The Apprentice
BBC One
****
The South Bank Show: Benedict Cumberbatch
Sky Arts
**
The hopefuls fed last night into the hope-destroying machine that is The Apprentice did not like the look of Nick Hewer’s replacement, Claude Littner, and I do mean his look. “It is as if he is boring a hole into your face,” said Elle, the big-haired, “disgustingly ambitious” one. I really want Elle to make it to episode 13, just so Littner can bore deep into her business plan.
Let us hope the producers will once more provide him an office for the task that won him the promotion, for, on the showing of the opening episode, interrogations not reaction shots are his forte. Hewer could have been a silent movie star: a raised eyebrow, a twitch of his nose, his tongue’s prowl from cheek to cheek — we knew always what Hewer was thinking, and what he was thinking was what we at home were thinking.
Accompanying what turned out to be the winning team on their quest to turn raw fish into overpriced lunch, Littner’s face radiated the same spectrum of emotions as a Doctor Who weeping angel. His expression said only: “I am not as nice as I look, and I look horrible.” His al fresco ad libs were lame. Still, it’s early days. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, like he never does.
Advertisement
That benefit was reluctantly bestowed by Sugar to the losing side’s decisive but, sadly, decisively wrong, project manager, April, a tall young woman whose spherical hair bun made her into an inverted exclamation mark. Brett, who came over as thick as the over-stuffed fish cakes he prepared “as per specification”, also escaped the chop. A former naval engineer, Brett may be a useful hand in the boiler room but is not, I fear, made of officer material.
That meant Dan, the perfumier, was out. He left trailing the heady scent of relief. Dan had told us he would sit quietly while his enemies made their mistakes and then, in the boardroom, pounce on them. His strategy in the end proved quite different: an eloquent apology framed as a disquisition on his own inadequacies as a buyer, chef and salesman. “A big fat zero,” he said of his sales, “absolutely atrocious”. Sugar had rarely agreed more.
The Cumberbitches will have been furious. The South Bank Show on their hero was not about Benedict Cumberbatch at all but about Hamlet, whose title role he is currently playing. This was Lord Bragg at his most self-indulgent, conducting a waffly interview in the form of an Oxford tutorial in which he, rather than the actor, was the expert. Outrageously, he even answered one of his own questions, “while you think about that one”. Things perked up when BC left the quad and ventured to a school in east London where some teenagers presented “To be” as performance art. “A little bit of energy and imagination and the thing comes alive,” he said admiringly. If only SBS had shown some. Asked how he felt after playing the prince on stage, BC suggested that Bragg come back tonight and ask him. He did not. Melvyn, I assume, had other plans.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk