After 20 years, I've finally worked out why The Apprentice is so remarkably satisfying
Stephen Jardine has just had a eureka moment about the popularity of BBC show The Apprentice
It’s taken 20 years but I’ve finally worked out what is going on. Which probably makes me dim enough to be a contestant on the show.
The Apprentice is back on TV screens and across the country many villages will be missing an idiot. Luckily Lord Sugar has corralled them all into one place for 12 straight weeks.
What a bunch. One of them told us he was London’s best estate agent. That’s like saying you’re the best pig stunner in the abattoir. And he isn’t even the worst of the line-up united by its misplaced sense of self-worth.
Once upon a time, The Apprentice really was an exercise in entrepreneurial flair. Lord Sugar’s sidekick Tim Campbell is there each week to remind us of that. Tim won the original Apprentice series back in 2006 and, with his psychology degree and smart business acumen, he’s gone on to forge an impressive career.
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Failed quest for shrimp paste
How must he feel surveying the current crop who sound like they abandoned formal education after primary school and who seem to think saying “let’s smash it” substitutes for having any plan or ability whatsoever?
What they do have is self confidence… way too much. Every series now begins with the contestants telling us how amazing they are and is then followed, week after week, by them proving that isn’t true.
Episode one saw them fail to find shrimp paste or a mahjong board in any shops in Hong Kong. That’s like being sent to a library and failing to locate a book. Unfathomable.
However no amount of failure seems to phase our intrepid future business wannabees. With their too tight, shiny suits, collagen-filled lips and staggering self-regard, they blunder from one simple task shouting meaningless management mantras they’ve learned on Tiktok while failing repeatedly.
In 20 years, some things have changed. When The Apprentice launched, the ultimate prize was a job in Alan Sugar’s Amstrad corporation. However his Lordship didn’t get where he is today without knowing a cretin when he spots one.
The reward for the eventual winner has been shifted to an investment in their business plan and I suspect the small print stipulates “if it ever gets off the ground”, which given the collective ineptitude is highly unlikely.
I’d love to see a pensioner version of The Apprentice where people over the age of 65 apply the skills and knowledge they have accumulated over a lifetime of actually working to the tasks in hand. I suspect it would be a lot less shouty and more organised but that takes me to my eureka moment.
No one is watching The Apprentice anymore because they are interested in business. Instead the audience tunes in to enjoy the weekly humiliation of the kind of people we all encounter at some point in life.
It’s schadenfreude TV. It might be the loud bloke talking on his phone on the train or the girl preening in the mirror at the gym but Apprentice candidates walk amongst us.
We have to put up with that but once a week Alan Sugar gets to tell them to shut up before listing their many inadequacies and telling them they’re useless… and fired.
It might not revolutionise business or bring us the next Lord Sugar… but it is remarkably satisfying.
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