The Apprentice, BBC1, episode 1, review: A return to the horror of watching LinkedIn come to life – iNews

The world has spun on its axis since the last series of The Apprentice in October 2019, yet still I am watching a group of blank idiots in an airless, windowless boardroom giggling politely as Lord Sugar chucks out tired quips like: You dont get furloughed, you get fired. Reassuring? Or woefully out of date?

The Apprentice is formulaic, protracted, often dull and usually only really worth watching for the first half, in which the hapless candidates go full Young Enterprise to hustle on Londons most camera-friendly streets and vulnerable pedestrians. The second half as they sacrifice each other in the boardroom is never as interesting as the pantomime set-up would have us believe.

Obviously, Im going to watch the whole thing, because self-importance, pomposity, delusion, and fatal error are sadly very entertaining, and I love how big I feel as someone who has zero entrepreneurial nous, no evidence of business acumen nor any understanding of markets or indeed money knowing that I absolutely would do a better job than these bozos. In this case, though, I have to wonder whether I would also have done a better job than Lord Sugar himself.

If I had a long-running reality process centred around business, that was returning after more than two years to a society and market ravaged by a pandemic which has forced companies to close, employees to work from home, offices to be abandoned permanently and cost billions of pounds in government bailouts, I would not have chosen to herald businesss bounce-back with a task involving the launch of a luxury cruise ship.

It was a British cruise ship, lest we forget, the Diamond Princess, that in February 2020 was forced to dock and quarantine at Yokohama for a month, when an early coronavirus outbreak infected nearly a quarter of its 3,700 passengers, and killed nine of them.

Several cruise lines have been shut down in the years since, governments have advised against cruise travel because its conditions can facilitate the rapid spread of disease, and all travel now requires complicated, ever-changing and expensive testing requirements. Certainly, the travel industry needs a boost. If only this lot could have given it one.

As always, as the 16th series began, it was girls vs boys (and they do refer to them infantalisingly as girls or ladies and boys)

This immediately felt off. Not political correctness gone mad, before you protest, but because this device seems deliberately set up to prevent us regarding men and women as equals and simultaneously to encourage the candidates to play into the worst and laziest gender stereotypes: women with big blonde hair and bright bodycon dresses shouting over each other and bitching; gormless men suited up like theyre on the way home from a rugby club dinner and with about as much good sense.

Both endeavours were appalling. The women named their company Bouji Cruises quite cleverly with the idea of rebranding cruises for groups of young female friends. Unfortunately their seedy ad campaign boasted that the holidays would allow passengers to live the lavish lifestyle, and little concern was paid to the fact that nobody, including half the team, understands what Bouji means (different for everyone, but involves brunch!) nor that it brings to mind that grand tradition of the booze cruise which frankly would have been much more fun.

The men meanwhile also opted to cash in on the middle-age wellness market, but sadly Seaquility sounded far less like the title of a nautical yoga retreat and more like the name of a painful infection whose recovery requires the use of a pressure relief cushion.

This was only exacerbated by their logo, a brown turd with legs and a cresting wave for a head. There are reportedly dangerous quantities of raw sewage off the British coastline so I suppose it at least looked like an accurate representation of how a passenger might emerge from the Channel while swimming back to shore after throwing themselves overboard within 30 minutes of setting sail.

I was still rooting for Bouji Cruises to sink, though, but somehow, led by the entirely uncollaborative pyjama mogul Katherine, they won. Observing them throughout was Tim Campbell winner of the first series and Claude Littners replacement who spent much of this episode in dismay and seemed similarly shocked at the result.

The Apprentice is a comedy. Can we all just agree that now, so that the production team can inject a bit of life into the edit and really go to town with the asides, the eye-rolls, the cutaways and the mockumentary-style looks to camera, which more in this series than ever they threaten to do?

For too long weve let the BBC pretend this is a real business competition, but while I like my Tropic pillow mist (Susie Ma, third place, 2011) this is no longer about hapless candidates or innovation or even moneymaking at all. Its about watching the real-world horror of 16 LinkedIn profiles coming to life.

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The Apprentice, BBC1, episode 1, review: A return to the horror of watching LinkedIn come to life - iNews