The Apprentice is watchable but well past its sell-by date
‘Forget Brexit,” barked Lord Sugar. “Here, I’m the one who decides who remains and who leaves.” Yes, strike up the Prokofiev and polish your put-downs because a fresh batch of besuited sociopaths wheeled their suitcases into the belligerent baron’s boardroom for The Apprentice
(BBC One). This was the business contest’s 13th series. Unlucky for some. Mainly us viewers.
The wannabe tycoons’ opening statements were the usual mix of mangled metaphors and insufferable boasting – which will come back to haunt them when they prove laughably inept. They variously compared themselves to a bitey bulldog, a stinging scorpion and a “fine-tuned money-making machine”.
“I’ve got size 10 feet and they kick butt,” said stroppy Elizabeth, proudly adding that colleagues call her “Scary Liz”. She took this as a compliment. Baby-faced Jeff smirked: “I’ll throw people under the bus, over the bus, then I’ll get on the bus, take the wheel and drive towards the job.” Presumably at a bus depot.
Several of this year’s batch wore such strange, ill-fitting glasses, it looked like they were in disguise. Perhaps protecting their future career prospects. Five male hopefuls were bearded, as is the fashion nowadays. Working in a kitchen for their first task, they wore fetching hairnets on their chins. Très chic.
The opening challenge was hardly high-flying: flipping burgers to flog on the street. Easy, you might think. You’d be wrong. The boys’ team (named “Vitality”, like a range of vitamins) labelled their meat wrongly and spent so long bickering, they missed the lunchtime trade. The girls’ team (“Graphene”, which is thin and hard just like them) were, according to one member, “faffling” – presumably a combination of faffing and waffling. I plan to adopt this portmanteau word immediately, with no faffling.
After the usual back-stabbing and buck-passing, Sugar pointed his firing finger at the boys’ team leader, indecisive Danny, who had contrived to make a £114 loss. Ronald Mcdonald won’t be worried by the competition.
The Apprentice remains fiendishly watchable: cunningly cast with hiss-boo villains and skilfully edited to suck us in. After 12 years on-air, however, the format has grown as stale as Sugar’s one-liners.
Its autumn scheduling doesn’t help. Until 2014, The Apprentice aired in spring but it was shunted later to avoid clashes with general elections and major sporting events. At this time of year, it has to compete with superior contests like The Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity… (which returns next month). Most sane sofa-dwellers have neither the time nor the patience to follow several such series at once.
Maybe The Apprentice, like Bake Off, would benefit from a spruce-up on another channel.
Mouthy comedian and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax was the latest celebrity to rummage around in her ancestry for Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One). What unfolded was a gut-punch story of Jewish persecution and mental illness.
Knowing little about the early life of her late parents, Wax travelled to Austria to learn about their flight from Vienna in 1938 to escape the Nazis. An experience that her father had airily described as an adventure turned out to be a grim ordeal of torture and terror.
Following her family line into the Czech Republic, Wax discovered two relatives who were both sectioned in the same asylum for the “agitated”. She was deeply moved yet took a curious comfort from it. Her own long-term depression wasn’t some sort of weakness, it was in her genes. Her “basket case” mother’s hysteria wasn’t war trauma but inherited. Wax determinedly traced similar symptoms down through generations of women.
It was an affecting tale, sensitively told. The camera settled for lingering on telling details: Wax tottering unsteadily in high heels, pouting to hold in her tears, absent-mindedly stroking her grandfather’s gravestone.
Wax made ideal fodder for this consistently absorbing series. Not only did she have a colourful family history but she was an open book herself. I guess that’s what being American and undergoing decades of therapy does for you. Making this fine programme was clearly cathartic. As she concluded: “Rather than doing therapy, I should’ve done genealogy.”
The Apprentice
Who Do You Think You Are?