The Apprentice: You're Partnered!
By Charles Allison
On December 19, 2010, London businesswoman Stella English was hired as Lord Alan Sugar’s sixth apprentice and so began my yearly mourning period where I’m suddenly lost as to what to do with myself every Wednesday night. For 12 weeks I’d watched candidates bicker, backstab and bawl and I was going to have to wait a whole year for it all to start again.
Earlier this year it was announced that the seventh series was going to be starting in May, meaning a mercifully short five months in boardroom rehab. Brilliant! Even better, I managed to get hold of an invite to watch a preview of the first episode. I assumed it was going to be great (it always is) and it didn’t disappoint.
The episode started like every other before it; with a montage featuring candidates swooping around London tube stations, striding across bridges and saying things like ‘Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon!’. I was hooked already. The hopefuls are as cock-sure, determined and entertaining as ever. My particular favourite is 25-year-old Edward Hunter, who seems to have some strange ideas about what Lord Sugar is looking for, boasting that ‘Not only am I the youngest guy in the competition, I’m also the shortest’.
The first task is always one of my favourites. As usual the boys and girls were pitted against each other, with the girls calling themselves Team Venture and the boys, somewhat ironically, opting for Team Logic. Each team was given £250 to go out and start up a new fruit and veg business from scratch. Sounds simple enough, but when some of the candidates can’t even spell the word ‘vegetable’, things start to get a little trickier, and much hilarity ensues.
It’s all pretty textbook Apprentice stuff, which in my opinion is no bad thing. There is, however, one big change to this series. The winning candidate is not going to be offered a job with Lord Sugar.
Instead, they are going to receive a £250k investment to help them start up their own business, with Lord Sugar as their business partner. Sugar was keen to play up how important this change is going to be to the series, but with future tasks again involving advertising, purchasing, selling, pitching and inventing, it seems to me that the series is going to follow a very familiar pattern, which is something that I’m very excited about!
