The anticipation is building: 14 new contestants, sorry, 14 new candidates, all strangely desperate to work for Sir Alan Bloody Sugar, all hoping to be the next Apprentice. Last year, Tim Campbell, the youngest of the group at 27 won the chance to work for Sir Alan for a year, on a six-figure salary, beating predictably spiky, arrogant, esoteric, loud, er, arrogant, opinionated, confident, and brash competition to land the prize.
In the spirit of second runs, I’m expecting everything to be a bit more glam, a bit more over the top this time round. No doubt the 14 aspirants will be that touch more confident about how to win through, how to deal with Sir Alan and his board, how best to shaft their team-mates, and how best to land a successful media career after they get fired in week 4 for masterminding their team’s crushing defeat in that week’s task.
But how will Sir Alan approach his second bloody series? Without so much as a smile, a 20% profanity score, extreme glumness, and lots of tosh about straight-talking, not liking bullshitters, and generally telling everyone how cr@p they are is my guess. Sir Alan didn’t seem to get a lot of enjoyment out of the first series, but where Donald Trump is just offensively rich and ridiculously, impossibly it seems, coiffeured, Sugar is just the grouch in a suit, and where Trump is about glitz, and grand-scale projects, Sugar is out there pumping meager margins from mainstream, low-cost, low-expectation products. And where the winners of The Apprentice in the US had a choice of which exciting new large project they would oversee, poor old Tim had the privilege of working 70 hour weeks for a year to re-launch a product that had already failed once, and which most right-minded people would struggle to get too worked up about.