Rejoice, the disgustingly ambitious have gathered once more to laugh at the jokes of Lord Sugar

Lord Sugar summons his retainers, Claude, bald and sullen like a vicious baby, and k-ARR-en, luxuriously coiffed like a pirate, to his sarcophagus where he is being doused with embalming fluid and prevented from drying out by eerie dark- eyed children with watering cans.

“I’m thinking of becoming a stand-up comedian,” says Lord Sugar. “Really, Lord Sugar?” sigh Claude and Karren. “Because I am very, very hilarious.” “Okay...” say Claude and Karren.

“Remember when I said that I didn’t want people to suck up to me. ‘If I wanted to be loved, I’d go to Tinder’, I said. That was very funny, what I said.”

“Was it, Lord Sugar?” ask Claude and Karren.

"The apprentices laughed so hard," says Lord Sugar, emerging from his chemical bath to be dressed by attendants, much like Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road. "It was gold."

Claude and Karren say nothing.

“Or the time I got them to market a cactus-derived shampoo and referred to myself as ‘a prickly customer’. That was a quality cactus-related pun. Everyone agreed it was v. witty.”

Claude and Karren say nothing.

“And when they said they were going for the older market, I said, ‘You could have called it Fifty Shades of Grey’ which is both funny and topical. They would not have been laughing had it not been very hilarious.”

Claude and Karren say nothing.

“Yes. I’ll be a stand-up comedian,” whispers Lord Sugar, surveying the wasteland below. “I’m a scream.”

Despotic mogul
Every year, 18 people who have caught Thatcherism from a dirty pie-chart are gathered from the outlands to laugh at the jokes of Sugar (The Apprentice, Wed/Thurs, BBC1). Formerly the mascot for a breakfast cereal, Lord Sugar is now a despotic mogul, and the youngsters competing to be taken under his bat-like wing are, in the words of one of their number, "disgustingly ambitious."

Observe as a swagger of them traverse a bridge (cockish bridge-crossing is the first test). Observe as one of them irons his tie. “Winner!” he says, punching the air, for he has won a game of ironing his tie.

Observe as they assemble syntactically sound if meaning- deficient word-strings. “Every morning I wake with a surge of adrenalin around my body,” says Jenny, describing what may be an undiagnosed medical condition.

“‘Ordinary’ or ‘mediocre’; those are curse words to me,” spits Elle, who has glaring eyes like an evil hypnotist.

“I’m a Swiss army knife of business skills,” says Richard, who presumably has a corkscrew, nail file and spork jutting from his side. “I’m a captain at the head of a cavalry charge,” he adds, confusingly (how could he lead a military operation if he’s an inanimate utensil from neutral Switzerland?).

After staring at Lord Sugar in adoration, they split into teams to sell fish products to yuppies.

They need team names.

“Can I throw my thought into the thought pond?” says Dan, who earlier promised to sit quietly until he “pounced”.

“What about the Sugar- babes?” he says. Everyone sighs.

They name the teams Versatile, after a 1980s soul band, and Connectus, after one of the shitter Transformers. Then they gut fish, sell salad, fail and bicker. Dan is drowned in the “thought pond”. It’s a mercy really. He never pounced.

And then there were 17...
Day 2: Lord Sugar emerges from the slumber pod where he feeds on hallucinogenic nectar, to tell everyone he wants them to market cactus-derived shampoo.

The apprenti are thrilled. He splits them on gender lines like deer in the wild. A furrow-browed young man thinks their theme should be “sexiness”. He outlines a scenario in which a man “with hair like mine” is swarmed by women.

Charleine suggests calling their shampoo “Cactesse”. “I like the ‘tesse’ but not the ‘cac’,” says April and the squabbling begins.

The boys’ team (Versatile) are unified under the slightly terrifyingly rule of Richard (the horse-riding Swiss army knife) who, like many leaders, esteems consensus while politely ignoring it in the interest of an empowered minority (horse-riding Swiss army knives).

Lord Sugar is impressed by Versatile’s “men washing their hair” ad but less pleased by Connectus’s “mother and daughter have a pervy massage together” ad. Richard takes credit. There is no “I” in “team”, however there is an “I” in “Versatile” and an “I” in Richard and 16 “I”s in the Apprentice. There are fewer of them every episode.