The Apprentice is a constructed reality show on the BBC which purports to show the journey of a winning candidate for going into business with Lord Sugar with a quarter of a million pound stake. It is filmed over 8 weeks and edited to last 12 weeks on TV. It follows the familiar narrative structure of a knock out game show.
Each programme begins with a heavily edited recap of the previous week’s show. The opening highlights tend to rely on footage which shows all the candidates squabbling, mishandling tasks and one of them finally hearing “You’re fired!”
The setting of London is shown by establishing shots of London from the air, candidates crossing over the bridge near the Tate Modern and frequent shots of Black London Cabs. It features repeated clips of aerial footage over the skyscrapers of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf financial districts, such as the 180-metre Gherkin, HSBC Tower etc. Alan Sugar has offices in none of these locations. His “office” seen in the boardroom scenes is actually a film set constructed purely for the show. Most other locations are chosen to fit the task somewhere in the London area but one trip a year is made overseas to sell some product in an unfamiliar environment.
Tasks
The successful candidates are split into two teams, initially by gender, with each team discussing and picking a name for themselves throughout the process (until the Interview stage). The teams are then given a series of tasks which test their skills in salesmanship, negotiation, requisitioning, leadership, teamwork and organisation, with each episode covering a single task. At the start of each episode, the teams each choose a project manager/fall guy to act as the team leader for the duration of the task. As candidate numbers are reduced week by week, the teams are periodically rearranged by Sugar, either to balance the numbers, ensure a fair distribution of skills for a specific task, or to give less vocal candidates a chance to demonstrate their claimed skills.
Each team is followed by two television crews and is provided with two vehicles to drive them between locations when required. As such they are only permitted to split into two sub-teams and no more. In reality most business teams work together seamlessly and are not out to sabotage one another. In addition to the crews and vehicles, they are also followed in the execution of their tasks by Lord Sugar’s advisers, who note down their opinions and thoughts on how they execute the task for later recaps in the boardroom.
The tasks themselves are significantly more difficult than they appear when they are televised, for a few reasons:
- The candidates must adhere to very strict time constraints, which would not be enforced in the real business world. One example is that each series has a task in which candidates are required to design a product and pitch it to retailers within 2 days; in reality they would have several months to perform this.
- On each task, candidates are usually provided with detailed dossiers which outline further guidelines that they must work under, i.e. cost restrictions when designing products, locations in which they are not permitted to sell or purchase goods, themes, ingredients or materials that they may use etc.
- In tasks where candidates want to buy goods from or sell goods to certain stores and/or establishments, the production crew must first receive filming permission from the respective owners. This can be a cumbersome and time consuming process that may influence the results of tasks, especially during the one day scavenger hunt task when candidates must purchase a specified number of items within a strict time limit.
- Candidates are usually not allowed to use the internet during tasks, and will have handed in their mobile phones to the production team at the start of the process. This increases the difficulty of determining suitable locations, appropriate pricing structures etc.
- As tasks that are completed over 2–3 days are edited down to approximately 30 minutes when televised, numerous candidates may appear to make minimal contributions in them. However, if candidates do not feature prominently in these final edits, but are also not shown to be accused of staying under the radar by Sugar or his advisers, it can usually be assumed that they have completed their duties in a successful and professional manner, and that this has not been deemed as entertaining enough to be broadcast.
- The persistent presence of television cameras when candidates are working intensifies the pressure on them, with their mistakes usually emphasised more during the final edits.
- The process is extremely gruelling for candidates. The result of this usually leads to them working considerably long hours and suffering from a lack of sleep and food on task days, often owing to the fact that could start very early on in the morning and finishing well after midnight with minimal time for breaks. As candidates are usually only allowed one phone call home each week, and are living in the same house as their direct rivals for the same prize, this can further increase the stress that they are under during tasks.
Boardroom
A studio mock-up of a real company boardroom, usually after the completion, or the following day is used to show the weaknesses of the candidates and the strengths of the Sugar team. Once in the boardroom, Lord Sugar, with the help of his advisers, reveals the results of what they went through and discusses about their performance, often exposing flaws in the candidates’ strategies and personalities. Sugar, who is introduced in the programme as “Britain’s most belligerent boss”,frequently delivers scathing criticisms couched in colourful language (“This was a total bloody disaster” … “you haven’t got a bloody clue” …The boardroom is usually divided up into three stages:
- Stage 1: Each team are asked to comment on their performance in the task, often through the project manager, but also through team members. Both Sugar and his advisers often gives out some criticism or praise in this stage about what happened in the team’s execution of the task; if the task involved the creation of a new product and/or a advert, they also review what was created. After this, Sugar and his assistants reveal which team has won, often giving out a result of figures (sales, orders, etc) to prove this. Members of the winning team are then told by Sugar that he has laid on a special treat for them such as a dinner at a fancy restaurant or a music recital, and they leave the boardroom. The losing team are dispatched outside the boardroom to discuss amongst themselves about their failures in the task, usually convening at the Bridge Café to do so.
- Stage 2: The losing team are subjected to a detailed review of their performance, sometimes humiliating, with the PM and team members often discussing/arguing about how well they did, what mistakes could have been avoided, who they feel is to blame for their failure, often with Sugar and his advisers interject with their own opinions, either agreeing or disagreeing with an argument, pointing out things they felt was wrong, who they felt did good, and any feedback made by outside parties connected to the task. After discussions on the task, Sugar asks the team’s project manager to choose two team members to accompany him or her into a final round of interrogation, which are normally the two poorest performing members of the team, yet the project manager may act treacherously, and either seek to remove more able members of the competition or make choices based on personality. Those not picked are sent back to the house, while the “final three” are told to wait outside the boardroom.
- Stage 3: Sugar and his advisers discuss about the final three in regards to performance in the process, relations to the other candidates, and any strong/poor points to them, before they are let back into the boardroom to discuss why they should not be fired by Sugar. These discussions often become acrimonious as each candidate tries to divert blame towards the others, and can sometimes lead to heated arguments. The discussion ends with Lord Sugar giving a quick review of what he and his advisers thought of each candidate’s performance in the task and the process, before dismissing one or in some cases two of the three from the process (in extremely rare cases, he has fired all three), with the catchphrase “You’re fired!”, at which point that candidate is eliminated from the competition (if more than one is fired, each receives the catchphrase separately). The fired candidate(s) then leaves and departs in a waiting taxi for the ‘journey home’, where they are briefly interviewed in the taxi to reflect on his or her rejection from the competition. Sugar then sends the surviving candidate(s) back to the accommodation provided for the duration of the show.
The scenes where candidates are grilled by Sugar in the boardroom usually last for several hours. This often means that the boardroom sequence in its 3 stages could take the best part of a full day to complete, further adding to the show’s gruelling schedule.
Music is an important part of the show. It creates a mood, is used to build tension, and generally add entertainment value. The main theme that everyone remembers is from Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev. Additional music has included Jupiter from The Planets, O Fortuna from Carmina Burana and Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition.
Debuting in 2013, this entertaining factual format was envisaged as a cross between The Royle Family (fittingly, the sitcom’s creators Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne narrate the series) and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Although Gogglebox bears closer relation to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe in its guise as a comic analysis of the week’s television, the central conceit of the earlier TV Burp has few predecessors – although one relative is US series Talk Soup, later rebranded The Soup, a 1990s clip show that drolly surveyed the previous day’s chatshows – while the idea of the public as TV critic can be traced back to the 1961 dawn of Points Of View.
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