And so another series of the BBC1 show ‘The Apprentice’ is over, and yet another winner has been crowned.
Carina Lepore was the victor joining the burgeoning number of ‘Apprentice’ winners who have had a moment of glory on prime time television and then never been seen again, be it in business or anywhere else.
The show has run with an almost unchanged format for fifteen years, with viewing figures dwindling gradually over the past five.
Is it time that the show itself was finally fired?
‘The Apprentice’ was fun when it began in 2005. Back then, the idea was that the winner of the show would be working directly under ‘Lord Sir’ Alan Sugar with a guaranteed salary of £100,000 per year, and the chance to be mentored by one of Britain’s most celebrated business leaders.
£100,000 was an exceptionally good salary back then, and Sugar was held in high regard.
Both the money and the opportunity would be considered life-changing for the successful candidate. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to the fact that barely anyone who won the show stayed with Sugar for more than a year even back then.
In more recent years, the prize has changed. Sugar apparently has no more jobs to hand out. Instead of working directly with Sugar, winners are handed a £250,000 investment and a partnership with Sugar to either promote their existing business or bring a product to the market.
It’s unclear whether the money truly does come from Sugar, or whether it’s at least partially funded by the BBC as part and parcel of making the television show. What is clear, however, is that Sugar receives a significant share in the successful applicant’s business.
When you look at that fact in the cold light of day, it becomes less of a chance for a young entrepreneur to gain a foothold in the world of business, and more of a conveyor belt for Alan Sugar to hear business ideas and decide which ones he wants to take an interest in.
For him, that’s a fortunate position to be in. Without taking anything away from Sugar’s past – he did, after all, become a millionaire from a starting point of selling electrical goods out of the back of a van – it’s been a very long time since he had a viable business idea of his own.
We are, after all, talking about a man who believed that an all-in-one fax-emailer device would be a desirable product in the 21st century.