With The Apprentice now in its 20th year on air, the bar for its contestants is somehow both lower and higher than ever. Any pretence that the BBC One competition, which is basically the Olympics for bulls***ters with a strong track record in B2B sales, is a genuine recruitment process for potential business highfliers faded long ago. The selection criteria seem to be erratic at best: is it open to anyone who’s ever listened to an episode of a motivational podcast, I wonder? Or perhaps to those who self-identify as “entrepreneurs” on LinkedIn? And yet this programme now has such a glorious track record when it comes to corporate stupidity that, in order to really grab our attention, Lord Sugar’s latest batch of hopefuls need to be utterly, unapologetically woeful.
With each series, essentially, we need a stronger dose of idiocy – and delusional similes – to get the same results. The early signs in this opening episode are promising. “I am the human equivalent of a tank, nothing gets in my way,” promises Mia, whose business revolves around meal prepping. Not to be outdone, her fellow contestant Chisola describes herself as “like a lion in the business world – fierce, hungry and ready to devour my prey”. Carlo, meanwhile, can boast one of the best job titles to ever grace the series: he’s a “hair transplant consultant” who connects clients with transplant providers around the world. I’d hazard a guess that he does a lot of trade in Turkey.
After too many laboured puns from Sugar – “I’m looking for a Bezos rather than a bozo,” he grumbles, as empty laughter echoes through the boardroom – our entrepreneurial overlord delivers his first mission. As has become standard for the first episode of a new Apprentice season, the candidates are dispatched to foreign climes, this time to Austria’s Tyrolean Alps, where they must organise and run a tour for holidaymakers.
The primary coloured suits and girlboss shift dresses are packed away into wheelie luggage, and the group heads to Innsbruck. There, it’s time for them to offend local business owners with comically lowball bids for their services, and to corral unsuspecting tourists into paying over the odds for an underwhelming day out. Chisola, meanwhile, establishes herself as a remarkably competent yodeller while prepping for her Alpine forest tour. Tutor Jonny reckons that using his GCSE-level German is the best way to win over potential suppliers. “I live in Kent, near London!” he says in an opening gambit to a no-nonsense Austrian; you get the impression that he’s about to ask her “What do you like to do at the weekend?” before his colleagues mercifully interrupt.
The low-level screw ups continue. The wonderfully named Keir Shave (was he cast purely so Suralan could later deliver a line about him being “the only Keir who didn’t want to be PM”?) decides to use a game of “rock, paper, scissors” as a way of setting tour prices. Carlo, whose luxuriant hair is a good advert for his transplant business, tries to sell tickets for a mountainous e-bike ride to a nonagenarian. “Why are we flogging to 90-year-olds?” one of his teammates ponders. In fairness, said 90-year-old did look like quite a spritely chap.
But these blunders are relatively underwhelming, and in a show that relies on spectacular errors of judgement, that’s a problem. This episode never quite reaches the depths of sheer awfulness, and so it never quite meets the expectations of Apprentice devotees. We want a logo that looks like a wave of excrement, dammit! A food product with a brand name that suggests it might in fact be fatal to eat! A middle manager having to perform as a background actor in a problematically themed escape room!
The tour challenge, too, feels a little over-familiar, and when the candidates return to London, the boardroom showdown lacks fireworks. Sugar looks like he’d rather be indulging in his favourite pastime of tweeting about EastEnders. I’m still hopeful for episode two, which appears promising, with the contestants designing their own “virtual popstars” using what looks like the software from The Sims 2. But if it doesn’t improve by then, this format might need to go on performance review.
