📺 Watching The Apprentice - season 18.

It’s sometimes reassuring when things stay the same - and here once more we have a bunch of buzzword-laden people, with apparent levels of self-confidence most of us could only dream of, doing whatever it takes to impress the master of awkwardly delivering badly-scripted jokes and pointing at people, Lord Sugar, all in the name of getting an investment.

I was just looking up the iconic 2010 contestant Stuart “The Brand” Baggs to be sure of getting his justifiably famous quote right - ‘I’m not a one-trick pony. I’m a whole field of ponies’ - only to discover that sadly he died in 2015, aged just 27. Lord Sugar left a floral tribute.

Another thing I recently learned is that in order to keep who wins a total secret until broadcast, the show apparently films two different endings, one where each of the two finalists win and the other one loses. Even the two candidates concerned don’t learn who won until much later - the day before the final show is broadcast. Same for the production team.

Sometimes even the same ending has to be filmed more than once. Harpreet Kaur, the winner of the 2022 season, had to have her “winning” ending filmed twice because she didn’t have “the right level of excitement” the first time through. I suppose it is probably hard to muster the TV-level appropriate extremes of performative excitement when there’s a good chance what you’re celebrating never happened. I’m not sure how she reconciles that with her quote in the same article that “there’s no acting” in the Apprentice, but there we go.

I’ll watch with interest when it’s time for the 2024 final to see if this cohort’s acting-like-a-winner skills are better than one might imagine.