DVD: The Apprentice – The Best Of Series 1-4

Self-styled as The Job Interview From Hell (and spoken at a volume that makes you wonder if you haven’t accidentally found Masterchef instead), The Apprentice is one of Auntie’s few success stories of the last few years. From its humble beginnings as cult favourite on BBC2 to its prime time explosion on BBC1 (complete with a post-game spin-off on the latter to keep everyone happy), the show is now five series’ strong and shows no sign of the declining popularity afflicting its Stateside predecessor, presided over by Donald Trump, a man whose hair threatens to defy all the known laws of physics.

In his place, Sir Alan Sugar (the business empresario behind Amstrad) and a healthy dose of brittle English greed. The whole production is in sharp contrast to the zip edit gold-washed frenzy of Trump’s US version. Instead, it’s all muted greys and blues and a boardroom decked out in Ikea’s premier range. Not for the UK Trump’s oil-slick charm. Sirallun (as he is known now in the collective conscience) is gruff, foreboding and quite clearly enjoying every bloody minute.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, here’s how it goes: Sirallun sets two teams made up of hapless wannabe Richard Branson’s and reality tv miscreants an entrepreneurial task with the winning team being the one that has managed to turn the most profit.

The losers return to the boardroom amid sweeping aeriel shots of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin to give the impression that all the firing (and eventual hiring) takes place in London’s glittering business districts when in fact they’re only trooping back to a warehouse in Essex. Sirallun’s aides Margaret and Nick under whose auspices the task is carried out generally sit looking smug before Sirallun yells at the stupidity of the losing team (even when they’ve fallen victim to bad luck or faced impossible odds) and delivers his zeitgeist-friendly catchphrase, ‘You’re fired!’ to that task’s weakest link. Repeat x 12 weeks all in the name of a £100,000 a year job in one of Sirallun’s organisations.

And it works. Oh god, it pains me to say this but it works. It works so well, the format has remained unchanged for five years now. While the US version has spun itself silly reinventing the wheel, the UK edition knows what works, sticks religiously to it and lets the contestants do their worst. Huge ratings ensue.

This DVD (or ‘Sirallun’s Greatest Hits’) revisits Series 1 to 4 and it’s interesting to note not only how psychologically damaged the contestants have increasingly become (the prize should surely now by default include one month’s psychiatric therapy) but also how the show has started making more use of the rapid-fire editing from America that puts expressions alongside actions that clearly don’t belong together.

The biggest negative is that this DVD lacks any of the dramatic tension, manufactured or otherwise, that the series has so much of. It’s all too easy to forget that when The Apprentice begins each year, it usually takes four to six weeks before you can distinguish one candidate from another. Until then, they’re very much one amorphous blob of monetary parasite.

The Apprentice is high-grade disposable reality tv, designed as such. It’s not there to be revisited, replayed or analysed in anything other than weekly doses before it’s on to the next episode. If you’re an Apprentice Super Fan who knows just how many hairs are in Sirallun’s beard (Answer: They’re not hairs but the residual energy from the souls of the candidates he eviscerates each week) or it’s Christmas (when this sort of DVD gets played once on Boxing Day and never again), this is mana from heaven. Otherwise, this is very much for completists only.

The Apprentice: The Best of Series 1-4 is out now. Get your mits on a copy by clicking here.