OK, by now you should all know exactly what “The Apprentice” TV show is all about. It is the TV equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion or a lioness bringing down a sickly wildebeeste on the plains of the Serengeti. And so we watch a group of hapless, boasting cocks and cockettes parade around in front of us trying to win the approval of the UK’s leading Nookie Bear impressionist (that will get us a few hundred hits from Google – and this time around I seriously believe Surallen has had cosmetic surgery in order to enhance his overall Nookieness. His hair now looks as if it is the cross between the type of fluff you find on the top of the head of an Action Man and the short and curlies located on your scrotum. Mind you, his face does look like a talking ballbag too – but that takes me back to my old illustration for this show where I superimposed a ballbag on the head of the great man. Ho ho – ain’t I a wit?)
Anyway, the producers got their special selection filter out working again. Got the mouthy asian bird – check. The ugly ginger bird – check. The pushy baby faced bloke – check. But this time around there are a few new stereotypes to include, like the Islamic fundamentalist bloke who’ll have everyone running in the opposite direction when they do the task that involves hijacking a plane (I made that up in bad taste, you know) and the whiny American bird who is obviously going to come a cropper during the mid-phase of the show during a big showdown.
The first task involved them cleaning and they chose to clean cars. Of course, you can approach cleaning in two ways: as volume sales or in terms of securing a large contract. With volume sales, it is head down bang, bang, bang – knock it out kind of stuff. The guys did that with the shoeshine business, but also had a car cleaning contract to fulfill. Both the male and female team fell with the contract work because they weren’t consistent and couldn’t work at speed. It’s cleaning frigging cars, ferchristsake. So we all know that they are inept.
Anyway, I lost consciousness for a while and the boys lucked out and won due to the girls blowing too much cash on supplies. A schoolboy error and when it come down to the boardroom, the wrong person got dumped. Moaning Mona should have been given the bullet just for arguing with her potential employer. But Sugar blew it once again purely to keep her in for future entertaining confrontational appeal. Ho, ho.
So it is the same old stuff and there is a law of diminishing returns, but for the first time the UK series has overtaken the entertainment appeal of the US counterpart. For years, Donald Trump has literally trumped on Sugar with a superior programme, by putting on extravagent challenges, amazing rewards and acting like a big fucking millionaire, whereas Sugar always felt more like a desperate manager of Dixons than some Mr Big Know-It-All business bloke.
But this time around Trump is doing ANOTHER celebrity edition (Piers Morgan won last year’s series) and the celebrities are shit and Dennis Rodman dominates the proceedings by acting like an eight-foot baby who has run headfirst into a barbed-wire fence. The show has been limping along and there’s no real tension, no real action and no real excitement, all be it for Rodman getting drunk, disappearing and trying to beat up his team mates.
So at least Sugar is providing a pure “Apprentice” experience. But who is going to win? It’s too early to say. I’d like to see the little baby-faced bloke win – you know, the one who has the funny walk/run. It is a comedy walk that he’s nicked directly from Shane Ritchie from the recent “Minder” remake on Channel 5. Yeah, he’ll do – though it really is too early to tell. Might be the ginger bird? Who knows!

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