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The Dabbler reviews the first episode of The Apprentice 2011.

Why does Lord Sugar (I preferred him when he was humble ‘S’ralan’) keep doing this? Is he perhaps relying on income from The Apprentice to prop up his business empire? Does he hope that continued exposure on telly will propel him even further up the honours ladder…Grand Vizier Sugar? King Alan? His US counterpart Donald Trump is running for President so anything is possible, I suppose.

One thing he never seems to get out of it is an employee. None of The Apprentice’s first four winners show still work for Emp’ror Alan and Yasmina Siadatan, the fifth victor, got pregnant within weeks of joining Amstrad and is still on maternity leave. That may be why the 2011 edition is instead offering a £250k investment in a business ‘partnership’ rather than a job.

But The Apprentice (BBC One 9pm, Tuesdays and Wednesdays) is my favourite of the reality shows. The secret to its appeal, I think, is that it has two gears. The first two-thirds of each episode is an amusing fly-on-the-wall documentary about idiots with bags of misplaced self-confidence making a hash of things. The last third takes place in the boardroom, with an initial and then final interrogation. It shares with The X Factor and Strictly the ongoing docusoap drama of characters being killed off every week, but unlike those shows there is no audience participation – we’re not required phone in to save our preferred idiot – and this gives Mark Burnett’s production company the license to edit each episode with great manipulative skill.

The boardroom interrogation scene, in particular, is shamefully riveting. Sugar has an unnerving ability to pinpoint a candidate’s most vulnerable spot and grind away mercilessly at it. As the tension mounts and the music swells pornographically, we get rapid cuts from the squirming victim to his shell-shocked or smug rivals, to Sugar’s leering simian mug, to the eyeball-rolling sidekick Nick; we are tricked and teased about who will go as Sugar eviscerates them one-by-one until, at last, the money shot: a stubby jabby finger and the climactic release of “You’re fired.”

If the boardroom scene is the editors’ chance to manipulate the audience, the fly-on-the-wall element is primarily about stitching up the candidates. The tasks they are given are unreasonably difficult and they are required to perform them under unrealistic time pressure. Follow a bunch of people around with a camera for a day in these circumstances and you’re going to be able to compile half an hour’s worth of hilarious cock-ups and daft remarks.

That being said, it can’t be denied that the combination of naïve egotists and competitive pressure does produce comedy gold. The Apprentice seems to generate an enormous quantity of one-liners that can be repeated the next day at work. “I’ll defuse this situation!” announced a chap, boldly, last night, as he stepped in to defuse a situation. One that sticks in my mind is the assertion by Lee McQueen – winner of series four (he phoned in sick on his first day in the job) – that the target consumer of his aftershave brand “definitely shaves his balls.”

Last year’s cast included Melissa Cohen, who came out with such linguistically innovative phrases as “There’s no room for manoevrement” and the vengeful “Karmically, they will be retributed”.   She was wholly lacking in self-awareness, whereas the series’ star Stuart Baggs came pre-prepared with a stock of inanities, including “Everything I touch turns to sold”, and “I’m not a one-trick pony, I’m not a 10-trick pony, I have a whole field of ponies, and they’re literally all running towards this job”. Such self-consciousness threatened to derail the show – all telly eventually eats itself and though The Apprentice hasn’t quite jumped the shark yet the waterskiis have definitely been donned – but Baggs nonetheless managed to trump himself with the off-the-cuff gem: ““I have to rein in my own extreme masculinity in this task.”

Last night’s evictee, wheeler-dealer-trapped-in-accountant’s-life Edward Hunter, managed to pack a series’ worth of daft pronouncements into his brief time on the show. Beginning with the most basic Apprentice blunder of volunteering to be the first Project Manager, he attempted to prove that he was really nothing like an accountant by refusing to even think about numbers. How did you work out the costings for making your orange juice and soup? “I didn’t want to speculate,” he replied, bafflingly. And the price you were going to sell it for? Edward hadn’t wanted to speculate on that either, but he did insist that his strategy would involve a great deal of rolling with the punches (‘rawling widda punchiss’) and helpfully confirmed that “When I was producing, that was production.”

So gnomic were his utterances in the boardroom (“My business plan. Very different. Bottom up.”) that Grand Vizier Sugar had to ask him to “stop speaking in semaphore.” Edward’s final line of defence was that he should be allowed to stay because he’d led the team despite being “the youngest. And the shortest.” I miss him already.

The Apprentice continues tonight on BBC 1 9pm.

Dabbler Review is brought to you by Glengoyne single malt whisky – the Dabbler’s choice.