As another series of BBC’s The Apprentice draws to a close, I am left wondering just where I will be getting my regular dosage of business world clichés, overly-confrontational interviews and repeatedly incorrect usage of pronouns (“That would be myself, Lord Sugar!”) from now on and how, indeed, I will survive without them when the series is off air the other nine months of the year.

My view of The Apprentice as effectively being a business-comedy has been cemented more and more with every passing instalment. I first began watching at the airing of the fifth series as an eager 12 year old who had received official permission from my parents to stay up and watch past 9pm. My investment at that time was at its peak with Wednesday night being the highlight of my week. Even then I recognised that there was some humour to be found in the absurdly short time-frame the teams are given to think of a product, create it, design the packaging and sell it, but I still treated the show relatively seriously and subsequently developed a semi-crippling fear of interviews and just generally of sitting across a table to anyone in a suit when I didn’t have a large plate of food in front of me.

However, having graduated from university in the summer and officially moved into the world of full-time work the show now seems more outright parody than gripping entertainment. I watch more for the conveyor belt of tropes than I do to discover who will be fired from a position that they never actually held in the first place nor had any job security with (does Lord Sugar really believe that firing at least 1/18th of his work force every single week is a sustainable economic model? Do the candidates not have a notice period? If so, how long is it?) Lord Sugar’s advisors Claude and Karen will always find something to condescendingly grimace to the camera about no matter how the task is going, frankly I would like to see a spin-off special where the both of them have to undertake some of the assignments that the candidates are set and see if they do much better.

Not that the candidates themselves ever seem particularly worthy of our sympathy. While most of the time they go on to seem pretty likeable on the after-show “The Apprentice: You’re Fired”, that might just be because it contrasts so heavily with the gratingly overt arrogance that they relentlessly display in the prior hour. I think that confidence is something that pretty much everyone could do with having more of, but arrogance and confidence are not the same thing. Confidence is a more subtle sense of self-belief, arrogance is just a smokescreen to cover insecurity that masquerades as confidence. Arrogance is annoying. The candidates’ facades inevitably collapse when they are on the receiving end of a grilling in the boardroom and are begging Sugar to allow them to stay in ‘the process’ and it becomes very satisfying and downright amusing to see them make their sheepish exit while repeatedly thanking him ‘for the opportunity’, having just been condemned to a black cab ride back to the media obscurity from whence they came. They then revert back to claiming that Lord Sugar will regret his decision for the rest of his life (he won’t).

There are so many other tropes of this show that deserve mention: the BBC’s vicious editing formula that can make any candidate look either smart or stupid with the addition of certain music and removal of context, Lord Sugar’s terrible scripted jokes that everyone nervously laughs at no matter how shit they are and the continuous use of the word “passion” to the point that it doesn’t mean anything anymore, to name but a few. Nevertheless, I will probably be back watching again next year because it is still pretty good entertainment and I also am just passionate about watching a seasoned entrepreneur decide to invest £250,000 in sweets. Lord Sugar’s search for his new business partner(s) is over, for now…