The Apprentice: Claude Littner had to ‘lie down in a dark room’ after seeing 2023 contestants arguing

‘He said it was really really bad, they were really at each other,’ Karren Brady said

The Apprentice’s Claude Littner was so overwhelmed by the vicious arguing between this year’s candidates that he had to “lay down in a dark room”, Karren Brady has said.

The business competition series returns to our screens this week, with 18 new and ambitious hopefuls competing in hope of impressing Lord Alan Sugar and securing a £250,000 business investment from him.

You can find out more about the 2023 candidates here.

Sugar is assisted by Brady and Tim Campbell, while his former aide Littner will return for two episodes of this series.

Appearing on The One Show on Tuesday (3 January), West Ham vice-chair Brady admitted that the arguments between the contestants had been too much for Littner to handle on his return.

“I know Claude said that the bickering got so bad, I saw him at the end of the very first day and he literally had to lay down in a dark room,” she epxlained.

“He said it was really really bad, they were really at each other.”

Littner was replaced by Campbell on The Apprentice last year after he suffered a serious bike accident near his home in Mill Hill, London in April 2021.

The 73-year-old fell off an electric bike and was forced to undergo nine different surgeries.

The cast of ‘The Apprentice’ 2023 (BBC/Fremantle Media/Ray Burmiston/PA))

He was rushed to a trauma unit at St Mary’s hospital where doctors immediately said they would have to amputate. However, they were able to save his leg.

Speaking about the incident in June 2021, Littner told PA: “I was just pottering along, I must have been doing no more than 10 kilometres an hour on this sort of two-track road. The next thing I knew, I was on the left-hand side of the street, my bike was in the middle of the road and I didn’t know what happened.”

He continued: “My wife and my sons were there as well and [the doctors] decided they were going to amputate my leg. And then they had another chat about it and they said, ‘Look, let’s get him into theatre right away tonight and let’s see if we can save his leg’. And I went into theatre and it was a very long operation and they didn’t take my leg off.”

Campbell won the first-ever series of The Apprentice.

The Apprentice returns Thursday 5 January at 9pm on BBC One.