Review: The Young Apprentice

Mind you, if by some strange quirk of fate, asteroids the size of an Amstrad tape deck start raining down from the heavens, my two biggest regrets would be that I spent my last evening on the planet watching this show and that I didn't get to finish the last few days of my advent calendar.

Sure, we're led to believe that the Apprentice is an open competition and that anyone can win, but traditionally, those that make it into the final boardroom tend to fall into one of two categories: either bookish accountants (think back to Helen Milligan), or excessively bolshy salespeople like Ruth Badger.

However, Young Apprentice, now finishing its third and reportedly last series, is a departure from its grown-up counterpart, featuring sixteen and seventeen year olds vying for investment in their future careers.

I'm relatively sure I have ear hair that's older than these contestants and thankfully, this youthful innocence means they haven't reached the same level of pretension and self-aggrandisement that's a key ingredient in the adult competitors.

In fact, it's a much softer affair; with Lord Sugar offering compliments instead of cheap quips (leave that to the TV reviewers, thank you).

After seven weeks of cutting out the laughably poor candidates, the end stage had the usual mix that consisted of: the contestant who got to the end by blending in with the wallpaper like a domesticated gecko – Lucy; the useless contestant who somehow managed to constantly be on the winning team through blind luck – Patrick, and two young entrepreneurs who dominated everyone around them like rabid Staffordshire Bull Terriers (whether for better or worse) – Ashleigh and Maria.

In the final challenge of the show, the four finalists had to design their own brand of sportswear in a bid to win £25,000. Taking on the usual series of challenges, the young contestants had to create a brand name and logo and then pitch it to experts.

Undoubtedly, the award for most befuddling contestant on the show went to Patrick, a young fashion designer and spitting image of Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. In fact, for the first time in my life, I just wanted to dive into the TV so I could button his shirt up.

Clothes aside, his main contribution was the curious choice to have a flashmob consisting of a middle-aged choir singing Lady Gaga's Poker Face in the Trafford Centre. How that in any way related to a trendy sportswear brand is beyond me, although, that decision did lead into us having a glimpse of Nick Hewer's own-brand look that skirts somewhere between constipation and bewilderment.

On the other hand, Ashleigh's attempt at creating a viral advert involved having six street dancers harangue passers-by in an oddly aggressive dance-off. In fact, if you add in an upturned hat for spare change, it looked like a prescient vision of Diversity's future.

When it came to the boardroom, the inevitable happened, and Ashleigh and Lucy's team triumphed. Lucy went to the extra length of wearing a silver blouse in an effort to blend into the background while Ashleigh won by promising to spend the money on either setting up an accountancy firm, or heading into property management: "one or t'other", she said.

Now we just have to wait until March for the new series of the Apprentice, if we avoided the impending apocalypse, that is.

Robert James Taylor