Unrestrained egomania makes splendid television. 
And the usual miscellany of disgraceful brags and narcissistic one-liners we’ve come to expect simply add to the glorious fun we all guiltily have when we’re exposed to such arrogant carp.
This moral ambivalence comes every year after we listen to the usual vain absurdity – last time out we had: “don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon,” and this series we’ve heard: “I have the energy of a Duracell bunny, sex appeal of Jessica Rabbit, and a brain like Einstein.”
Zeeshaan Shah, though, was not particularly convincing: “I take my inspiration from Napoleon; I am here to conquer,” he said. Amazing.
It goes without saying the programme these days is anything but real. The candidates appear to have been rapidly accumulated from a broadcast assistant’s scribbled production notes; the events are moderately scripted to appear spontaneous; and Lord Sugar’s continuous makeover which sees him physically slimmer and vocally slicker each year just adds to the overall hollowness.
Did you know that Sugar is an East End boy made good, who started with nothing and built an empire worth millions? It’s true; but he’s just too modest to tell us.
He has read the CVs of all his potential apprentices, and he’s “sick and tired of all the usual cliches” because, he says, “actions speak louder than words.” How ironic, and idiotic. I often wonder if he as a teenager would make it past round one of his own Young Apprentice.
There are other faults, though, that lie outside of Sugar’s liability. The Beeb must be channeling a substantial chunk of their taxpayer cash to acquire widescreen lenses vast enough to capture the candidates’ ludicrously enormous egos.
And it’s all so obviously edited. The quotes are artificial, fights and feuds encouraged, episodes planned in storyboards before recording and scenes stitched together out of footage shot miles apart. There are numerous ways of using footage to shape a story, and reality television shows thrive on conflict between the contestants. It’s manipulative editing at its finest.
The programme has a delightful ability to discover resplendently self-delusional comics, and as Andrew Pettie so accurately summed up in The Telegraph: “Britain may be in the grip of recession, but in the field of blithering idiocy we remain market leaders.”
There is so much wrong with The Apprentice that it’s just brilliant. Brilliantly entertaining.