You're Tired: It's time to put The Apprentice to bed

If you tried to explain the premise of BBC One's The Apprentice to someone who'd never heard of it, you'd have a hard time getting past your second sentence. 

"Well..." you might say, "this chap Alan Sugar wants to invest £250 000 in a business"... 

Aah, so it's like Dragon's Den? "Well, not really. He doesn't actually read or hear anything about a business plan."

Oh.

You'd then have to explain that he makes the potential business partners take part in a series of diverse and unrelated activities, such as inventing a baby food or selling fish at a market in Cornwall.

And you've lost them. And this is before you've even got to the question of who or what "The Apprentice" is or how Sugar can fire someone before he's even hired them. Which he never actually does.

Veterans of The Apprentice will of course know that the show is all about "the process". Over the course of 12 weeks, the candidates take part in a series of ridiculously fiendish tasks to see how well they shape up as a business partner. Because, of course, the best way of knowing how investible someone is is to check how well they can voice a cartoon character or gut a fish.

The point of the tasks is seemingly to see how competent the candidates are, which might work if they weren't designed specifically to set them up for failure. Quite often, the candidates are asked to come up with a logo for a product, some packaging for it, some photographic materials and a professional video to promote it, and put all of this together in a sales pitch. In two days.

If I hired a professional company to market my business and they came back with all this inside a weekend, I'd tell them to come back to me in a month when they've had time to do it properly. However, when the candidates in The Apprentice have a go and come up with something a bit rubbish, we're supposed to be surprised by this and laugh at how incompetent they all are.

To help make them look as incompetent as possible, the producers have a whale of a time on the editing floor. When a candidate makes a point that doesn't quite land, the camera will immediately cut away to a random montage of previously-shot footage showing the other candidates looking overly confused, accompanied by the soundtrack of a comedy bassoon solo.

And cue the reverse cymbal into the next scene..!

Sugar is supported through the process through his trusted aides. However, if he's looking for integrity in the people he works with, he might want to find some new ones. His first aide, Karren Brady has gained some respect for saying that women should not use their feminine wiles to get ahead in the business world, and then lost it immediately after applauding Roisin "you can catch more flies with honey" Hogan for manipulating someone into selling an under-priced diamond by flirting with him.

Karren Brady being as respect-worthy and professional as ever.

However, if you want to see how unpleasant someone in the Sugar circle can be, look no further than the dreadful "interviews" episode. In this episode, Sugar lines up the most audacious, aggressive, self-absorbed gargoyles he can find and gives them a platform to be thoroughly unbearable to anyone remaining in the process. The criteria to be one of these interviewers is simply to have no higher calling in life than to sabotage someone's dream business, humiliate them, and make grown people cry on national television.

The most notorious interviewer, for all of the wrong reasons, is Claude Littner. Claude's little party trick, before being an unrelenting fallace for twenty minutes straight, is to refuse to say hello or shake someone's hand before interviewing them. Presumably, the candidates are briefed by the producers before to just go along with this and take it because it makes good television. This has to be the case, because if any reasonable person entered a job interview to this level of utter disrespect, they would respond in one way and one way only: smack them in the mouth and leave.

The "interviews" are designed to expose the interviewees for the type of people they really are. It's hard to disagree that interviews do this, particularly when it's true for the interviewers themselves when they're interviewed in the wild.

Take, for instance, this car crash interview on Good Morning Britain. In this particular edition of "how long can you listen to Linda Plant talk without vomiting?", she explains how she can make employees work in conditions they don't want to because that's what she wants them to do. This Jurassic torrent of self-opinionated bile is an unfortunate reminder of how The Apprentice pedals the 20-year old philosophy that, to be successful in life, you just have to wear a suit and be a twat.

The winner of The Apprentice this year; Shama Amin, who actually left the show with some dignity. 

It's the final tonight, which is the one episode of the show that's well worth watching. In this episode, the candidates do something they actually want to do and thrive at: they run an event to launch their business ideas. They're supported by previous colleagues, who are now their friends, and no-one backstabs anyone in the boardroom. 

Sugar is nice for a change, his Christmas cracker jokes even become bearable and, if you're lucky, Karren Brady might attempt to smile. It's good wholesome TV and leaves you wondering why every other episode isn't like this.

So, the series ends on a high; we can celebrate that a candidate gets the coveted investment they're after, and that we can be free of this nonsense for another year.