The Apprentice: This Year’s Hateful Line-Up In Full

The Apprentice is back soon, so fans of hedgehog-faced men shouting unusual swearwords at a group of self-regarding ladder-climbers before dismissing one of them in a completely arbitrary way have got something to live for again.

This year The Apprentice makes the leap from BBC2 to BBC1, meaning that even more of the population will be watching Alan Sugar somehow trick a group of successful businesspeople into looking like nitwits because they can't sell sweets to children properly. And because of the new channel, The Apprentice needed to recruit the highest calibre of contestant available - so this year hopefuls to become The Apprentice include a quantum physicist, a soldier, a financial adviser and… oh, you know what? They're all going to be hateful, needlessly ambitious pricks who'd stab their own mother in the eye with a dirty syringe for a fiver, so let's just leave it at that for now.

For a long time the hecklerspray stance has been the American version of The Apprentice is better that the British version of The Apprentice. One show is about a crazy-haired billionaire real estate mogul who thinks nothing of starting fights with lesbians landing helicopters on skyscrapers that he built to bellow into a mobile phone, and the other show is about a piggy bad-tempered grey-haired man who sells rubbish telephones from a grubby building in Brentwood. You couldn't compare the two versions of The Apprentice.

That's changed slightly this year, though. Donald Trump's Apprentice has messed with the formula too much. For one, the show never got over giving Martha Stewart an Apprentice season - and when this year's Apprentice sacked Trump's crony, went to LA and made the Apprentice candidates sleep in tents, it was a gimmick too far and people stopped watching. Add to this the laser-guided genius of spoof show My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss - a hoax-Apprentice where the fired candidate each week was chosen by a monkey spinning a wheel - and all the signs point to a franchise in trouble. So Alan Sugar's British Apprentice has a lot riding on it this year.

Especially since it could end up like last year's series. 2006 was the year that The Apprentice went showbiz, with all the candidates seeming to be on the show for fame rather than success. Among the idiots taking part in last year's Apprentice were Syed Ahmed - the stunningly dimwitted waiter with an A Team fixation; Paul Tulip - the swearing headhunter who was clearly angling for a sitcom; and Samuel Judah - who literally couldn't wipe his own arse unless he'd spent a fortnight looking up long words to fit into a PowerPoint presentation about it first. In the end the final of The Apprentice was between Ruth Badger and Michelle Dewberry - an angry lesbian and a slightly easy-looking checkout girl with a fine line in sob stories. After a tense final Alan Sugar crowned Michelle Dewberry as The Apprentice - at which point Michelle did it with Syed, got pregnant, had a miscarriage, split up with Syed, left her job with Alan Sugar and was a contestant on a reality TV show about haircuts.

Alan Sugar won't be making that mistake again, and has been personally involved in finding the 16 finalists for this year's Apprentice. They'll all be clawing opportunistic fuckwits with ideas above their station - this much we know - but who are they? The Independent knows:

Tre Azam, 27, from Loughton, Essex, a marketing and design consultant.

Katie Hopkins, 31, from Exeter, a single mother-of-two and global brand consultant.

Kristina Grimes, 36, from Harrogate, a pharmaceutical sales manager and a "ruthless single mother".

Rory Laing, 27, from Bristol, a waiter and bankrupt entrepreneur who employed ex-public school pupils including Kate Middleton for the Henley regatta.

Lohit Kalburgi, 25, from London, a telecoms manager born in the United Arab Emirates.

Adam Hosker, 27, from Lancashire, a car sales manager.Lives with wife and children in Blackburn.

Natalie Wood, 29, from Upminster, Essex, represented England in swimming as a teenager. The mother-of-two has worked in the City.

Paul Callaghan, 27, from Southampton, an ex-Army lieutenant who graduated from Sandhurst and spent six months serving in Basra.

Jadine Johnson, 27, from Harrow, Middlesex, a financial adviser and single mother.

Gerri Blackwood, 33, from Woking, Surrey, a transport development manager. Turned down a job at MI5 for The Apprentice.

Dr Sophie Kain, 32, from Llanellen, Wales, a research scientist for aviation firm "who doesn't suffer fools gladly".

Ifti Chaudri, 33, from Egham, Surrey, a company director of tile business. Applying to join the 2012 Olympic team.

Andy Jackson, 36, from Leeds, a car sales manager now living in Kirriemuir in Scotland.

Ghazal Asif, 23, from Glasgow, a business development manager. Speaks five languages.

Naomi Lay, 26, from Cornwall, an advertising sales manager. Has run both the New York and London marathons.

Simon Ambrose, 27, from Clapham, south London, a former investment banker, runs internet-based businesses.

The Apprentice starts on BBC1 next Wednesday. And you can bet that watching a group of people do essentially the same task each week for three months will never be so much fun.

Read more:

The Sweet Smell Of Success: Sugar's Apprentice Line-Up - Independent