The Apprentice

“The One Show, EastEnders, The Repair Shop… watching BBC1 can feel so much like you’re stuck in a continuously repeating pattern that you may start to hear the voice of Rod Serling. “Imagine if you will, a British TV viewer starting to realise they are watching the same thing over and over, trapped in a time loop. Welcome to… The Twilight Zone.” Or rather, The Apprentice. Twenty series in, nothing whatsoever has changed. Trundling on screen was the latest bunch of besuited braggarts, seemingly interchangeable with those from previous series, and here was an opening montage of Lord Sugar saying “you’re fired!” Later came a moment where he told them: “I need you to go away and I’m going to decide which one of you is going to leave the process.” Hang on: not “which of you will get fired”? This was breaking new ground!”
James Jackson, The Times

“How far did I get into the new series of The Apprentice (BBC One) before wanting to fire everybody involved? I had a wobble at 10 seconds, when the narrator introduced the usual bunch of chumps as “Britain’s entrepreneurial elite”. At 30 seconds, there was a chap bragging that he’d recently upgraded from a Tesla to a Porsche, and informing us that he’d made his first million by 25 – a claim soon to be dismantled in the boardroom, when Lord Sugar pointed out that turnover and profit are not the same thing. My breaking point came before the minute mark when a woman described herself as “a fiery, sassy, chilli pepper pocket rocket” with “the brains to match the beauty”. The Apprentice has always revelled in being enjoyably awful. But in its 20th anniversary year, it’s just plain awful.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

““A lot has changed in the past 20 years,” admits Alan Sugar, in the first episode of The Apprentice’s 20th series. “There have been financial crashes, and pandemics… not to mention Liz Truss.” And yet, of course, not everything has changed – a fact made abundantly clear by The Apprentice itself, as soon as this year’s class of wannabe moguls walk through the doors of the boardroom. Two decades in, the BBC’s annual spectacle of entrepreneur-on-entrepreneur pugilism is necktie-deep in a rut.”
Louis Chilton, Independent