It's time for The Apprentice to clear its desk and go
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Version 0 of 1. As a general rule, I pride myself on the amount of bad television I can stomach. If there’s an incomprehensible Saturday night gameshow, I’m there. A documentary about sheds? Sign me up. When Fish Attack? Already series-linked. Some people can withstand huge amounts of pain, others can drink sailors under the table. Me? I made it all the way through an entire episode of The Singer Takes it All. You’re right to fear me. I’m a machine. That said, though, I’ve had it with The Apprentice. Last night’s episode of The Apprentice was easily one of the most relentlessly uninspired hours of TV I’ve ever sat through. I can’t even be sure that it was actually a new episode – hand on heart, I’d seen every beat, every edit, every musical cue and snipe and scripted put-down at least a dozen times before. The Apprentice has had its day. It’s running on fumes. It’s time to replace it with something more exciting, such as a 40-part retrospective on the history of the milk carton, or a static shot of someone trying to dislodge some food from between their teeth with the corner of an envelope. The tasks this year – sell some stuff you’ve only just seen, invent something that you have no real expertise in, spend two hours manufacturing a product that you clearly know nothing about – are merely tired rehashes of things we’ve seen before. The contestants are all entirely unremarkable, too. There isn’t a standout, either in terms of acumen or full-blown ridiculousness, among them. They’re just variations on well-worn stereotypes. There’s the posh one. There’s the one who’s only in it to be famous. The self-starter. The chippy northerner. The one who uses too much hair gel. The git. The sod. The stupid one. Even Alan Sugar’s stilted jokes, always the low point of the show, have become depressingly familiar this year. “Never mind aloe vera, it sounds like it’s goodbye Sarah,” he told one hapless dolt on Wednesday, looking for all the world like a fire-damaged Zoltar Speaks machine that just received some especially bad news. To make matters worse, The Apprentice began the week after The Great British Bake Off ended. The juxtaposition highlighted how outdated the show has become. Bake Off – despite getting a little long in the tooth itself – revels in fun and niceness and, unfortunate baked alaska incidents aside, cooperation. The Apprentice, though, celebrates nothing but self-interested knuckleheads. The world has changed, but The Apprentice refuses to notice. Watching The Apprentice is like watching a bunch of teenage Larpers attempt to reenact the days before the financial crisis in a condemned warehouse from memory. One of the nicest touches about the Bake Off was the way that it caught up with each contestant in the final episode, whether they’d left their job or written a book or just pottered around the garden. That could never happen on The Apprentice, though, because the captions would be cataclysmic. “Since leaving the show, Robert has been ostracised by everyone he loves.” “Lindsay realised how badly she came off on the programme, so had a haircut and figured that would camouflage her inherent mean-spiritedness.” “James is still running down an infinite pavement, trying to sell some shit out of a box to a stranger for five pounds.” On the plus side, at least, the BBC’s version of The Apprentice has lasted longer than the American one, which imploded after introducing a catastrophic format change that required the losing team to sleep in tents for a week. And it’s still worth having on in the background, if only to help you maintain a list of companies to boycott for shilling themselves out for an appearance. But that’s about it. The Apprentice needs to die, and quickly. |