It's time to fire The Apprentice

This bullying show is bad for business

FOR the sake of British business’s reputation, it’s time – with regret – to fire The Apprentice.

The current series was already awash with the normal nonsensical tropes: Setting its candidates up to fail; threatening to fire someone just because they can’t, say, make a dog food or design an electric bike; offering them two choices and then finding fault whichever one they choose; giving them the false hope of getting through round after round of humiliation before jettisoning them on the basis of a business plan they’ve had since week one.

But last night’s interview round surely proved beyond doubt that this show needs to be put out of its misery.

The whole format is now not just tired, but exhausted. I think this was something like the millionth series and while it was always an exaggerated, telly version of how business really works, at least for a while it had one foot in the tenets of how to run a successful venture. And the interviews – an individual grilling by business greats who all seem to have their desks on an empty landing – have always been harsh. But last night’s was just so out of step with the way modern business works.

Perhaps the most troubling part is that these interviewers are paraded as successful business people and therefore role models the candidates should aspire to be. Except, would you aspire to be a sadistic bully?

Take Karren Brady, who was last night promoted to the interview panel and so writ even larger her normal humourless, arrogant, stony-faced persona. Aside from ripping apart everyone’s business plan (“it’s as crazy as it comes,” she sneered at sweets entrepreneur Megan Hornby), it was with all the gloating pomp of a Disney villainess that her low point came when one of the poor applicants made the cataclysmic faux pas of calling her Karren. “It’s Baroness Brady to you,” she snarled, trying on the same ludicrous delusions of grandeur as her boss Lord Sugar, who regularly reminds us of his humble beginnings as a barrow boy but seemingly insists everyone “respects” him by using his title.

This bullying has no place in business

Recognising her peerage and status is clearly important to footballer’s wife Mrs Peschisolido, who apparently forgot all the candidates had called her Karren throughout the series and didn’t realise all the other interviewers seemed happy to be addressed by their first names.

She wasn’t the only problem. It’s a long time since The Apprentice reflected any true notions of how to really succeed in business, and the gap between the show’s portrayal of a grilling in its made-for-TV boardroom and how most bosses interact with their teams has widened even further since Covid.

The pandemic brought working from home, it brought empathy, understanding, flexibility, soft skills, the understanding that personal relationships are every bit as vital as the bottom line figures. But you wouldn’t know that from The Apprentice.

The show is a comedy now, Gogglebox TV that no longer invites you to deride its hapless victimised contestants but instead vent at their vicious, bullying superiors. Sugar has a tiresome catalogue of pithy one-liners that humiliate the contestants while simultaneously challenging them and everyone witnessing this to laugh at his wit – by definition the actions of a bully. Mrs P revels in belittling candidates as stupid, and the parade of other monsters on interview duty last night was as bad. Claude Littner, Mike Soutar and Linda Plant constantly talked over their victims, calling them and their ideas variously “pathetic”, “hopeless” and “ludicrous”.

Cartoon baddies show their ignorance

I can’t believe any of them are as cruel as this in real life – Soutar looked awkward and Littner, for all his uncompromising rhetoric, seemed almost apologetic to be pointing out the contestants’ failings. Plant, meanwhile, simply embarrassed herself by telling would-be gym owner Marnie Swindells that her business model of not paying her trainers was ridiculous. “Do you really think that’s a proven model of success? I seriously doubt it,” she scoffed, unaware that if she’d actually looked at the industry as hard as she looked at the business plan, she’d know thousands of very successful gyms around the country do just that, with self-employed trainers charging their clients but working hours for the gym in lieu of rent. No wonder an incandescent Marnie told her fellow candidates: “I’m more than happy to be educated on business but don’t tell me I don’t know about boxing.”

The interviews also retrod tediously worn paths, including castigating candidates as “uninvestable” because they were entering a market with no experience. Even though, for them at their entry level, this is not as reckless a gamble as, say, having no experience before buying a so-called “Big Five” football club which then under your nine-year stewardship as chairman fails to finish in the top six.

Everyone makes business mistakes and obviously it’s important to learn from them. (The barking Baroness, for example, hopefully learned last year that just because you team up with a university to launch a Karren Brady MBA, it doesn’t mean it won’t be scrapped through lack of interest. What made you think that idea would work, Karren? It’s as crazy as it comes!)

Are interviewers proud of their image?

But it’s the tone of The Apprentice that’s completely out of kilter with today’s workplace. The interviewers showed a complete, utter lack of personal respect for the candidates. Business is business, of course it is, and in any venture a deep-dive examination of plans is essential and difficult conversations are sometimes necessary. But there’s a difference between straight-talking and bullying, and if you got torn apart like that in real life, in any decent company culture you’d be encouraged to go straight to HR. You have the right not to be spoken to like that. Yet such things don’t happen in the cartoon Apprentice world. What does that say about Lord Sugar and his process?

Many viewers understand that on one level this is only telly. (Who knows, maybe Claude Littner gave everyone a hug in the green room afterwards.) But only on one level. For the talented young women subjected to this grilling, there was a lot at stake – not just the £250,000 investment prize but whether they could withstand public humiliation on national television. And telly or not, whether a viewer knows anything about business or not, what kind of image does this portray of Sugar as a boss – or Brady, Littner, Soutar and Plant and the sort of people managers they are? They are Sugar’s “trusted advisers” – presumably in that he trusts them to belittle, humiliate and ridicule his would-be employees. Are they really happy to be seen like this?

On this evidence of how they treat their fellow humans, would you want to work for any of them? I wouldn’t. Would you want to work for Sugar? I wouldn’t. The show was always faintly ridiculous, now it’s gone full self-parody - but without the laughs.

Worst of all, I’m afraid The Apprentice is bad for business, and British business’s reputation. It’s time to point the finger, and give this show its P45.

Thanks for reading this today, I really appreciate you taking the time! I write on a variety of different subjects for a large number of clients and audiences. If you'd like to, please read more of my weekly blog here, and read more of my published articles here.

And if you'd like me to write something for you or your business, please email me at ptw@peterthewriter.org!