I’ll be your Apprentice, Sir Alan

Debra: As scary as Margaret Hamilton?

How I’ve managed to get sucked in to watching The Apprentice now, after successfully avoiding it for the first four series, is baffling but it’s a fact. I am totally hooked, like a crack whore who need her weekly fix of rocks of Sir Alan’s dirty sugar to get through the week.

I sometimes think it’s because it’s the only thing of any substance amid the desert of Wednesday night TV, but mostly it’s because the contestants, this year more than any other (as far as i can see), are so mind-bogglingly awful. I spend each episode with my fists clenched in anguish, one eye shut out of pity for the poor crew who have to follow them around, the other open wide in case I miss a single thumping faux pas or cringe-worthy moment. It’s great telly.

Last night’s task seemed simple enough. Sir Alan growled the orders for a glorified jumble sale. Given identical piles of crap (eight kilos of jellied eels, a pair of china dogs, a rug, a signed photograph of Frank Lampard, a collection of second-hand books, some old shoes and boots and a (plastic) human skeleton and a commode) which had a couple of hidden valuable items (first edition of James Bond; vintage shoes worth £100; an Indian rug worth £200), the teams had to identify the costly items and sell as much as they could for its true value. Simple, yeah? Nope. Not for this group of quarter-witted baboon people.

Collecting jumble for a charity has taught me that you should always check the value of things before you sell them on. Good first editions can sell for much more than a new book, a fact that these teams seemed desperately unaware; likewise, vintage shoes can now age as well as vintage wines. They’re not just: “Tatty old shoes…let’s see if someone will take them for a quid!”

Instead of sitting down and looking through the antiques guide they had been given for valuation purposes, one of the teams, Empire – this week led by the unspeakably awful Ben Clarke – tried to flog theirs, along with the rest of the box of second-hand books on Charing Cross Road. The other team Ignite just ignored it, except for Lorraine Tighe (a harpy who looks like Wallace’s, from Wallace and Gromit, much uglier sister) who harps on and on and on about doing a valuation of the carpet in THAT VOICE until even I, who agree with her, think I would cheerfully kill her.

In the end, Ignite walk around east London with the expensive Indian rug (the phrase coals to Newcastle comes to mind) on their shoulders, knocking on doors and offering it to old ladies for £1. By a stroke of luck (production team intervention perhaps?) they find a buyer on the street for £50. Empire, on the other hand, in the form of Yasmina and uber-thick James McQuillan, make the effort to find a proper buyer, but with no idea what it’s worth, end up flogging theirs to two grubby men in a grubby warehouse. When offered £50, the hatchet-mouthed Yasmina pushes the price up to £55 (you can see the gleam of cha-ching! In the buyer’s eye) and tops it off by calling him “My man” – a phrase she seems to have picked up from the odiously patronising Ben. Just who do these people think they are?

I will tell you. They are 15 (now nine) people with the combined IQ of a piece of cheese that has been left out in the sun for a week and been licked by the cat. Terrapins are smarter than most of them: certainly than James, who could probably have a train driven between his ears with no visible difference facially or cerebrally.

The way they try to crawl and scam and fight with one another is despicable. Debra Barr specifically is one of the most horrible human beings I have ever seen in real life or celluloid, unless you count Margaret Hamilton in the Wizard of Oz and she was green. I am constantly amazed when watching her by the raucous quality of her harpy voice. She is a one woman negation of the belief that dimples make you pretty.

The other horror is obviously Ben, who you’ll no doubt have heard of by now, but he’s great fun to watch for his raw ego, which, much like raw egg, can be useful mixed in with a load of other ingredients, but alone it is to nobody’s taste. I’m guessing that’s the theory behind keeping someone so inherently flawed in for this long – he makes good telly, he certainly won’t make a good Apprentice since he can’t take orders from anyone. Maybe that’s why he dropped out of Sandhurst.

The only one of them who I can see making a decent apprentice at the moment is Kate. Simple, honest, sweet, good-looking; she also seems capable yet malleable. Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick but that would seem to be the perfect idea of an apprentice. None of these other ego-centric fools seems capable of being taught, or of being part of a team.

Unfortunately, my going away means that I won’t get to see these lovely specimens triumph or fail under the burden of Sir Alan’s expectations. But when I return I might just have a go at the Apprentice myself. I know how to spell my own name, and I could just about manage to look something up in a book.

In fact, I have read a book. That should put me streets ahead of the game.

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