Covid? Never heard of it! Step into a carefree past: watch The Apprentice
Sometimes, change is the last thing you want. Yes, in the newfangled world of reality TV, you can now find innovative formats where dates are disposed of via a trapdoor or contestants woo each other without speaking the same language. But 2020 and 2021 were packed with enough plot twists to last a lifetime. This is why the return of TV staple The Apprentice is so welcome.
After two years off air, almost everything in the world has changed, bar the show itself. As always, Alan Sugar takes on a crop of business hopefuls who are confident to the point of delusion (which is how one of them actually described themselves in the first episode). Even the first few minutes of its return were characteristically thick with quotables: “I am the EST of everything, which means I am the coolEST, smartEST and wickedEST in businEST”, assured one contestant.
Fascinatingly, the opening episode took place as though the past few years didn’t happen. Bar the odd reference to the pandemic through Sugar’s bad dad jokes (“You don’t get furloughed, you get fired!”), you would be forgiven for thinking it had been shot pre-Covid. The economic uncertainty, the decimation of the high street and the remote-working revolution were things of neither the past nor the future. The strange time-machine energy was only exacerbated by the addition of the show’s first winner, Tim Campbell, stepping in for Claude Littner, and a contestant introducing the word “bouji” to her entirely baffled team.
Watching The Apprentice in 2022 is an exercise in nostalgia, a televisual
DeLorean to transport us to the simpler time of 2019. It almost feels like the suspension of reality is intentional. Why else would the first task have been to launch a luxury cruise line, after possibly the most disastrous period for the industry in recent years?
While the two teams built their rival brands, in the real world, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that every US passenger cruise had Covid cases on board. Meanwhile, the UK is still reeling from the disaster of the Britain-registered Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that was quarantined at Yokohama for a month in 2020 after almost a quarter of its 3,700 passengers were infected with Covid.
But this is not a criticism. More often than not, TV is about the suspension of reality – it is why sitcom characters referencing the pandemic can be so grating. If we wanted to watch the news, we would do so. The idea that the boys’ team might encourage a postpandemic boom in cruises with a logo that – as pointed out by Twitter users – resembled a Covid variant is surely a thing of fantasy. The girls gave them a run for their money in the ineptitude stakes, their cringe-inducing branding not much better than the boys’ anthropomorphic oil spill. It is a demonstration of the show’s commitment to representation; women can be just as belligerent and ridiculous as men, thank you very much.
In these times, The Apprentice’s comeback should have felt irrelevant for an endless list of reasons, but the deja vu made it even more enjoyable than usual. At times, the show has appeared allergic to the future; Sugar’s declaration in the opening episode that “TikTok is becoming very powerful” sounded partly fearful. But this time the show’s lack of innovation has worked in its favour. For nearly 20 years, we have been regaled by its familiar, formulaic combining of egos and schadenfreude – and we probably will be for 20 more. If “keep calm and carry on” were a TV format, it would be The Apprentice, the ultimate pair of realityshow safe hands.