At last! An apprentice with the sense to walk out on Lord Sugar

Finally, one of the gormless trainees on The Apprentice (BBC1) shows a bit of gumption and common sense. Sales manager Scott, fed up with being patronised and mocked in the boardroom by alan Sugar, chucked it in.

Good for him — it took long enough but at last he realised he would be desperately wrong to go into business with a character who treated him with such contempt.

The boorish Baron of Clapton, whose flights of ego have been more preening than ever this series, was ladling out insults and humiliation like a deranged dictator at a north Korean cabinet meeting.

His jibes were not witty or doubleedged. The one person he needs to fire is his scriptwriter, though i suspect he already has, and that alan is penning his own put-downs. That might explain why they are so lumpen.

He told former supermarket boss Gary that he would never ‘shrug off that big corporate image,’ as though working his way up to a senior job at a giant retailer was something contemptible. Perhaps, to a chancer like alan, it is.

Then he laid into plumber Joseph: ‘you look like a plumber, with braces and a moustache, like Super Mario.’ That was a reference to a nineties video game, back in the era when people actually bought alan’s amstrad computers.

He has been surrounded by sycophants throughout the series — not just the obsequious apprentices parroting: ‘yes, lord Sugar’ but the smarmy Claude littner, with Karren Brady petting his ego, too. The days when a Margaret Mountford or nick Hewer might actually speak a word of contradiction are long gone.

So like any petty tyrant, alan has lost his grip on what’s clever, what’s constructive and what’s just crass.

When he turned on Scott, who had been part of this week’s winning team, he talked down to him like a sadistic schoolmaster squashing a second-former.

Scott, 27, didn’t lose his temper: he simply came to his senses, and replied: ‘it’s all right. i would like to quickly say thank you for the opportunity,’ and left.

That’s the first sane business decision we’ve seen all series. it would be deeply self-destructive to harness yourself to a bully who mistakes rudeness for wisdom. it would be barmy to accept a £250,000 obligation from a show-off who thinks he can buy superiority.

and it would be sheer madness to hand such a clown half of all your labour, half your profits, half your dream.

Frankly, Scott must have been a vain and greedy young man to become involved with The apprentice in the first place. But at least the show has taught him something.

north london labour MP David lammy talked himself into trouble, too, in This Is Tottenham (BBC2), a documentary that saw him dealing with the myriad complaints of constituents.

He was effective at sorting out housing problems for seriously ill voters. He was politely patient with the lonely and the griefstricken. But when it came to politics, both local and national, he was floundering.

The boss of a nearby timberyard that was due to be flattened for redevelopment by order of the council pleaded for lammy’s help: the MP tried to argue that axeing these two dozen jobs would be ‘good for employment’.

He told a bunch of 16-year-olds that they should have their say at elections because, ‘if you’re old enough to have sex, you’re old enough to vote’. They all cringed.

and he spelled out labour’s attitude to Middle England: ‘a lot of the issues here are about bad luck. if you are middle class, there are often buffers for you, and a lot of my constituents do not have those buffers.’ in other words, the middle classes could go hang.

Director Clare Johns could see what an irritant the man was. Her camera zoomed in on a sign in the timberyard office: ‘i have one nerve left . . . and you’re getting on it!’

But it wasn’t clear why lammy was singled out for this special treatment, this opportunity for showboating. Perhaps it was because, like alan Sugar, he couldn’t tell when he was digging a hole for himself.