Fresh meat - The Junior Apprentice

It’s easy to dismiss teenagers as slack-jawed, sofa huggers. Congregating in shopping centres, clogging up A&E on Saturday nights. Those August riots didn’t do a whole lot for their reputations and a study published by Barnardos last week concluded that 44% of Britons think young people are ‘feral’. Yowser.

So, not only does The Junior Apprentice do us all a favour and help buck up Monday nights, it also serves as a timely reminder that the youth of today are capable of far more than sulking and shoplifting.

One minute you cannot help but marvel at the polished, pushy delivery of a cohesive business strategy by a 16 year old. The next you are biting down hard on the arm of your sofa as a privately educated schoolboy barks ridiculous instructions via the tinny medium of speaker phone to the rest of his team, all of whom know they will be apportioned unfair amounts of blame when they fail the task. Which they will. And then you find yourself feel genuinely sorry for that same schoolboy, who is fighting to keep his bottom lip from trembling as he sits, dejected and world weary, in a shiny suit three sizes too big for him.

The show also appears to have given Alan Sugar a new lease of life. By episode 3 of any regular series, he’s acting like a rabid badger that’s been repeatedly poked with a big pointy stick. However, in this PG version he comes across as a kind of benevolent uncle, gazing fondly across the boardroom at his bickering protégés, rummaging in his pocket for Smarties. He never loses his patience, and he’s never shy of making a watery joke or three. He’s either had his faith in human potential renewed, or he’s been over-doing it on the ginseng.

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