“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.
The series premiere centres on an archetypical Apprentice task, atreasure hunt with a far-flung twist: the 20 contestants are divided by gender into two competing teams and flown out to Hong Kong. There, they must race to acquire a list of items, such as a mahjong set and shrimp paste (without using Google, as anyone in real life automatically would). As is so often the case in the early rounds of this series, the teams are undone here by their own rank ineptitude. Navigating a foreign city without speaking the language is a hurdle, but hardly an absurd contrivance from the show’s producers – and the teams’ attempts to do so are by turns amusing and excruciating.
