in the making. Task after task is defined by a glorious disconnect between candidates’ grandiose bravado and incessantly dismal performances. They are clearly ordered to be as objectionable as possible, but the programme’s makers are merely coaxing out existing idiocy for the viewers’ benefit. Far from being caricatures, every aspiring Sugar exhibits the ruthlessness required to succeed in a neo-liberal economy where self-worth is maintained by eliminating the competition. This is a reality game show that accurately reflects economic bloodthirstiness.
A variety of hate figures have entertained us with the banquets of doggerel and festivals of chicanery necessary to make the show a success. Wince as Brett violently mashes consonants and vowels together during a presentation in the vain hope he’ll sound knowledgeable. Snarl as Richard, who would be reincarnated as an estate agent, squirms out of another tangle. Cringe as Selina arrogantly rewrites history again and again to whitewash her mistakes. The tasks are varied enough to cover lots of business aspects from number crunching to product design, informing us as well as humiliating cretins who couldn’t run a cake stall at a primary school fair. The Apprentice is the ultimate venus fly trap for sales junkies, luring them in with the promise of an investment before closing and dissolving hubris in a slow and painful process.
Now worth an estimated £1.4 billion by The Daily Telegraph and just missing out on a place in this year’s Sunday Times Top 100 Rich List (he finished 101st, the poor dear), Sugar does not need to strain his wrinkles looking for a new victim. The disappearance of the Sith Lord of business would however leave a gaping hole in the BBC’s armoury, hence the looming 2016 series. Sugar’s one-liners are as cutting as ever, Claude Littner is a brilliant replacement for Nick Hewer and Karren Brady’s effortless sassiness renders gloating hollow. The unholy trinity bounce off each other well and generate as much mirth as the hapless contenders.
It’s indisputable that the show suffers from some personality based issues. The remorseless sycophancy of oft repeated ‘yes Lord Sugar’ in the boardroom is infuriating. You wish someone would say ‘alright Alan shut up now’ to cut the old toad down. Sugar simultaneously holds out his boot to be licked and spits on the candidates with breathless arrogance. Post-boardroom massacres, the displays of ‘affection’ for the departing contender are transparently disingenuous and the worst aspect of the cutthroat process. Also, is it me or are the winners’ treats becoming more and more uninspired? Sugar is either losing contacts per series or uninterested in properly rewarding those who make him money.
Despite these quibbles, once the swooping theme tune consumes you and the candidates strut across Millennium Bridge, personal anxieties are off duty for sixty minutes of wonderfully silly television. This series has had great drama (Scott leaving of his volition – I thought he was going to win!), a task in which no one won and sizzling rivalries between Selina and Charlene, all of which prove The Apprentice won’t be fired anytime soon. Once Joseph wins, the reconciliation process between my conscience and I will begin in earnest.
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