In most series of The Apprentice — and this has been the eighth — it is the characters of the applicants that are revealed during a frantic, 12-week dance of the seven veils: wicked Katie Hopkins, nerdy Tom Pellereau, Stuart “The Brand” Baggs, Lee “simpoo-as- vat” McQueen (who was really Alan Sugar as played by Daniel Craig and therefore the inevitable winner). Unfortunately personality was not the strong suit of this crop of supplicants for Lord Sugar’s £250,000 cheque. And so it was that, last night, interest zoomed in on the character of Sugar himself.
In having to choose between Tom Gearing, the posh boy who needed to raise just £25 million to realise his dream of a hedge fund in fine wines, and mesomorphic Ricky Martin, who wanted to launch a technocrat head-hunting company, Sugar had to pick between “devilment” (Tom) and “safety” (Ricky). That both projects were worthy of only the greatest yawn from anyone interested in anything beyond profit was irrelevant to Sugar. We at home might have longed for a tangible product, such as Pellereau’s curved nailfile last year, but Sugar was looking only for an investment opportunity. Nick Hewer advised that Tom’s project could be “electric”. Karren Brady cautioned not to rule out Ricky because he was “safe”.
But how safe was Ricky? In the prime scene of the episode Ricky met Claude Littner, Sugar’s adviser, who is a kind of cross between Torquemada and a cannon ball accelerating towards your solar plexus. “I have been looking forward to this encounter,” said Littner, to which the only sensible reply would have been: “What big ears you have, Grandma.” Ricky’s personal statement, he said, was the “crassest, [most] obnoxious, infantile and puerile” he had ever read. The 26-year-old recruitment manager and part-time wrestler had called himself Thor, a tutor who could teach an “old dog” new tricks and the answer to Lord Sugar’s “succession planning”. “The problem is,” concluded Claude, “you are an arrogant fool.”
The thunder god pleaded that the 11 weeks had knocked the rough edges off him and he was a “very different person now”. Claude confessed to Sugar that Ricky’s business plan was impressive. “In truth I am mesmerised by the guy,” he told the peer. You wonder how he speaks to folk who do not mesmerise him. Next to Jade Nash, whose “grubby little business” was a call centre cold-calling people with offers of debt relief, and Nick Holzherr, who had a bizarre plan to connect online recipes to grocery deliveries, Ricky did look like a safe pair of hands. Out went Jade and Nick.
Yet in some distant sun-dappled vineyard lay the prospect of Tom’s sommelier millions. Château Sugar: it has a ring to it, does it not? Sugar Scientific Recruitment, not so much. But then Sugar’s current character, dulled by the years, was suddenly revealed. “I should keep to my ethos of keeping it simple, keeping it straightforward,” he said. “Ricky, you’re hired.” It was an anticlimactic climax to a series that could have done with more bolts of lightning.