The Apprentice review – Lord Sugar’s ‘I’ve got better places to be’ routine is becoming preposterous

“A lot has changed in the past 20 years,” admits Alan Sugar, in the first episode of The Apprentice’s 20th series. “There have been financial crashes, and pandemics... not to mention Liz Truss.” And yet, of course, not everything has changed – a fact made abundantly clear by The Apprentice itself, as soon as this year’s class of wannabe moguls walk through the doors of the boardroom. Two decades in, the BBC’s annual spectacle of entrepreneur-on-entrepreneur pugilism is necktie-deep in a rut.

The series premiere centres on an archetypical Apprentice task, atreasure hunt with a far-flung twist: the 20 contestants are divided by gender into two competing teams and flown out to Hong Kong. There, they must race to acquire a list of items, such as a mahjong set and shrimp paste (without using Google, as anyone in real life automatically would). As is so often the case in the early rounds of this series, the teams are undone here by their own rank ineptitude. Navigating a foreign city without speaking the language is a hurdle, but hardly an absurd contrivance from the show’s producers – and the teams’ attempts to do so are by turns amusing and excruciating.

Each season of The Apprentice seems to bring with it the same familiar personalities – the young, the brash, and the vapid, by and large – thrusting them into the same old types of dispute. There’s always a wildcard or two: this time round, the obvious candidate is Georgina. She’s an actor and events manager who describes herself as a “quadruple threat”, with entrepreneurial nous supposedly sitting alongside the more conventionally razzling and dazzling musical theatre arts.

It’s immediately obvious that Georgina is not cut out for the savagery of this boardroom; that her competitors – performers and showpeople too, in a way – have all brought knives to what she thought was a pillow fight. So, The Apprentice’s most distinctive new candidate exits stage left. The only surprise is that Georgina has someone to commiserate with: Nikki is also blamed for the women’s team’s dismal effort, and Sugar rounds the episode off with the earliest double firing in the show’s history.

Anyone new to the series might assume that Lord Sugar’s heart is no longer in The Apprentice – but really, that’s always been the routine. He seems intent on giving the air of a man who constantly has pressing, serious, and opaque business demands just out of frame, tugging at his sleeve. But after 20 years, the former Amstrad boss’s indefatigable air of jaded, savvier-than-thou, I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-put-up-with-this-malarkey rigour is becoming rather preposterous. No one as rich as he is devotes 20 years of their life to something they don’t want to do. He wants to be there. And what is “there”, exactly? A drab meeting room in which clueless egotists argue about who made the error in the purchasing of shrimp paste.

It’s worth noting that The Apprentice begins less than a week after The Traitors ended on BBC One – the latter a reality show that, in just four series, has shown far more willingness to shake up its formula than The Apprentice has evinced over two decades. That’s not just in terms of the rules, or the format, but the people chosen to star. “Apprentice candidate” is not just a role but a whole, insufferable personality, and this series is, as ever, full of Apprentice candidates up and down. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of watching them.