The Apprentice (BBC1) 

Rating:

(yes, no stars!)

Flops, every one of them. Hopeless, cringing disasters that failed so badly, it was physically uncomfortable. How can anyone perform so dreadfully and be oblivious to it?

I’m not talking about the candidates on The Apprentice, embarrassing though they were. It’s Lord Sugar’s jokes that leave me with my teeth and my eyelids clenched tight in pain.

‘I’m looking for a Bezos, not a bozo,’ he greeted the 18 hopefuls — a lame gag made worse by the fact he didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos (it’s ‘bay-zoes’, not ‘bezzoss’).

‘You’re in the air conditioning business?’ he asked one contestant. ‘You blow hot and cold, do you?’ 

All the apprentices chuckled dutifully, though their amusement was drowned out by the howls of mirth from the Good Lord’s sidekicks, Karren Brady and Tim Campbell. 

That’s how you get ahead in business — laugh loudly when the boss cracks a funny.

Many of his one-liners are crude and puerile. As he pushed the teams’ business plans to one side, he snorted, ‘I’ve got a bunch of CVs here — some of them contain more crap than the River Thames.’

When one office junior got his geography muddled, on a sales trip to the Austrian mountains, Sugar sneered, ‘I believe you had trouble with your Dolomites. I think I can get you some cream for that.’ 

Flops, every one of them. Hopeless, cringing disasters that failed so badly, it was physically uncomfortable – and that was just Lord Sugar’s jokes 

‘This is where the schnitzel hits the fan,’ he added, as the Austrian puns kept coming. 

‘Do-re-mi, no dough for me.’ He told one woman to ‘keep your Von Trapp shut.’

Who writes this drivel? And how can we make them stop?

The simplest solution is the obvious one: The Apprentice is desperately outdated and has no place on primetime TV. It should have been cancelled years ago.

Its format has barely changed since the Noughties. We still see endless staged shots of the apprentices filing into limousines or running along streets in flapping suits and high heels.

Repetitive edits pick out their smuggest boasts and most inane asides, which encourages them to behave like idiots in the hope of extra screen time. 

Half of them have no real interest in ‘becoming Lord Sugar’s next business partner’ — they’re just looking for publicity on social media.

‘You didn’t sell anything, did you?’ snapped Baroness Brady at one apprentice, Emma. ‘Technically, no,’ she admitted, as though she felt it unfair for criticism to be based on actual facts.

The Apprentice is desperately outdated and has no place on primetime TV. It should have been cancelled years ago, writes Christopher Stevens

In reality, British businesses are struggling to stay afloat, with the number on the brink of bankruptcy up 25 per cent on last year, according to a recent report. 

But this show, a throwback to the era before the 2008 banking crisis, continues to celebrate stupidity, mismanagement, backstabbing and cluelessness.

‘It’s a shambles, you know, a bloody shambles,’ gloated Sugar, as he despatched his first victim, the hapless Emma.

But to see British business hopefuls failing isn’t funny any more. And, Lord knows, neither are the boss’s jokes.