Alan Sugar, now affectionately known as Suralan – or, alternatively, a grimacing Wooly Willy toy with a haunted look in its eye stuck crudely onto a child’s wrinkled body in a mortician’s suit – sits in the high chair grumbling at moronic, vapid shills.

It almost sounds like the perfect job doesn’t it? Imagine being paid by the BBC to sit at a desk and break idiot’s hearts for the entertainment of the braying public. It’s one of the easiest jobs in the world.

However, the catch is, he has to continually meet these dunderheads without pulling out a carpet stapler and filling their faces full of excruciating tiny wounds.

For a moment on last night’s The Apprentice, it looked like Britain was going to view the most horrifying episode of any show ever aired. The show, from the off pretty much said “tonight is all about babies”. A grim vision passed in my mind – Sir Sugartits demanding that the challenge would be for the would-be richdicks to create a baby before the day was out.

The thought of Ben yelling “SHOUT SANDHURST! SHOUT SANDHURST, SLUT!” at McQuillan in the futile attempt to roughly and brutally make his arse pregnant, or dish-faced Noel Fielding lookalike Debra riding atop a weeping Howard, punching him in the face with huge cement-mixer hands, grunting like deaf pigs in throes of an ejaculation that can only be likened to the death rattle of a cockroach, spilling eggs from its guts.

Of course, that wasn’t the deal at all. Rather, the assembled vampires were being asked to shag the public in the quids. Weirdly, these sharked-eyed poindexters were dealing with products for children. A bunch of people with less life-skills than a lepton looking at a bunch of stuff and trying to decide what The Nation’s Parents would want to buy for their puking little offspring.

The natural thing to choose was a foam hat, especially designed to make your child look like it had Down’s Syndrome. As an aside, you don’t see *those* helmets these days do you? Unless you tune in to The Apprentice of course. One of the clunges on the show basically implied that they’d sell the dubious products via ‘guilt’. Presumably they hadn’t considered the secondary guilt of their child getting mercilessly bullied at playschool, which is ironic for a bunch of people who probably spent their time getting spat at in school corridors.

Our James needed to impart his unique take on the world too. Watching him squat and talk to women about their ‘lid’ being flipped open so the baby can ‘pop out’ was worth the entrance fee alone. As he mimicked the pressing of a pubic bone and a monkey stump to some clearly puzzled preggos, internet searches for Entire Skeleton Removal spiked.

Anyway, one team of morons beat another gaggle of goons and that treated us to the familiar spectacle of The End Of Programme Showdown. This of course, is television that could curdle milk. It captures that awkward bullshit that we all go through in every excruciating job-interview we’ve ever had. In effect, each person is asked to talk about their strengths. The appalling feeling of pre-sick water rising through the throat while you try to convince a twat in a suit that you’re a reliable so-and-so and good at taking one for the team.

However, this job-interview is dragged out over weeks while everyone laughs at you and hates you. Even Alan Sugar hates you. You talk and talk about how wonderful you are, hoping that no-one chips in… but the whole world offers abuse like it’s some gift. No. You keep that. You shallow, irritating git. It’s all yours. The reward is either further humiliation on national TV or you get a tiny, withered hand pointed your way – like a dried-out monkey paw on a stick – and that timeless line: “You’re fired.”

Sandhurt Snow Patrol Ben got the chop, which saw him near-blubbing on telly like a mardy-arse. Off in a black taxi he’s taken to a life of also-runnery. Regardless of what he acheives in life, there’ll be someone, somewhere, ready to lay into him and snort uproariously about the time he showed everyone what a prick he was on our idiot lanterns. The long trudge to the cab compounds the bleakest fears. The niggle becomes a load klaxon. “You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.”

And how we all laugh. Laugh like the mean-spirited shitehawks that we are. We watch, we sneer, we predict a winner, we go to bed. We don’t care. These people are just moving meat factories, shunted on screen and shunted back off again. They’re as human to us as Nookie Bear. Possibly less so. And that’s what TV is. A writhing pie full of shit and sinew. Yet somehow, we gobble it up every night.

So who is the real fool?

This was a guest blog by Mof Gimmers out of that Electric Roulette. Go visit now!

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We’re the best there is, ever was, and ever will be. In fact, we’re the Jesus of business and we’d kill every child ever used on a Huggies or Andrex advert to win, the cuter the deader.

That’s right, The Apprentice is back! Just in time too, as we need something to fill in the time between series of Dancing on Ice.

If you’ve ever watched this humility free reality show before then basically you’ve seen them all. There’s a bunch of contestants who are dead behind the eyes, all vying for a job at Sir Alan Sugar’s workhouse.

Each one of them is as devoid of character than the last, but they do provide an impressive amount of hyperbole and idioms to enjoy. It’s that which most likely keeps us returning to watch the series year after year.

The programme begins as normal with the candidates making ludicrous claims regarding their competency. Every one of them would have you believe that they are some sort of wheeler dealer Robocop who would burn their competitors’ eyes out with a spent match rather than face defeat. At this stage it becomes patently obvious that if beauty does indeed come from inside, these people would all be butt ugly.

This week’s challenge was to clean things in return for payment. The boys’ team, despite being a man down quickly managed to assign a faceless man called Howard to lead them, and picked the name ‘Empire’. Considering the historical ramifications of this word, it felt as if the choice of name could have been more sensitive considering the multi-cultural make up of the team.

The girls’ team was given the moniker Ignite. That’s a good name because it signifies burning things, no, because it represents light? Passion? Anyway, they were headed up by Mona (pronounced Monna), an incredibly outspoken and direct woman who repeatedly informed her customer that they were wrong during negotiations.

The tasks proceeded with the normal back-biting, bitching, and short term allegiances. That and the look of utter contempt on the team leader’s face when they are updated on the progress of their sub team via cellular telephone. Any sort of mistake apparently comes across as news that they’ve just defecated botulism-laced faeces into their lunchbox.

We won’t spoil the massive excitement and anticipation by telling you who won, but the trio of business superheroes who ended up in the boardroom were particularly sour-faced and provoked the feeling of intense satisfaction when Sir Alan gave them a big telling off.

Here’s a pick of some of our favourite phrases from episode 1:

“[I have a] rainbow of skills”
”at the end of the day”
“turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”
“[I’m a] rough tough cream puff”
“[you get the] complete package”
“I’m a one man business killing machine”
“I’ve got acumen coming out of my arse”
OK, we made up the last two. Feel free to add some better ones below (shouldn’t be hard).

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Dead? No, of course he's not dead. But Sir Alan Sugar has stepped down as chairman of his company Amstrad after 40 years. That means that all those wonderful jokes about the crappy-looking, pointlessly impractical email telephones he hawked so mercilessly during the first few seasons of The Apprentice are all worthless now. Really, he may as well be dead.

Anyway, even though he's left Amstrad, Sir Alan Sugar's still going to be the terrifying boss figure on The Apprentice. However, there's bound to be some changes – those taking part in next year's Apprentice will now be battling for a prestigious £100k a year job keeping watch for the rozzers while Sir Alan flogs boxes of unsold email phones from the back of a van in an MFI car park.

Listen to the intro to The Apprentice long enough and you'll believe that Sir Alan Sugar is a genius. A stone cold genius so unashamedly geniusy that everyone he works with happily puts up with his bellowed insults and belligerent manner because they understand that he knows more about business than anyone else alive.

Sir Alan Sugar even has the ear of the Prime Minister, we're told. He literally has it. He tore it off during a heated conference about proportionate enterprise regulation procedure. The Prime Minister doesn't even mind, because Sir Alan Sugar is that much of a business genius.

And as a business genius, Sir Alan Sugar knows that the recession is affecting two things more than anything else – rising fuel prices and tumbling property prices. Which is why he's chosen now to step down as chairman of his electronics company Amstrad to build up his, um, property and private jet businesses. Whoops.

That's right – Alan Sugar is no longer in charge of Amstrad, the company that's been his life for 40 years. The Times reports:

Sir Alan Sugar, the multi-millionaire star of The Apprentice TV series, has stepped down as chairman of Amstrad, the company he founded aged just 21. Sir Alan insists he is not retiring but that it was the “right time” for him to step down from his role at the company, which he sold to broadcaster BSkyB for £125 million last year.

You know what that means, don't you? it means all those ghoulish Amstrad animatronic Alan Sugar toys will be going cheap! They're the perfect Christmas present for anyone you want to curse into a lifetime of petrified insomnia thanks to the latex cockney robot sat in the corner of their room constantly bellowing insults at them. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter that Alan Sugar has quit Amstrad, because he'll still be presenting The Apprentice and making appearances in all kinds of television commercials. However, let's just hope that his property and private jet interests hold up, because otherwise he'll have to change his catchphrase from "My fee from this ad is going to Great Ormond Street hospital" to "Up yours, sick kids – Daddy needs a hot tub."

Folded:

• Take the personality test! (are you extraverted, introverted, insane? Find out here! Takes a while to do though – oh, and at least one of us turned up with the same Jung personality as Abraham Lincoln)

• Barry Norman Pickled Onions (yep, that’s right, the Barry Norman. They taste quite nice)

• The Long Walk To Finchley (regardless of your opinions on Margaret Thatcher, this one-off comedy/drama plays as the epitome of what BBC4 do best: light political fluff)

• Lee McQueen (seems like, for once, any old Alan has picked the right candidate; apparently he’s putting Lee to work on the London Underground somewhere)

• Hulk squish (not smash. Norton’s fine though)

Creased:

• CGI (why is it seldom as good as filmmakers think it is?)

• When those factory bods accidentally put smooth Tropicana in the juicy bits Tropicana carton (doesn’t ruin your day, but certainly gets the morning off to a rough start)

• No more The Apprentice (in 2005 it started off worse than Dragons Den and then swiftly became the only reality show worth watching. Big Brother then, everyone? Hmm? No)

• Gone Baby Gone (far and away not a bad movie, but Mr Ben Affleck needs to find his own voice and not Clint Eastwood’s if he wants to succeed as a credible director)

• Jumper on DVD (even with some mildy interesting deleted scenes, you’d still be better off eating your money rather than spending it on this)

And, as is normal for The Apprentice, the full line-up of candidates angling for a £100,00 job being Sir Alan Sugar's monkey-slave have been revealed. But what are this year's gang of Apprentice contestants actually like?

Well, one is a global pricing leader, one is an international car sales strategist, one is… oh, let's cut to the chase – all the Apprentice contestants will be hateful, ambitious, money-fixated, ladder-climbing arseholes who don't have the skills to match their endless tiresome self-promotion; the sort of people who you'd punch to death in a second if they came up to you and started trying to network. That probably covers them all. 

The Apprentice starts next week, and it finds itself in something of a rut. Although the last season of The Apprentice got some pretty incredible ratings, there's no escaping that a lot of it was pretty dull. Sell coffee, sell sweets, sell art, sell sausages – most of the show was just the exact same task over and over again, which hardly seems like a good way of testing people's versatility.

So that's something that The Apprentice had better start changing if it doesn't want to become a self-parody. A bigger problem, though, is the quality of candidates it needs to find. All the really good candidates applied in the first three years and now all that's left are rejects from previous selection processes and newcomers who just want to be on TV.

It's a fine balance that The Apprentice needs to walk – too far one way and you've got a dull show full of dull people, too far the other way and you've introduced so many new rules and punishments that you've got The Apprentice LA, which is probably the last thing that anyone at the BBC wants.

This season of The Apprentice needs memorable contestants like never before – they need people as unlikeable as Ruth Badger, as angry as Tre Azam and as borderline personality disorder-suffering as Katie Hopkins. Plus some of them totally need to be doing it.

So with that in mind, let's have a look at this year's gang of 16 Apprentice hopefuls – 15 of which will be fired with the remaining one being paid £100,000 a year to throw heaps of unsold Amstrad email phones into a flooded quarry or something:

Nicholas De Lacy Brown, 24 – twat.

Jennifer Celerier, 36 – brassy twat.

Jennifer Maguire, 27 – horsey twat.

Raef Bjayal, 27 – gigantic twat wanker.

Claire Young, 29 – hateful twat.

Lucinda Ledgerwood, 31 – Lucinda? Twat.

Kevin Shaw, 24 – friends with Jenson Button twat.

Simon Smith, 35 – recovering drug addict twat.

Helene Speight - gender-confused twat.

Sara Dhada, 25 – arsehole.

Michael Sophocles, 24 – bell-end.

Ian Stringer, 26 – fame-hungry bastard.

Shazia Wahab, 35 – turdhole.

Lee McQueen, 30 – moron.

Lindi Mngaza, 22 – dyslexic twat.

Alex Wotherspoon, 24 – accident-prone tit.

Those are their official Apprentice descriptions, too. We know, we thought they were a bit harsh as well.

Read more:

Meet This Year's Boardroom – Metro