The Apprentice review: Alan Sugar and his group of idiots are back with plenty of comic value

A fresh group of 16 hopefuls try to impress Lord Sugar in the new series of the entrepreneurial reality TV show

“Never, ever underestimate me. I’ve had them all in here. Chancers, posers, brown-nosers, moaning Minnies, big-time Charlies and half-pint Harrys.”

No, not a secret recording of HM the Queen on the appointments she’s made to the Johnson cabinet: The Apprentice (BBC1) is back, for its 15th series and the class of 2019, I am happy to report, are idiots. Gobby, conceited, deluded, chippy, greedy, aggressive, charmless, incoherent, vain, selfish, pretentious and, above all, annoying idiots. The contestants must, perversely, be recruited for their complete absence of business sense or entrepreneurial potential – but rich abundance of comic value.

We are familiar with the type, if only from all the previous series of the show, which, let us always remember, gave us the national treasure that is Katie Hopkins (a contestant in 2007), last glimpsed visiting Tommy Robinson in HMP Belmarsh. (I do hope she didn’t jokingly poke a finger through the bars and say “You’re fired!” to Robinson, aka Mr Yaxley-Lennon).

Though not in the Hopkins league, the scale of the current crop of 16 contestants’ personal and professional failures remains impressive. Some of them are well into their thirties and, without being unnecessarily unkind, it’s fair to conclude that they’ve done sod all with their lives. The gulf between their net worth and their sense of self-worth is unimaginable. Ryan-Mark Parsons, for example, a young Michael McIntyre lookalike, is a bumptious teenager and “luxury womenswear consultant” (which I take to mean he sells knickers in a shop). He declares that he needs “not millions, billions” to sustain the lifestyle he feels he deserves: one, presumably, where he can afford his own silk knickers.

Then there’s Jemelin Artigas, 34, a Venezuelan “marketing consultant”. She boasts, beyond parody: “You can actually cut me and ambition comes out of my blood.” Not that it matters, but that doesn’t, actually, make any sense, but, even if it did, it can’t be right, because if her ambition really was that visceral, she wouldn’t be scrubbing round on some reality TV show for a nominal £250,000 to go and invest in some hopeless business venture with Alan Sugar. Would she?

Anyway, for week one they all get a free trip to South Africa to undertake their first task, which is to make a few quid from a “tourist experience” – selling tickets and organising an upmarket event. The girls opt for a booze-up at a Western Cape vineyard, which is a good enough idea. Charlotte Allen-Horton volunteers to be project manager, and if all else fails she can always make a decent living as a Meghan Markle impersonator, though she’d have to work on her Brummie accent a bit. The tour of the winery is, obviously, a disaster as the girls get lost and the trek resembles, according to Sugar sidekick Claude Littner, a Benny Hill sketch.

The intensely irritating Lottie Lion is in a state of open warfare with the intensely ineffectual Lubna (“I’m disgustingly ambitious”) Farhan. I might have more sympathy for pushy Lottie, who knows her wines it must be said, were it not for the fact that she is currently a school librarian. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but lending out The Hungry Caterpillar to eight-year-olds is, shall we say, a rather unconventional way of emulating Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett.

Still, the “ladies” manage to make £44.76 more profit than the “boys”, who bugger up their safari venture (too few tickets and trinkets sell). They are condemned to indulge in the mutual recriminations over mugs of tea at the Bridge Cafe, followed by the usual boardroom bollocking, in full The Apprentice tradition.

One thing that remains reassuringly undimmed over the past 15 years of output is Sugar’s taste for appallingly cheesy gags. These are the only things that seem to make his usually unyielding features crease into a passable imitation of the late Sid James. Thus, he chuckled that out in Africa the zebras “come with their own bar code”, and the kids all laughed along like it was the funniest thing ever said. It was as if they were going along with it all just to raise their profile enough to scrape an easy living as C-list celebrities, with a business plan precariously based on appearance fees with the likes of Gok Wan, Amber Gill and Joey Essex on Celebrity Most Haunted or Strictly Come Dancing (if they are lucky).

You probably need to at least make it to the final of The Apprentice to ensure that level of fame and fortune, though, and I am sorry to say that Shahin “The Falcon” Hassan (36, chartered engineer) found himself on the wrong end of Sugar’s famous index figure and catchphrase, for the simple but undeniable economic crime of failing to sell a single ticket for the ill-fated safari.

The Apprentice has been out-competed as the light entertainment business show of choice by Dragons’ Den, and Britain seems less enthralled by making money and less inclined to mistake worldly success for happiness than it was pre-crash, pre-recession and pre-Brexit.

Then again, if there is one thing that Global Britain is still a world-beater at, it’s producing grotesques to makes fools of themselves on The Apprentice: the supply appears inexhaustible, even under no-deal Brexit. Boris should stick that on the side of a bus.