JMorgan

Last updated 01:00, Thursday, 10 May 2007

NOT even the sight of a naked Brad Pitt standing in my doorway* would stop me watching my favourite TV programme of the moment.

The Apprentice is probably the most perfect series mixing tension with humour, humiliation with victory, cleverness with sheer damn fecklessness, men against women.

If you happen to be having a bad week, I simply suggest turning on BBC 9pm on Wednesdays and discover that people who think they are smarter, more sophisticated, generally more savvy than the rest of us, can actual be clueless, charmless idiots.

Every week the programme tells us these people have given up highly-paid jobs for the chance to work for hilariously grumpy Alan Sugar. I can only imagine their colleagues threw them a farewell party and then sighed a huge sigh of relief.

The reason the contestants make such fascinating TV is they make all the classic mistakes when it comes to rising to the top: Arrogance replaces confidence, determination turns into aggression, back-stabbing instead of bonding, the know-it-alls bossing about the quietly calculating. And it may be 2007, but it seems men still have a problem with taking advice from women – always a recipe for disaster.

Mind you the women aren’t much better with their tantrums and bitchiness. It is week seven and I have no idea who the winner will be. Of course my very favourite bit of the programme, after cringing with pleasure at some of the decisions made by the teams (remember the one where they tried to sell cheap cheese to the French? Oh, the unmitigated joy), is Sugar’s demolition of them.

The contestants swan around for the first 40 minutes of the programme believing they are unstoppable, their arrogance knowing no bounds, watched silently and deadly by Sugar’s two assistants, and then the games begin.

As the losing side faces up to its mistakes they squirm, they lie, they pass the buck, they generally get their come-uppance as Sugar squashes their inflated egos without changing expression.

If there is one thing us Brits like its people being put in their place. The Apprentice is supreme at this. Fed up with some moron at work? Suggest they are good enough to audition for the next series, then sit back and wallow in your revenge.

* Well, it may distract me for a couple of seconds, but no more than that.