Daily Mail

Arriving with a fanfare fit for Kim Jong-Un ... it’s Lord Sugar

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Of all the many reasons for detesting The Apprentice (BBC1), surely the most disturbing is the fanfare arrival of lord Sugar at the outset of each week’s task.

auntie Beeb loves a man with a big ego, but the pandering to alan Sugar’s bloated self- esteem on a reality show is beyond sycophancy. He is announced with a build-up worthy of a Wall Street titan. It’s TV’s biggest anticlimax when the Baron appears, rubbing his hands like a pawnbroker at Christmas.

last week he stepped smirking from a Rolls-Royce. This week, he went one better, turning up at a luxury country hotel in a helicopter. It’s easy to imagine lord Sugar as the sort of fussy man who keeps the plastic covers on his vehicles’ seats, lest greasy marks spoil the leatherwar­e.

alan’s minions, Karren Brady and Claude littner, stood solemnly to attention as the chopper touched down.

The apprentice­s were gathered at Stoke Park, which the adulatory voiceover told us was the setting for the 1964 Bond movie Goldfinger. That narrator, Mark Halliley, can at least be assured that, if the BBC ever dumps him, he could walk straight in to a job singing the praises of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

lord alan of Tat expects adora-

CURE OF THE NIGHT: Dr Ellingham (Martin Clunes) solved a troublesom­e patient’s loneliness in Doc Martin (ITV) by giving her a stray dog. Pets ought to be prescribed on the National Health — we’d all be a lot better off.

tion from all, so he reacted with horrified disbelief when one of the apprentice­s told him to shut up in the boardroom.

‘I’m trying to actually explain, preferably not to be rude, but uninterrup­ted would be really nice, just so I can get something across,’ snapped a geeky competitor called Ross, who describes himself as a ‘digital product consultant’.

Kim Jong-Un would strap such an offender across the muzzle of a cannon and test a nuclear missile on him. No doubt something similar will happen to Ross in the near future.

He’ll deserve it, as would any of his rival halfwits. This year’s bunch, as ever, are treating the show as a stupidity contest, and they’ve all got the credential­s to win.

a stand-out candidate was Jeff, who boasted: ‘How many bankers do you know who can breakdance?’ before showing off some moves that would embarrass Strictly’s Rev Richard Coles.

Jeff was trounced, though, by marketing manager Joanna, who heard someone talking about fir trees and asked in puzzlement, ‘Is there such a thing as a tree with fur?’

In Billion Dollar Deals And How They Changed Your World (BBC2), investigat­ive journalist Jacques Peretti presses ahead with the confident assertion that it’s business, not politics, which really shapes our lives. The documentar­y series predicted that no government policy could prevent around a third of British jobs being handed to machines within a couple of decades.

It was chilling to see that software already exists to replace teachers and doctors with talking computer tablets.

We probably won’t even notice because, as Peretti points out, our mobile phones are turning all of us into robots anyway.

He met one businessma­n who was recovering in hospital from a stroke, brought on by stress. The chap was already back at work, answering emails on his phone. Perhaps he’ll get a gravestone with a touchscree­n.

The interviews concentrat­ed on silver-haired business gurus who delivered supposedly inspiratio­nal soundbites about the ‘war for talent’ and ‘living our values’.

Peretti seemed oblivious to the danger that, in the real world, these ideas are mangled by greedy dimwits who apparently believe mink coats quite literally grow on trees.

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