Why I love The Apprentice and its enduring incompetence

I genuinely thought that the pandemic would finish it off, yet The Apprentice rumbles on regardless, wheezing through its 20th year like a burnt-out exec coming up to retirement. By now, it really should be playing golf and shouting at clouds. 

Everything about the format is comically redundant, including the ultimate goal – becoming Lord Sugar’s business partner. Surely that was never a real prize in the first place. But now it would be career suicide, like volunteering to be the Smithers to Mr Burns. 

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Anyway, I’ve been ignoring it for years, but I decided I would dust off my Amstrad VHS player and watch it, just to keep it company. But it turns out I needn’t have bothered, because this series is doing really well in the ratings, even in a world where you can stream Pedro Pascal into your frontal cortex. 

I suppose the secret of its enduring success isn’t Lord Sugar, or the boardroom, or Baroness Brady making weird faces like she’s sitting on a sea urchin. One thing that is evergreen, and some would say currently flourishing, is incompetence, and The Apprentice has it by the bucketload.  

AI would have real trouble trying to emulate the astonishing idiocy of this year’s contestants, who would have to go on a six-month training course to find their own arses with both hands. In the episode I watched, their challenge was to make and market their own hot sauce, and the results were, as you might imagine, “more fiasco than tabasco”. (Copyright: Alan Sugar’s Crap Puns Inc.)  

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I have seen 84,536 episodes of The Apprentice in my lifetime, but try as I might to cast a detached, critical eye, I was agog from the get-go. Team 1 (there is no way I’m stooping so low as to google their team names) was led by Mia, who decided that their sauce should be ‘Asian-esque’. Then, despite not having made or tasted the sauce yet, they brainstormed names. “Subtle Spice”, said Liam. “Spicy and Nice”, said Melica. “I think we should call it Umami Mami because umami is a flavour profile,” said Mia, who was very proud of herself indeed.  

Meanwhile, over on Team 2, led by Amber-Rose, Dean, a renowned intellectual and air-conditioner salesman said: “Let’s call it bangin cos that’s the language I would use, bangin.” However, this prompted some discussion about whether there would be an apostrophe after the ‘n’, to denote an abbreviation. It was like watching The South Bank Show. 

After that, they cast the TV advert, and Team 1 had an argument with Melica, who was really keen to be involved in the ad. “I can be an actor!” she shrieked. “I got an A in GCSE drama!” Sadly, though, her fledgling career was shot down in flames by Mia, who recruited fellow team member Chisola instead, because she came up with an amazing creative concept for the advert: “I can picture a prison… the sauce is so hot it can break open prison doors.”

Finally, two members of each team went to a professional kitchen where they actually made the sauce. Team 2 chose such exciting and disruptive flavours as chilli and onion, whereas Team 1 went at it like toddlers making perfume out of any old garbage they could find. They threw everything at it – rose petals, mango and carrots – and then started arguing when it wasn’t umami and turned out to be even thicker than they were.  

Sadly, the feedback was not good. People gagged, and hot sauce impresario Levi Roots said he’d need a pair of boxing gloves to get the sauce out of the bottle, which made me wonder whether he and Lord Sugar share the same gag writer. Talking of which, Alan wasn’t impressed either.

“Gourmet? More like ‘gor blimey!’ There’s no winner! You’ve both lost and they’re both garbage!” he ranted. Anyway, it was brilliant. I’ll be back next week to see them trying to sell a blow-up canoe on a shopping channel.  

Series 19 of The Apprentice is on iPlayer.Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist.

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