The Apprentice review, episode 1: Lord Sugar returns to humble a new crop of candidates

**Spoilers for the first episode of the 2018 series ahead**

It’s nice to have The Apprentice back. Series 14, now, yet I had almost forgotten how imbecilic the candidates usually are. My query now, however, is whether they are actually so genuinely freakishly stupid and insanely arrogant that they can say things that sound like satire crafted by the finest writers in the trade. I can do no better than to catalogue the following examples, with additional remarks, and invite you to draw your own conclusions:

“My tongue is a lethal weapon”: Kayode Damali (some sort of motivational speaker, diamond ear studs, berk). The tongue’s lethal impact seems to have been mostly inflicted on Kayode’s own career.

“I am the Beyoncé of business”: Sian Gabbidon, “owner, swimwear brand”. She isn’t. With a net worth of $355 according to Forbes, Beyoncé is the Beyonce of business, and has already partnered with H+M to do swimwear.

“I’m an extremist. My goal is world-wide domination”. Camilla Ainsworth, owner of a “nut milk brand” (no sniggering, please). A Hitler in a cocktail dress, then, though she differs from old Adolf because the Fuhrer famously only had one nut. See you in the bunker, Cams.

“I’m like a cash machine. If you punch the right buttons I will give you money”: Alex Finn, “IT analyst”, offering a perfect précis of a mugging.

“I’m not worried about collateral damage”: Jasmine Kundra, the Bashar al-Assad of the series.

And - most magnificent of all: “I’ve got self-confidence oozing from my skin”: Kurran Pooni, unemployed film extra. He thinks he will be the first actor of Indian descent to win an Oscar for a best performance. Maybe, but this won’t be it.

I mean, could all that be “for real”?

It might be me, but they also seemed an unprecedentedly good-looking bunch, as if the cast of Love Island had suddenly developed some entrepreneurial instincts and decided to get dressed. Or, let us be frank, a bunch of no-hope twenty-somethings had just happened upon yet another pitiful avenue for their blatant hunger for instant minor celebrity. Their desperation is sweatily pathological that, to borrow the deathless words of Kurran “One Trick” Pooni, it oozes from their very pores. Camilla could make nut butter out of it.

The Apprentice does offer a portal to fame. After all, the most famous graduate of the Alan Sugar School of Management and Wealth Creation is Katie Hopkins, now languishing under an individual voluntary arrangement and has had to sell her house to pay some legal bills. She also enjoys an apparently voluntary arrangement with the political views of the alt right community.

The shift towards eye candy is not of course universal. The series has retained many of its reassuring features, and none more grizzled than those of grumpy wumpy Lord Sugar himself, more and more looking like a cross between Sid James and Nookie Bear. He’s still there, joined by wing woman Karen Brady and wing man Claude Littner, banging out the cheesy puns with an expression of distaste that suggests he may be growing weary of the charade – “workers not shirkers”, “winners not whingers”, that sort of thing.

So off we swagger and stride then, with 16 candidates plus those wheelie cabin bag things, taking on 12 tasks and, as we all know, there’ll be one winner who will be bunged £250,000 of Sugar’s money to blow on, sorry, invest in, some venture or other before they drift onto the reality TV circuit.

To add a bit of variety, the wannabes were packed off to Malta, “in Europe” as Sugar helpful added, to find some obscure items. As ever, this was bizarrely to be accomplished without the help of the World Wide Web, a feature of this particular task that does feel absurdly archaic, as if they’d all been ordered to only use absurdly outdated technology such as faxes or the Amstrad E-m@iler Telephone ™.

As it happens, the girls’ team still weren’t all that sure where Malta was, even when they arrived, but no matter. It could have been Maldon, or Mars, for all the difference it made. The usual chaos of over excited egomaniacal kids shouting over each other in the back of a Mercedes people carrier prevailed, and with routine results.

Both teams failed to acquire the requisite products in the set time, and duly suffered heavy penalties and ritual sarcasm from Sugar in the inevitable boardroom bloodbath. The boys were better organised, but lost points when they assumed that an “octopus with a 40 inch hose” was a cephalopod, rather than jargon for an item of scuba diving equipment. Could they really – really – have been so dense…? Or was the joke too hard to resist for the programme makers? I’m a little disappointed that the candidates weren’t tasked with finding the Maltese Falcon.

Sugar enjoyed humbling the excessively well-groomed young pretenders in front of him by asking them “What’s got eight legs and is bloody useless?”, very possibly the best line of his entire career.

The girls lost, and Sarah Byrne, owner of a “children’s acting academy”, was the first to be fired. She was the archetypal gobby Northerner – not least because she looked like someone had forgotten to say “when” as they were pumping Botox into her lips – and she played the class card. She was wrong about that, but she and ineffectual team leader Jasmine were right in thinking that the appropriately named Jackie Fast had manipulated their downfall.

Sugar says he disapproves of Fast’s playing fast and loose with business ethics, but whether that proves an abiding obstacle to her progress we shall see.

Now that Brexit is almost upon us, we will need the likes of Jackie to go out and conquer new markets for Global Britain. Once they’ve worked out whereabouts Europe is, we’ll all be fine.