If anything needs to be fired, it’s Lord Sugar’s lumpy one-liners
We’ve waited a long time for this. It’s been 11 weeks of jaded tasks, tired soundbites, forgettable candidates and Lord Alan’s arthritic jokes.
Some of his one-liners were so laboured, they needed a midwife to deliver them. even the sycophantic wannabes on The Apprentice (BBC1) groaned when smarmy part-time actor Kurran turned up with his arm in a sling, and Sir Sugar asked: ‘Your big break? And from what I hear, you’ve appeared in Casualty also?’
A career in Christmas panto awaits Baron Amstrad . . . even if it’s only as the back end of a horse.
But though the series is long past its best, it always builds to a climactic episode worth watching. Not Sunday’s showdown, which this time is between a young woman who designs swimming costumes and another selling almond juice. No, the segment to relish is the interview stage.
each year, the five surviving apprentices take their half-baked business ideas to a panel of veteran business types, and get savaged. Their plans are not so much dissected as eviscerated. It’s like Dragons’ Den with Gestapo officers.
The brutality started in earnest as henchwoman Linda Plant took one look at wideboy Daniel’s plan and told him: ‘You sound like a prize imbecile to me.’ Daniel didn’t help his own case: minutes later he was wondering aloud whether Australia was in Asia.
Tennis coach Sabrina said she was counting on Claude Littner ‘being the nicest,’ which makes you wonder if she’d ever watched the show before entering. Cue the Littner snarl, as he turned on another interviewee and called her ‘vacant’.
But even this hour of ritual humiliation lacked the freshness of previous series. Once, hangover cure peddler Daniel would have been fired on the spot for his lies: he claimed on his Amazon page that his product had racked up more than a million sales, when the true figure was fewer than 50,000.
Five years ago when another contestant, Jordan Poulton, was caught out in similar weaselling, he was ditched straight away. This time, it took Lord One-Lump-OrTwo half an hour to find his conscience and drop Daniel.
Worse still, the interviews ended with soft-edged, soppy questions that gave the apprentices a chance for an X Factor sniffle about how proud their darling children and dear old parents would be to see their success. It seems Alan Sugar has gone saccharine in his old age.
The perfect balance between sentiment and straight talking was achieved in the Christmas special of Old People’s Home For Four-Year-Olds (C4).
There were lump-in-the-throat moments, most of all when little Scarlett, who lost her mother to cancer, whispered in the ear of her pensioner friend Beryl: ‘I have a heartache.’
But there was also plenty of mischief on show, from the old’uns as much as the preschoolers. Sylvia, whose first baby was born during the Blitz, celebrated her 103rd birthday by signing up for dancing lessons. ‘I’m hoping for a nice young man to hold me tight,’ she said.
We were catching up with characters from the latest series, which ended last month. It’s good to know the residents of Lark Hill Retirement village are still in touch with their young friends, though inevitably they see less of each other. ‘Once the children left, it left an empty space,’ remarked one. ‘I miss them very much.’
Singer Alfie Boe will probably miss them a little less. He was hired for the Yuletide party, but his a cappella rendition of White Christmas had all the children sticking their fingers in their ears. everyone’s a critic.
FESTIVE SPLURGE OF THE NIGHT: Paul and Michael, on Christmas Shop Well For Less (BBC1), were fab dads but manic spenders: £100 on Harrods crackers and an incredible £8,000 on baubles. Do people really do that these days? The world’s gone mad.