TV review: The Young Apprentice

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/01/tv-review-the-young-apprentice

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Oh good, <strong>Young Apprentice</strong> (BBC1), more adorable little bonsai tossers. Here they come, to London, in their age-inappropriate clothes, with their little wheelie suitcases stuffed with ambition, to walk around below tall buildings, talking shite. The same shite as the older ones, but it's funnier when it comes out of little mouths.

Someone will mention an animal soon, an apex predator. Here we go: Maria may look like a 5ft 1in blond angel, she says, but underneath she's a lioness who will take out anyone in her way. Grrrrr.

Another one, shaggy Sean, had his first business when he was nine. Yeah, me too mate ... oh, hang on, mine wasn't a business come to think of it, it was a model aeroplane. How did these kids get to be like this? And what will become of them? Hopefully they'll turn into potheads and go and live on a beach in Goa. Please can someone make a programme in 10 or 15 years' time: We Were the Young Apprentices.

For now, though, they're tugging at their leashes, a pack of attack puppies crossing the wobbly bridge. Above them, ever present, the Shard thrusts skywards, a constant reminder of the way they must behave.

Alan Sugar says he feels privileged, because none of them has walked into his boardroom staring into a smart phone ... Hello, is this one of his laboured, scripted, constipated jokes, straining to work its way out? "For the next eight weeks, the only way you're going to be using phones is for business," he says. "Not for playing Angry Birds. Because that will make me angry. And you don't want to make me angry, I can assure you." I do, I want to see him angry; go one Young Apprentice, play Angry Birds, make him angry.

Hard to tell if that was a joke or not, to be honest. This must be, he's got that tell-tale look of concentration. "Whoa, what a CV you've got here," he says to David. "You're the chair of this, the chair of that, chair of something else, you're the chair of everything ... let's hope your colleagues don't just sit on you." Ha, good one, you got there in the end, Lord Sugar. What was it, take six?

Apols if I'm being petulant, but I'm still cross with @Lord_Sugar for blocking me on Twitter. And for what he said about Tulisa Contostavlos. "Can you tell me who the hell this Tulisa bird is on X Factor," he tweeted (ha, you can block me, but I can still see). "What has she done?" Well, she sold well over a million albums with N Dubz alone. Also, Lord Sugar, with(out) respect, some birds don't like to be called birds, it makes them angry birds, especially if it's already part of an insult. It made Tulisa angry – she called Sugar a twat. I see he's just had a run-in with Louise Mensch too.

Anyway, Sugar tells this lot of his own humble beginnings, as he always does – how he started at 17 with nothing, he was a boy, he had a barrow (rhymes with para), in the East End ... enough already, know it.

Off they go, then, to sell secondhand clothes – the boys, Team Odyssey, and the girls, Team Platinum. "They say when a piece of music goes platinum, that means it's sold a million," Sugar tells the girls back in the boardroom. (Yeah, like Tulisa, whoever she is). "Do you reckon you've sold a million in this task?" The girls – oh let's just call them the birds, why not? – haven't, but they've sold more than Odyssey, mainly because project leader Patrick spent too much time, effort and money attaching a vintage kimono to a wetsuit. "Where would you wear that to?" asks a woman in the shopping centre.

Patrick probably should go, for the wetsuit alone, but Sugar fires posh Maximilian – more like a Harrow (doesn't rhyme with para) boy than a barrow (does) boy – instead. It's a shame; Max, who dabbles in pre-Socratic philosophers, would have been good value. A talker, though, not a doer, he's probably more suited to politics. In my We Were the Young Apprentices documentary, he'll probably be the Chancellor.

No matter, there's still plenty of entertainment among the remainder. Sugar is still a twat. Nick Hewer still bobs around in the background, screwing his face up into a cat's bum. And Karren Brady ... well, who is this Karren bird anyway, what's she done?

Ghastly, all of it. Yes, of course I'll watch the whole thing. Already looking forward to the next one.