On last week's episode of The Apprentice, candidates were tasked with creating a new brand of condiment. Each team's product was predictably lacklustre: a table sauce with a misspelt brand name and a chutney which was initially so spicy that the initial sample wasn't considered good enough to take to a tasting session. Come boardroom time at the episode's end, Sir Alan was unsurprisingly unimpressed. Where is the entrepreneurial talent, one could imagine him crying.
Unfortunately for him, the ideal candidate for this task had already been snapped up by the BBC's other business entertainment programme, Dragons' Den. Levi Roots, whose Reggae Reggae Sauce is now worth around £30 million, popped up on The Apprentice: You're Fired! to offer advice to the latest victim of The Apprentice boardroom.
If Roots had chosen The Apprentice as the programme through which to seek investment, one can hardly imagine he'd have been successful. Too nice, too trusting, Levi Roots would never have survived the back-stabbing and machismo of The Apprentice's ten-week interview process. And yet Roots is now a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, a success story that this crop of Apprentice candidates aspire to and one that nobody can imagine them achieving. Rather than spending months on arbitrary business tasks, Roots had the chance that any entrepreneur needs: a fifteen-minute opportunity to pitch a great idea to potential investors.
The contrast painfully makes clear how far The Apprentice has lost its way compared to its BBC rival Dragons' Den. This is the second series of the show with an altered prize for the winner: Sir Alan is no longer looking for a £100k-salaried employee but rather for a 'business partner', an entrepreneur with an idea that's worthy of £250k of investment. In short, The Apprentice has taken the prize of Dragons' Den yet kept its own elimination format which is utterly unsuited to the reward at the end.
Dragons' Den works because its pitching process is perfectly tailored to investment opportunities: pitch the dragons your idea, they'll tell you if they think it's workable and worthy of their money. The final of last season's Apprentice - in which candidates were grilled on their business concepts - took exactly this format, making the previous eleven tasks completely redundant as it emerged that the primary criteria for assessment was the business concept alone.
What if a candidate fired in the earlier rounds had a far superior business proposal to their rivals which they never got a chance to pitch? Last series' winner Tom Pellereau won only three out of eleven tasks but became Sir Alan's business partner on the strength of his business idea. Runner-up Helen Milligan won a whopping ten out of eleven tasks but when it came to the final round her business proposal was revealed to be unfeasible: to put it bluntly, she was doomed from the start. Had these candidates been sent onto Dragons' Den, these same conclusions would have been reached with fifteen minutes of filming rather than two months' worth.
One of last season's Apprentice candidates, Leon Osman, entered the show having already failed on Dragons' Den. Two losing Apprentice candidates from that same series - Susan Ma and Jim Eastwood - suggested afterwards that they may go up against the dragons as an alternative way to seek investment. On Children in Need in 2011 the BBC even did a crossover of the two shows, with Sir Alan going up against Peter Jones et al. in a comedic skit. Funny as that parody was, there was a certain irony to it missed by the BBC: the two shows are now so similar in their prize that the crossover had already happened, with The Apprentice now so ridiculous that is has become a parody of itself.