Twisted Fire Starter

The Apprentice is back and once again we’re left asking the question, are these really the best candidates they could find out of 20,000 applicants?

But then, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this is any different from all the other reality TV shows: the audition tape will always be more important than the CV.

Still, as ever it's a joy to watch the initial fighting talk and bravado disintegrate into schoolkid bickering and in-fighting. And this year it happened even sooner than usual.

The task was a Sir Alan classic. Whereas Donald Trump would have his teams running the Federal Reserve for a day, our sixteen had to sell fresh fish from the back of a van.

Not only that, instead of being allowed to settle in to their posh digs first, they were sent straight out onto the streets with barely enough time to learn each other’s names.

Despite this, within hours, if not minutes, the boys’ team had fractured along traditional class lines. On one side, plummy public school types Raef, Nicholas and Michael; on the other, the salesmen with regional accents, Alex, Lee and Simon.

Much was made of this in the boardroom but it shouldn’t really have come as any sort of surprise; those are the rules of the playground.

The girls ultimately won by just getting out there and selling, even if it was in a rather panicked, directionless manner. The boys were at the opposite extreme, spending hours “strategising” before making “executive decisions” (and by the way, since when did decisions, whether made by the project manager or not, have to all be “executive”?)

That it was Nicholas who got the “big fat F”, rather than project manager Alex, was perhaps a surprise. But then, Sir Alan’s always taken a more sophisticated approach than Trump’s, which usually involves just sacking the person in charge. Also, Sir Alan’s always given short shrift to anyone with airs and graces and Nicholas de Lacy Brown had plenty of those.

Is it too early to pick a winner?