This week’s tv reviews

If you like your serving of The Apprentice dished up with a healthy measure of cringe, then tuck in. Lord Sugar’s exercise in humiliation is back and next in the firing line are Lottie Lion and Ryan-mark. No, really

One of the programmes I most look forward to watching, The Apprentice, is finally back and, boy, have the producers found the creme de la custard of the business world this time.

For some unexplained reason the first episode of this 15th series kicks off in Cape Town, South Africa.

Presumably this is to teach this year’s victims, I mean contestants, about the intricacies of the British tourism trade because safaris and wine tours are all the rage here.

Some of the people participating are just the worst kind of workplace humans – like the colleague from the office who says something awkward in the group Whatsapp chat that causes everyone else to leave it and start a new one without them. But they always find a way back into it.

There’s a woman called Lottie Lion, who definitely likes to roar a lot. She’s a self-professed Shakespeare fan, though she had no idea where the quote was from that Lord Alan of Sugar recited in the boardroom. “I’ll have to look that up,” she replied.

Her wine expertise was also impressive to no-one – for everyone who participates in prosecco Fridays or Wine Wednesdays is an expert in their choice tipple.

But watching the girls on their wine tasting masterclass was as cringey and awkward as I hoped it wouldn’t be. I hid behind the sofa for most of it, much like I used to do as a kid when I saw the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

It also looked like the worst possible hen do you could imagine, where Lottie is only there because she’s the sister of the groom and everyone else is thinking up lists of what they’d rather be doing: sitting in a snake pit, stranded on a Thomas Cook holiday, stuck on a boat without a paddle...

The boys’ team wasn’t any better and indeed lost the task for many ridiculous reasons, the main one being they didn’t sell enough tickets for their safari tour.

It’s not surprising after the guy who was leading the tour part of the task (whose name I don’t yet know) referred to the rhinos as elephants and, when asked how old the hippos were, replied that they live up to 70 years.

But somehow the team’s resident 12-year-old, Ryan-mark (yes, that is his name), brought it back with his wit and redeemed himself from the programme’s intro where he says that millions of pounds isn’t good enough for him, he wants billions.

Sorry, kid, not even a billion pounds would make me watch that episode again.

Picture: BBC. The contestants on the 15th series of The Apprentice.