The fourth season of The Apprentice starts on BBC 1 next week and, although people come to see Alan Sugar be all gruff and hedgehog-faced, they stay for the hopefuls.

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