This year’s Apprentice hopefuls are so thick their combined intellects barely match that of one average idiot
REMEMBEr the Brain Drain, the threat that high taxation was going to drive every competent entrepreneur out of Britain and leave us an island of business boneheads? Well, it happened. The 18 candidates on this year’s The Apprentice (BBC1) are so miserably thick that their combined intellects are barely enough to match one average idiot.
Whether you’re comparing their vocabulary or their vanity, there’s no discernible difference between this lot and the vacuous Love Islanders over on ITV2.
‘I’m a doctor,’ declared one oaf named Asif, whose business proposal involves peddling a ‘wellness brand’ of vitamin tablets. ‘I’ve got an extremely high IQ, I’ve got an extremely high bench press. And to top it off, I’m quite good on the eye.’
His IQ was so superlative that when Lord Sugar announced the results of the first challenge, to organise a corporate away- day, Asif applauded himself – unable to tell the difference between a profit and a deficit. His team had lost.
Despite this, he wasn’t even among the three at risk of eviction. First out was Ollie, who works for his family distillery in Yorkshire and calls himself ‘a selling machine’.
Helping out in the kitchen at Cawdor Castle in the Highlands,
Ollie was on dessert duties. Charged with making the brownies, he failed to grasp the distinction between tablespoons and teaspoons. Then he opted not to use flour. ‘There’s a little bit of pressure on me to create the best top-tasting brownie anybody’s ever tried,’ he bragged. But at least Ollie realised, by the end of the day, that he had messed up.
Others were oblivious to their stupidity, such as Virdi, a DJ in a turban, who thought the key to victory was to ‘sell it with our personalities’. That meant boasting about his music career, and impromptu raps bereft of rhythm or rhyme that inflicted life-threatening embarrassment on anyone within earshot. This includes not only Lord Sugar but sidekicks Baroness Karren Brady and Tim Somebody MBE (it’s OK to forget his name but not his medal).
Virdi has no concept of the gulf between his own opinion of himself and what the rest of the world thinks. His CV on the BBC website reveals, ‘My goal is to star in a Marvel movie as one of the Avengers.’
The line-up this year is so dire it contains not one DJ but two. The other is also a fitness instructor in his 40s, Tre Lowe, who declared, ‘I’m going to create a legacy that reverberates through time.’
Amid such an array of halfwits, it’s hard to predict which will emerge as the dunce who defies the odds and wins a £250,000 investment. If the perfect formula is delusional ambition allied to a complete lack of research, amateur interior decorator Onyeka Nweze stands a strong chance.
‘My business is going to be making ten million within five years,’ she predicted. She intends to achieve this through computing: ‘Lord Sugar has never invested in a tech business – now’s the time.’
Perhaps Onyeka doesn’t count Amstrad as ‘ a tech business’, though its word processors launched the pre-Lord Sugar to billionairedom. Let’s hope she
doesn’t propose reviving the Amstrad emailer, which was a landline phone with a tiny screen attached and a keyboard for typing text messages. Alan doesn’t like to be reminded of that.
Onyeka took charge of the girls’ team to organise Highland games for the castle junket. She wasn’t sure how many cabers to use. ‘I think it’s like a giant piece of wood that gets tossed,’ she decided.
Given a choice between taking her guests abseiling or jumping into a river, she went for the cold water option – then refused to take part, pleading that she couldn’t swim.
How her team emerged with a profit is baffling, given the food they served – fishcakes coated in sugary crumble instead of breadcrumbs, and uncooked puddings.
ONEor two catastrophes like this might be amusing, or could even add tension. ‘What if something goes wrong?’ we’d think. But this was an excruciating non-stop catalogue of crises. Two decades of this show have convinced an entire generation that doing business in Britain means fouling everything up. The pity is, they’re probably right.
The alternative is practically unthinkable, not to mention impossible – a series where competent people are rewarded for doing well. Instead, Alan Sugar will keep churning out Apprentices for as long as the BBC lets him – a fossilised format presided over by a dinosaur.