‘You’re Hired!’: A Look Back At The Apprentice 2019
This review originally appeared on my blog in December 2019.
I love The Apprentice. I look forward to it every single year. It’s the one reality series that too-smart-for-you TV snobs won’t look down on you for watching, despite the fact that The Apprentice is really just Big Brother in suits. Think about it: larger-than-life contestants living together in a big house, completing weekly tasks where they will always be destined to fail (or at least make a dick of themselves), all while being watched closely by an omnipotent figure who calls all the shots.
In fact, Alan Sugar is a much scarier man-in-charge than the titular Big Brother. For one thing, he looks the contestants in the eyes when he’s destroying them emotionally — Big Brother hides away in a little recording booth somewhere, where he’s safe from any angry housemates who’ve snapped after the pointlessness of what they’re doing has finally dawned on them. What a coward. Also, Alan Sugar is really bloody rich. Alan Sugar is so rich that he could probably buy you and sell you back to yourself at a much higher price, and that’s pretty scary if you ask me.
But, I digress. The thing that’s so great about The Apprentice is that it’s so low-stakes. Not to the contestants, of course, but to the viewer. See, it’s the only reality show where I never care who stays or who goes, and that’s because the contestants are usually, without exception, cocks — and this year hasn’t been much different.
Obviously, the stand-out recipient of the ‘Jesus Christ, You Really Are Absolutely Awful’ award this year has to be librarian and general irritant Lottie Lion, whose name alone makes her sound like the archetypal spoiled brat character from a Roald Dahl novel. It suits her so well, it’s almost as though her parents just sensed from birth that she was going to turn out that way. Or maybe she came out of the womb riding side-saddle on a horse and waxing lyrical about how much better she is than everyone else. I can’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
When she wasn’t shooting a piece-to-camera to repeat her mantra “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win”, she was busy coming up with increasingly ridiculous reasons why she was the ideal candidate for the top job of project manager in each task. She started out strong in Week 1 by announcing she was the best choice for sub-team leader in a tourism task, because “I know that the population of South Africa is 51 million”, and yet, amazingly, still managed to out-BS herself week after week. Perhaps the finest example was Week 9, in which she described having viola lessons when she was four as having been “in the music industry for 15 years”. By that logic, I’ve been in dentistry for 23 years, because I can navigate my own mouth with a toothbrush without taking out six of my teeth in the process.
Oh, and let’s not forget the racist remarks she allegedly made in the contestants’ group chat, in which she told Pakistani candidate Lubna to “shut up, Ghandi”, before allegedly threatening “I’ll f*cking knock you out at our press training”. With any luck, Lubna might knock her out first, since, as a person born with arms, she has technically been in the boxing industry for 33 years.
On a much lighter note, this series might have introduced us to one of the most genuinely likeable contestants The Apprentice has ever seen in the form of Thomas Skinner, a self-described “full-time geezer”. Obviously, that’s not his day job — geezering does not pay very well, especially in this difficult economic climate. He’s a salesman, and a bloody good one — he’s so ridiculously charismatic that he could sell me the very concept of breathing itself and I’d probably pay over the odds for it.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at much else, and was fired by a reluctant Alan Sugar after losing eight out of the nine tasks he’d been involved in. A huge shame, but couldn’t Alan Sugar just take him on anyway? Considering the lack of success that previous winners have experienced, he honestly might as well. I’m not sure exactly what he would hire him to do. In fact, there’s no real reason why he couldn't just pay him to be a full-time geezer — it’s not as if he can’t afford it, is it?
Personally, I think he deserves all of the prize money and maybe even a knighthood, purely on the basis that he’s the first candidate in a long time that hasn’t once described himself as ‘cutthroat’ or ‘brutal’, or made some ridiculous statement about how money is so important to him that he’d probably murder his entire family for a fiver. You know, like they usually do.
This year’s final saw headhunter Scarlett Allen-Horton and artisan bakery owner Carina Lepore go head-to-head for the opportunity to work alongside The Ultimate Sugar Daddy, with the final task being to create a hypothetical launch for their respective businesses.
Step one was to pick a new brand name. Carina and co. decided on Lepore’s, because — as Thomas put it — “people will go for the bread, but they’ll go for you, too”. It’s a nice enough point, but if she’s opening a chain of bakeries, she won’t always be in there, will she? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed to go into a Blackpool branch of Gregg’s, only to be told that, once again, I’m unable to speak to Gregg himself. He’s probably hiding in one of his fancy London stores, the big elitist. Scarlett had slightly more trouble with rebranding her recruitment company, which aims to place more women into top-level engineering positions. Former contestant Marianne helpfully suggested naming it after “those animals that build their own homes”. Beavers. She means beavers. Beaver Recruitment? Really? Not exactly suited to a headhunting agency, but on the bright side, she may have just stumbled on a great new codename for going out on the pull.
Next on the agenda was to come up with a billboard and a TV advert. The billboards were both surprisingly good, at least in comparison to anything else filmed against a cheap green screen in this year’s series, like the now-infamous “Who took my unicorn, Sparkle Stars?” abomination from Toy Week.
The TV advert task was a different story for Scarlett, who was surprised to find that her ‘vision’ of teammates Lewis, Lottie and Marianne driving an imagery car in an empty warehouse wasn’t complete advertising gold dust. “It’s cheesier than I imagined”, she said, upon seeing it for the first time. How? I genuinely can’t understand how she came up with that and thought it was ever going to look like anything other than part of a hastily-planned GCSE Drama performance — but then I would say that, because as someone who has seen a TV advert before, I’ve technically been in marketing since 1996.
On Carina’s team, their prison-themed advert for her artisan bread (no, I’m not sure how they arrived at this idea, either) was far more impressive. Ryan-Mark — a luxury womenswear consultant and snotty prefect from a 1960s comic book — even managed to put in a convincing performance as a hungry jailbird, which wasn’t something any of us were expecting to see this year.
After this, and the all-important pitches — which I’m not going to go into, since it’s consistently the least entertaining part of the finale, where I imagine most people, including me, take a piss break — it was time for the final boardroom. In all seriousness, the tension in the final boardroom is mad. I can only imagine it’s like you and another person are staring down the barrel of a madman’s gun, except the madman is Alan Sugar, and you want to be shot because, instead of bullets, it’s money. Actually, it’s not like that at all, is it? But it must be absolute squeaky bum time for the candidates, is what I’m trying to say.
After a few minutes of back and forth, and a couple more minutes of Carina and Scarlett turning on each other at the last second — which I’m absolutely, one hundred-percent, completely sure the producers definitely didn’t encourage in any way — The Sugarman arrived at a conclusion, and crowned Carina the winner, with a statement that I’m sure we can all agree with: “I do like the idea of more bread.” Well, don’t we all?
Anyway, deserving winner found — as well as plenty of memorable moments and ridiculous characters along the way — that’s it for another year. The only thing I’m left wondering is why it’s called The Apprentice, since the prize is a £250,000 investment, and since most real-life apprentice jobs pay about £3.90 an hour. But then I wonder that every year, and to be honest, I’m all fired out.
