Review of The Apprentice UK TV Show

I have to hand it to the BBC people who select the participants in The Apprentice, they always do a superb job. The hard of thinking on Channel 4 who pick those for Big Brother could learn a lot from them.

The first episode was on last week and it delivered everything we’ve come to expect - top class pseudo-reality TV with a perfect combination of different personality disorders.

The first test was simple; run a static and a mobile coffee kiosk and see who makes most money. But before they even got to that we had the knob who tried to get the name of one of his real-world customers (Certus) as the team name. He got snared big-time. I liked the women’s selection of “Stealth” as their name. A pointless twist was then added whereby they switched the team-leaders' teams at the last second.

I think everyone on the planet has had a cappuccino at this stage yet one of the teams bought normal ground coffee for their machine by mistake. We also had the quantum physicist who bought 200 litres of milk for the day. A clear case of the ongoing mismatch between gravitational theory and quantum mechanics. Perhaps the “frothing causes milk expansion” coefficient is the one they have all been missing to create the grand unified theory?

Both team leaders seemed hell bent on screwing up their own chances by either pulling their vans from good pitches or leaving them in bad ones. I loved the fact that the female team leader (Jadine) felt that the most important part of the “Eclipse Coffee experience” was the logo done in powder in the froth. Was she forgetting that this was a one-day test rather than the creation of the next Starbucks?

The nice harmless man (Andy) in charge of the women was pretty useless but well intentioned and got the boot. The physicist will be following him very soon.

Interesting that over half of each team was not shown speaking at all for the entire episode. Are they doing the dark horse thing or was it just an editing approach where they introduce different characters on different weeks?

An added bonus for Irish viewers is that we appear to have a paddy on it and I may know someone who went to school with her.

Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC1

Don’t miss the follow-up programme “You’re Fired” at 10pm on BBC2. It looks like Badger still doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “stepping up to the plate”. Will someone please tell her it has nothing to do with dinner?