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'I'm going to start a business with both of you' – Alan Sugar's surprise in Apprentice final – video

The Apprentice final: an almighty, unforgivable anticlimax

This article is more than 6 years old

The infants-school everybody-wins cop-out of last night’s final might qualify as the worst thing the programme has ever given us – surely, its time is up

This is the way The Apprentice ends, not with a bang, but a shrug. An almost literal one, too; at the climax of last night’s finale, tasked between funding a recruitment business or some sweets, Alan Sugar threw his hands up in the air, muttered something about being a gambler, and let everyone win.

Of all the terrible things The Apprentice has given us over the years – unqualified presidents, poisonous alt-right figureheads and Pants Man – last night’s cop-out might just qualify as the worst yet.

Because the final is the only time in the entire series that Sugar has to make an actual decision. Ever since the original “be my literal apprentice” conceit was swapped out in favour of a business investment, every episode bar the final – every tinpot minimum-wage market-stall hoop that the candidates are made to jump through – has ultimately been irrelevant. Sugar knows the businesses he wants to invest in, and everything up to the final moment of the final episode is merely an arbitrary whittling down of big-tied nimrods.

The Apprentice finalists James White and Sarah Lynn. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

So for Sugar to conclude the final by announcing a new, tedious, infants-school-sports-day everybody-wins policy – and for him to do it with the level of weary resignation he demonstrated last night – is an almighty anticlimax. It’s an even more extreme version of this year’s X Factor, where the judges didn’t get a say in anything and largely just sat there looking like four barely dressed lemons.

Alan Sugar is supposed to be the executioner. He creates a bull pit, forces a crowd of idiots to turn on each other and then stabs the weakest in the neck. That’s what he’s for. That’s all he’s for. For him to suddenly rescind all responsibility is unforgivable. It’s a sign of weakness in itself. And perhaps it’s a sign that his time on The Apprentice is over.

It might even be a sign that The Apprentice should pack it in for good. Ratings have been way down this year, the candidates have blurred into a generic amalgam of awful, and the business ideas have shown a harrowing new paucity of imagination.

True, it might still struggle on past this. After all, MasterChef has continued to spin on witlessly since the 2012 Professionals series ended with joint winners. But the stakes are much lower on MasterChef. MasterChef is just food. The Apprentice is the walking manifestation of a toxic me-first worldview; the worldview that crashed the banks and voted for Donald Trump and Brexit. It is a dire, dismal television programme, and the only way to glean even an iota of enjoyment from it is to see it as a sort of gormless Faces of Death for people who look, dress and act like weekend cosplay letting agents. It’s bloodsport, but now Sugar has deprived us even of that.

After this misfire, there is only one way for The Apprentice to continue. Say the same thing happens next year, and Sugar is once again faced with two equally matched candidates. Instead of hiring them both, Sugar needs to sack the pair of them, storm out of the boardroom, take his top off, ride the loser’s taxi like a surfboard to both of their houses, and fire himself. That is literally the only way that The Apprentice can survive.

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