A rare shot of The Apprentice boss Lord Sugar nearly smiling (Image: Getty)
You know what to expect with BBC1’s The Apprentice. It’s not “Britain’s brightest business prospects”, as promised by Lord Sugar, but braggarts, big-heads and the odd quietly effective stealth candidate who stays under the radar until quite near to the end.
The ‘big characters’ emerged quickly. Bull-headed Carlo Brancati boasted “my business is worth millions!” Yeah? We’ll see. Nadia Suliaman claimed to be “as mad as a box of frogs,” but her real talent seems to be elbowing in, in the closing moments of a sale, to steal the glory. And Chisola Chitambala described herself as “a lion in the business world,” so asleep most of the time, perhaps.
Rival teams had to flog excursions in Austria. One offered the stunning Alpine peaks, the other pushed e-bike rides through a forest complete with tree-hugging, tuneless yodelling and an amateurish lecture on honey. No prizes for guessing who won…
The forest team took six hours to sell their first ticket. “Salesman” Dean didn’t shift any, and Carlo wasted time peddling the e-bike ride to a 97-year-old Danish man.
The show depends on candidates who are overconfident but barely competent. The producers know their business proposals from the start – there’s only ever a couple of investible ones – so it’s just a case of making sure the right one makes the finals. There would be more jeopardy if their ideas weren’t disclosed until the interview stage. “She’s a wizard at sales, Lord Suger, but her business pitch is for a professional pet-dream interpreting service…”
All the familiar elements are back, including the Bridge ‘café of doom’, a swift, brutal exit for the first loser (Emma) and Sugar’s feeble pre-penned zingers. Candidates’ CVs contained “more crap than the River Thames,” he grumbled. “I believe you have trouble with your Dolomites, I think I can get you some cream for that.” Ouch. The only quip that made me grin came when Sugar told Johnny, who’d attempted to speak German, “You probably think wunderbar is something from Victoria’s Secrets”.
It’s just as well wasn’t around to offer his thoughts on Alpine horns. But the bad-boy of Strictly was busy sailing around the Severn estuary, past Penarth to Barry Island, in Wynne And Joanna: All At Sea. It was a harmless, some might say utterly pointless, BBC1 show but the bantering opera singer and cheery Gavin & Stacey star Joanna Page had a whale of a time; surely only a few (million) fellow Grinches would have denied them their licence-fee-funded giggle-fest.
In the event, Jo sailed closest to the wind by littering the show with unintentional double meanings. Conclusion? Either Wynne was on his best behaviour or a lot of filth hit the cutting room floor. Evans made an ill-considered, unfunny adlib at the Strictly tour launch and has now “stepped away” from duties. A no-Wynne situation.
Steve Coogan insisted one whole scene was cut from Channel 4’s Brian And Maggie because he thought it was “too kind” to Baroness Thatcher. Quite so, we can’t have balance on a political drama (or the news, or ). Deplorable viewers can’t be trusted to agree with the views of our self-regarding media class.
Weekend World’s Brian Walden, a masterful interviewer, had something in common with the Prime Minister – both were chippy, grammar school alumni. They got on, they socialised, he secretly wrote her scripts… and Maggie never expected him to stick the knife in…
Walden’s tough 1989 interview with Thatcher – he quoted claims she was “slightly off her trolley” – hastened her downfall at the hands of Tory Party backstabbers, we’re told. Surely that was coming anyway? It was tough but it was no Frost/Nixon. James Graham’s script serviced outstanding performances from Harriet Walter as grocer’s daughter Maggie and Coogan as glazier’s son Walden. He even gets his speech impediment, if not quite his oddness and not always his accent.
The anachronistic lingo let it down though. Very few British people used the Americanism “I’m good” in the 1980s. And even fewer British Prime Ministers did.
The only modern TV interviewer of Walden’s sharpness is Andrew Neil who is no longer on the box. The only modern radical with Maggie’s vision and charisma is no longer in the Conservative Party.
Don’t miss…
If you’re missing The Traitors’ brand of treachery as game-playing entertainment, rejoice. The Traitors US (nightly, BBC3), also set in stunning Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands, is back. Unlike our version where everyday people compete, the Yanks saturate their series with micro-celebs – previous reality show contestants who are generally older and more clued up. There’s a minor British royal, a retired female wrestler, a detective and drag queen Bob who is partial to sporting a tea cosy on his head. Best is Huey Morgan look-alike Rob Mariano, aka ‘Boston Rob’, a US Survivor winner who had fellow traitor Bob banished by episode four.
The other lightweight traitors, Carolyn and Danielle, look daggers at him, but they’re not in his devious league. The show is camper thanks to host Alan Cumming hamming it up, but the format still grips.
Comedy of the week was Going Straight, the 1978 spin-off from Porridge re-running on BBC4. It follows the misadventures of Ronnie Barker’s brilliantly realised Norman Stanley Fletcher after he’s released on parole from Slade Prison. Also written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the superb first episode guest-starred Fulton Mackay as prison officer Mr Mackay. US sitcom Married with Children, with Ed O’Neill as misanthropic dad Al Bundy, is being repeating on Rewind, but definitely isn’t compatible with modern sensibilities. Good.