Sugar's jaded Apprentice routine is getting very old

The latest series of the BBC reality show makes it clear that the tired formula needs a good shake-up

- says Louis Chilton

“A lot has changed in the past 20 years,” admits Alan Sugar, in the first episode of The Apprentice’s 20th series. “There have been financial crashes, and pandemics... not to mention Liz Truss.” And yet, of course, not everything has changed - a fact made abundantly clear by The Apprentice itself, as soon as this year’s class of wannabe moguls walk through the doors of the boardroom. Two decades in, the BBC's annual spectacle of entrepreneur-on-entrepreneur pugilism is necktie-deep in a rut.

The series premiere centres on an archetypical