Alan Sugar's TV show was 'a 12-week job interview from hell' that took eight months to film, reports Rosita Boland
In the end, it was a strange and disappointing climax. The Apprentice, the BBC reality TV show in which 16 British-based entrepreneurs/salespeople/
chancers competed via 12 weekly tasks for the prize of a year-long £100,000 (€148,000) job with millionaire businessman Alan Sugar, ended on Wednesday.
In the final were Kristina Grimes (36) and Simon Ambrose (27). Throughout the series, Yorkshire-based Grimes, a pharmaceutical saleswoman, who spent a large part of her life in Wicklow, was competent, formidable, determined and focused. Much was made of the fact that she raised her son alone, whom she had had as a teenager, and then put herself through college. Ambrose was posh, Cambridge-educated, likeable but often twittishly ridiculous, and by no means at any point of the show an obvious leader. Prior to the final, he had been deemed an also-ran by the public by some distance, with Grimes the clear favourite.
But it was Ambrose to whom Sugar turned on Wednesday night, on a show that was watched by 6.8 million people. The magnate declared: "Bloody old fool that I am, I'm going to take that risk, you're hired." Nobody could believe it, including Ambrose himself, who looked as if he thought they were still in the usual pre-broadcast process of filming two alternative endings.
This is the third British series of The Apprentice, which started in the US, with Donald Trump as the man with the job to offer. All three series have provoked much discussion, with topics ranging from whether or not it is a totally artificial insight into the business world, to whether the candidates actually want the position or not. Last year's winner, Michelle Dewbury, only lasted four months in the job before quitting and setting up on her own, which was both a public embarrassment for Sugar (reported to be furious) and a blow to the credibility of the series.
The show is presented as being "a 12-week job interview from hell" when in reality the majority of the show was filmed over two months early last autumn. Even the least observant viewer who watched the "final", where the last task was to create (theoretically) a new use for one of Sugar's property investments, a hulking building on the south side of the Thames, will have noticed that leaves were autumnally falling off the trees as the candidates inspected the site.
What, for some reason, is never mentioned in any series of The Apprentice is the fact that the two finalists then actually go and work for Sugar for six months, before he utters the words: "You're hired." Presumably, this is the real, hands-on probationary period. So viewers get hoodwinked in that respect.
In addition, on Wednesday afternoon, hours before the "live final" aired, the internet was abuzz with news of a leaked press release to newsrooms, which accurately identified the winner.
IRONICALLY, THIS YEAR, the real climax of The Apprentice came in the penultimate week, when Sugar chose Grimes and Ambrose from the remaining five candidates. He had actually already chosen the most controversial candidate of any of the three series, Katie Hopkins (32), as his first-choice finalist. Hopkins, on leave of absence from her £90,000 (€133,000) job at the Met Office, behaved like a cross between a spoilt, gooey-eyed poodle and a version of Margaret Thatcher, and gave an ongoing series of character assassination asides of her fellow candidates to camera throughout the show.
It was nasty, but it made for great, if uncomfortable, viewing.
One of Hopkins's comments on her rival Grimes included: "Kristina is a total arse-coverer. It's a shame she doesn't do it a little better with the skirts she wears." Of another candidate, Adam Hosker, she said: "If Adam could just go back to the car-sales lot [where he worked] and get run over, my day would be perfect." She told one of Sugar's interviewers that, according to her personal scale of ruthlessness, "stealing another woman's husband would rate 8 out of 10." (She had already admitted to doing this.)
Although Hopkins had been chosen for the final, she pouted so much and looked so miserable on being told the news that a baffled Sugar asked her to explain her reaction. The viewers could have told him that Hopkins, living in pretty coastal Exeter with her two small daughters, had no intention of ever moving to work for Sugar's Amstrad in Essex. What she wanted was the glory, as confirmed by the fact she stepped down from the offer, sold her story to a Sunday paper, was photographed cavorting naked in a field with a married colleague, and was then presumably unsurprised when the Met Office announced this week that they had fired her.
So, in the end, Sugar went for Ambrose, the posh twerp, and confounded public expectations. Of course, it was the wrong decision, but, as Sugar would say himself, "I don't give a jack-shit what anyone else thinks".