Sugaring the pill of working with the barrow boy lord

Since the Apprentice started offering serious money to the tune of £250,000 in a start-up business, the quality of the candidates - or at least their backgrounds I should say - has skyrocketed.  Mind you, with the bombastic pomposity on display, you half expect Lord Sugar to proclaim at the start of a programme, “Your task is to create a new religion.  After 48 hours, those with the most adherents will win and on the losing team, one of you, if not indeed all of you, will be sent to hell.”  Entering into a partnership with Lord Sugar is not quite on the scale of a Faustian pact, though it will always be a fraught relationship.

Though they often had decent businesses behind them, the girls proved themselves to be the worst crop in a while as evidenced by them losing the first two tasks in a row.  One of them, Jane, even had a multi-million pound multinational behind her, yet fell to pieces frequently in the process.  When it came down to the final five, Jade was a nailed on certainty for the final, as it would be a PR disaster were the last four candidates all men.  Having never been in the bottom three until the last task, Nick was also guaranteed.  With Ricky and Tom winning on the other side, Adam was exposed once too often as ‘out of his depth’.

I had really been impressed with Tom for a long while but had cooled as his imagination started to fail him – he recognised things were boring yet didn’t have a fix to rectify that.  Ricky was growing on me but his initial summary to Lord Sugar before the interviews began in earnest backfired in the jargon he deployed.  Nick and Tom emerged best from this soundbite section. 

With the interrogations, I noticed that Nick did something that Stuart Baggs did, addressing Margaret Mountford by her Christian name.  Yet Nick got away with it unlike the irrepressible Mr Baggs, though that was about all in which Nick succeeded.  Jade was annihilated in the interview stage, proving there was to be no ironic twist that she would be triumphant from such a lousy bunch of women.  Yet when Claude praised Ricky’s business plan, I knew his influential clout would be an important factor in the boardroom.  From that point and my wife can vouch for me on this, my top two were Ricky and Tom, with Ricky being Lord Sugar’s pick.  What a shame I’m not more au fait with bet in play.  With Lord Sugar having made £850 million from selling his satellite dish manufacturing company, he didn’t need the hassle of a high-risk, potentially very lucrative exploit.  Ricky’s niche recruitment agency gave him the safety route and fulfilling his contractual obligations with the BBC.