It’s series eight, and the troops march into the boardroom. Sugar looks up, vaguely harassed, as though disturbed doing some very important work in his office and not, in fact, in a TV studio in Ealing, having just got his make-up done in a trailer.
He’s a fascinating man. The camera men think so too, picking up the faintest of mouth twitches, the smallest crocodilian flicker of the eyes. No-one can keep their eyes off him. He’s indomitable. He’s never wrong.
In fact I find I can’t describe him properly without reference to the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Between 1930 and 1961 he wielded complete power over his people – no-one challenged him. The source of this authority? He was irrational. The more unpredictable and capricious he was, the more insecure his subjects became.
Lord Sugar’s fearsome charm resides in an ability to switch something, at random, from the category “things that are really important and obvious” to “things he just doesn’t give a shit about”. Whichever answer the coin flips to, he presents it with maximum aggression – cue sycophantic scrambling from everyone.
In episode one, the boys were lambasted for spending all their time talking about margins, “and ignoring the product!” They win, however, and suddenly margins were “obviously” the priority all along, idiots. “What went wrong, girls?” “The guys were very focused on their margins,” plead the girls. “That’s called strategy,” comes the smug answer.
Mentioning humble beginnings, once a brilliant way to get Alan Sugar on side, is now apparently out. “I don’t want to hear your sob story”, is the new line. Now he wants “aggression” in his business partner (“if I want a friend, I’ll get a dog”) – but be aggressive, and you’re ” far too shouty”.
Not that I feel too sorry for the contestants. It’s just that they don’t seem to have much of a chance. The formula seems to be: film them saying something (possibly with the off-camera instruction, “Can you just say something obnoxious please? Yep, that’s great, yep, like that”), and then show a montage of them doing the opposite, with tuba sounds.
The sneaky rug-pulling tactics are used on us as well. So violently edited is the show that it allows radical plot twists (the team that seemed to get everything wrong wins) – and complete character changes (shrinking violet becomes team bully) – from episode to episode.
Having said that, there are a couple of nicely captured moments in episode two. Jane (Irish, shouty) spotted Maria (another one) asleep in the car. A heaven sent chance. She decided to engineer the situation, stuff of classroom nightmares, where you wake up to find yourself required to participate in a conversation you’ve missed. Waking Maria, she immediately asked her the (completely out of context) question “So, what do you think about that? I mean, do you have ideas … or …” Maria had no answer. It was brilliantly evil – and lead almost directly to Maria getting fired.
Azhar was another highlight. “People describe me as a killer whale of the sea world.” That’s just a regular killer whale, Azhar. That’s not how metaphors work.
I won’t go on, because they are indeed fish in a barrel, but then so are we for watching it.
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