Mouth Box

I like Young Apprentice. But for all the wrong reasons. It makes me laugh. It makes me wince. Occasionally it makes a little bit of sick rise up in the back of my throat.Lord Sugar is clearly trying to be a little less scary this time around, so he smiled a lot more in this first show than he usually does in the grown-up version of the franchise. He even made a little joke about Angry Birds to show just how hip and "down with the kids" he is.Since becoming a game show host, Nick Hewer has become rather more show-business than business, and he is fast becoming a tongue-in-cheek caricature of himself. The camera loves Nick. He mugs on command beautifully, and has now perfected his very own unique brand of quiet exasperation. Meanwhile, the camera hates Karren Brady – here is a woman who can clearly muster an ugly sneer without any help from the director or lighting cameraman.Contestant Sean Spooner looks about 12, with a haircut by his mum and apparently still sporting freckles from this year's summer holidays at Butlins in Bognor Regis. Is this frightened-looking little boy really expected to compete against a hissing snakepit of power dressing, ball breaking teenage girls wearing enough lippy and eye liner to sink a battleship? I find myself feeling a bit sorry for all the boys in this year's series. They look like lambs to the slaughter.I wondered why contestant Amy Corrigan's dentist was not persuaded to humanely remove her huge orthodontic braces for the duration of the series. Then I realised that Amy was probably wearing them ironically – in a kind of defiant tilt at the other apprentices. Could this industrial scale dental treatment have been designed purely to intimidate and terrify her opponents like Apache war paint? First to be fired was Maximilian Grodecki – who, although clearly some kind of mad genius, appeared to be so aristocratically in-bred that he could barely move his facial muscles, making me wonder if deeply posh people like Max should not be given big badges to put on their cars like disabled people. Max was an expert in pre-Socratic philosophers. Basically, he was so clever he couldn't think.My favourite contestant, and I suspect everyone else's as well, was Patrick McDowell – a delightfully camp young man wearing Harry Hill's glasses and sporting Gary Linekar's ears. During this week's re-cycled clothes task he decided to sow the top half of a wet suit onto the bottom half of a Japanese kimono – a design Zandra Rhodes would no doubt be proud of. Sadly Patrick was unable to sell the garment, even in Brick Lane – a place renowned for its eccentric and ill-judged fashion statements.Young Apprentice has always looked to me like a competition for people who are bullied at school, and when they return to those schools at the end of the series they'll probably be bullied even more.Read regular TV reviews at Mouthbox.co.uk

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Jackson Booth-Millard

Originally called Junior Apprentice, Young Apprentice is pretty much the same format as the original show, but of course with a different league of candidates. Basically twelve young men and women, aged between sixteen and seventeen years old, who have all achieved good things already in the business world, are entering this competition, under the observation of Amstrad (Alan Michael Sugar Trading) founder and worth £800,000,000, Lord Sir Alan Sugar, and his aides Nick Hwere and Karren Brady. It is still the same thing, tasks are given to make money and business, such as selling products and buying things, profits and numbers are added up, the winning team gets a treat, the losing team sees three brought into the boardroom and one is fired, and the winner of Young Apprentice gets not a £100,000 and a job with Sugar, but they will win a £25,000 cash injection into a company that they make, they money will be given to them over time. It is just as good fun to watch as the original show, and the point Sugar is trying to make is that young people in the business world have just as much good input as the older generation. Narrated by Mark Halliley. It is funny to see occasionally ridiculous ideas brought forward, the silly decisions and actions of candidates, the bickering between them, and of course Sugar is the star with grouchy demeanour, an interesting documentary series. Very good!

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