The opening scenes of The Apprentice – Lord Alan Sugar’s search for a new business partner – have become a yearly tradition on British TV. We meet a squad of suited and bodycon business dress-clad candidates, who seem to be competing to say the most ridiculous thing. “I’m like a lion in the business world. Fierce, hungry and ready to devour my prey,” says Chisola Chitambala, a contestant on the latest series, which is airing weekly on BBC One. “The level of competitiveness I have is disgusting! I am the human equivalent of a tank. Nothing gets in my way,” insists meal-prep entrepreneur Mia Collins. “I can sleep when I’m dead!” proclaims Amber-Rose Badrudin, while hair-transplant consultant Carlo Brancati boasts: “What others can earn in a month takes me one hour.” (This gives rise to the question: what are you doing here, then?)
The first series of The Apprentice premiered 20 years ago this month on BBC Two. The days when it felt like a genuinely exciting format are long gone, however, because it is now one of the most predictable shows on TV. Ratings have stalled, it’s being panned by critics and it has grown into a high-cringe spectacle – one that symbolises a wider slide in standards in reality TV and beyond.
The central appeal of The Apprentice has always been twofold. First, its scratching of a society-wide itch to see “corporate types” – professionals who are arrogant enough to think they know it all – being cut down to size; and second, the “rags to riches” element, dating from the early days of reality TV, when shows like The X Factor and Big Brother gave people who had traditionally been shut out of opportunities a shot at becoming rich and famous.
This was the first problem The Apprentice encountered: it became an easy vehicle for celebrity. Contestants such as Saira Khan – a fan favourite and runner-up from the first series – launched successful media careers. Long before she ended up a far-right media commentator, Katie Hopkins was the pantomime villain of series three, where she became the first contestant to leave the competition voluntarily. (Did she ever want the job? Or just the airtime?) The standout contestants, such as Jessica Cunningham and Luisa Zissman, soon started appearing on other reality shows, with the Apprentice-to-Celebrity-Big-Brother pipeline turning into British reality TV’s unofficial graduate scheme.
James Hill, who was one of the breakout stars of series 10, in 2014, appeared on CBB the following year, where he was crowned the winner. He tells me that he originally went on The Apprentice “to be taken more seriously” in business and didn’t expect the lucrative TV offers that came next. “I don’t think you can go on any TV show and think, ‘I’m going to be the next David Beckham,’” he says. “You just have to run with it and see what happens.”
Still, it’s undeniable that the show has leaned into casting over-the-top TV personalities, many of whom clearly want to be famous. “When it first started,” Hill says, “it was a lot more serious and the personalities weren’t as vibrant. But I think TV has changed in general. Audiences have changed – they want more of the ‘reality’ aspect. That balance of fun and professionalism has shifted.”
He might be right that audiences want more drama – after all, reality TV is a conflict-heavy medium. But the balance feels skewed. We still need to be able to believe in the premise of the show: that it’s a genuine search for business talent.
The Apprentice has always contained a heavy dose of humiliation. The often-ridiculous tasks, which usually require interaction with the public or “industry leaders”, are designed to create as many toe-curling moments as possible. But casting on the more recent series has turned up the cringe-o-meter to such an extent that the show’s very premise feels ridiculous, too.
In the early years, when the contestants reached the final five, they were put through a gruelling set of interviews with some of Lord Sugar’s most trusted business associates. During these interviews, great care was taken to scrutinise their CVs. Embellishments or lies, which inevitably surfaced, represented a major scandal. Now, though, when the contestants reach the interview stage, the difference is stark. The interviewers don’t need to dig for white lies, because many of them don’t seem to have the basic knowledge of how to run a business. The “gotcha” moments are someone forgetting to include the most basic elements, such as costs or profit, in their business plan. When confronted with the fact that they are clearly out of their depth, it feels like not only a waste of time for the participants, but a waste of the viewer’s time, too, when we’ve spent weeks watching them.
Some of this is down to the format. Since 2011, candidates stopped competing for a job with Lord Sugar and began fighting it out for a £250,000 investment in a business idea and a 50-50 partnership with him. Often, viewers have been put in the frustrating position where a candidate with a strong record in the weekly tasks ends up pitching a concept that is flawed, or isn’t something Lord Sugar is interested in investing in. This first happened in 2011, when Helen Milligan had an exemplary task record, but her idea of an elite concierge service didn’t spark joy. Tom Pellereau – an inventor with a far worse record in the challenges – won the investment instead. The producers can take some of the blame here, too: over time, the tasks have become more complex, to the point where the contestants are given days (or mere hours) to come up with campaigns and pitches that would normally take a team of professionals much longer. It feels as though they’re being set up to fail.
The show’s normalisation of underqualified candidates feels representative of a slide in standards that goes far beyond TV. We live in a world of personal branding and image curation, where little more than confidence and a social media profile is needed to brand yourself as a business success. The darkness of this is easy to spot in outlandish scammer stories such as those of the “Tinder Swindler” Simon Leviev or fake New York heiress Anna Delvey, but it has also seeped into our culture. And as a medium that rewards those who have “the gift of the gab” (translation: chancers), reality TV is a powerful vehicle for this type of branding. Just look at Donald Trump, who co-produced and hosted the original US version of the show, rebranding himself as a business success following a string of high-profile corporate bankruptcies and failures in the 1990s. He probably wouldn’t be president today without it.
Some might argue that prioritising personality isn’t the end of the world – especially on a reality show. “I think you have to remember, it is TV. It is not real life and you have viewers at home who want entertainment,” Hill says, when I ask about the declining quality of candidates. “People have been selected for the process because they’ll make good TV. But then you have people who are there because they have great business plans, so it’s finding a balance between the two.”
Unfortunately, it’s been obvious for some time that The Apprentice is failing to strike that balance – to the point where it feels like we’re watching the bottom of the barrel being scraped. I want to say that viewers “deserve better” here, but while I’m still tuning in to watch such repetitive slop, I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. It used to be The Apprentice’s contestants who looked like fools. Now the viewers do, too.
Article by:Source: Louis Staples
