Here we go again then, The Apprentice (BBC1), take nine. Lord Sugar is out and about in the Roller, twiddling his cufflinks and posing under the big tower at Canary Wharf – almost like he owns the bleedin' place, or at least actually works there in real life rather than in an insalubrious office block behind the railway station in Brentwood. An East End boy made good, he started with nothing and built an empire worth … yeah, all right, everyone knows that now, shut up.

Right, bring on the tossers. Zeeshaan says he takes inspiration from Napoleon; he's here to conquer. Jaz is half machine; she can process information at the speed of an Amstrad CPC464. Myles is business perfection personified. Jason's intelligence is like a machete in the jungle; it's just going to take one swipe and he's through ... etc. Tossers, as I said.

They arrive by BMW, by train, by DLR, striding purposefully over London's bridges, wheeling their tossy little wheelie suitcases. Alex takes the new cable car crossing over the river at North Greenwich – a funny way to come from Cardiff … or Transylvania, which is clearly where he is actually from. Has anyone told him he looks like someone, one of the others asks him. He's had Freddie Mercury, he says … nope, they meant Dracula. Uncanny. It's the eyebrows that do it; they're terrifying, pointy and arched, evil and black, like a raven's wings. Also rudely – and not quite symmetrically – interrupted, by a razor, in the middle.

Perhaps that's why they have all been summoned to the boardroom at midnight – to suit Vlad the Impaler here. Also, look at what happens to Neil's beard under his chin; it doesn't stop, just gets hairier and hairier as it disappears down under his shirt … know what I'm saying? Put it this way, I wouldn't want to go to any full-moon parties with Neil. Will there be a supernatural thing going on in this season's Apprentice? Certainly hair is a feature; I'm not happy about Karen Brady's new barnet – over-coiffed in my opinion.

Right, Lord Sugar has read their CVs. He's sick and tired of all the usual cliches because, he says, actions speak louder than words, which you could say was one of them (a usual cliche) itself. I don't think words are Lord Sugar's favourite things, to be honest. He's going to send them a curveball right now, he says, make them decide on the spot who the project manager is. Is that what you do with a curveball, though – send it? In the post, perhaps? He makes up for it with his knowledge of the life and times of Napoleon and of Greek mythology (the Jason and the Argonauts thing he won't let go), demonstrating a hitherto unseen scholarliness.

Task number one then. There are two shipping containers at Tilbury docks full of assorted imported goods – bottled water, lucky Chinese waving cats, toilet paper, leather jackets, cat litter. Plus a huddle of asylum seekers, fresh blood for Bela Lugosi of the Valleys to sink his fangs into perhaps … No! Mainly because there aren't any asylum seekers, I made them up. It might have been interesting, though, to see what the Apprentice wannabes did with them.

Anyway, they hit town armed with the Yellow Pages and the A to Z (really? in 2013?) to try to offload their jackets and cat litter. And they make some terrible decisions and a few good ones, but mainly they show themselves to be the miserable human beings they are – deceitful, shouty, backstabby etc …

The girls are in trouble. They forgot Lord Sugar's first rule of selling to trade: make sure you're not talking to the cleaning lady (the first rule of being Lord Sugar is to assume that the cleaner is a woman). They wasted time with a non-decision maker, lost the task and now one of them is going to get fired. "Oh, man," says project manager Jaz (half-machine, remember?)

"No, I'm not man, I'm Lord Sugar, OK, yeah?" says Lord Sugar, clearly cross because he thinks she was addressing him as "man". Oh, man (I am). She was simply expressing regret. But that's it for Jaz – she's off.

Everyone, get on the Twitter and tweet @Lord_Sugar, addressing him as man. Or Shugsy, or anything, just so long as it makes him cross. Ha, see how you like that, you silly, self-important old goat … man … satyr (back to Greek mythology, somehow).

Oh, and there's life in the old formula yet. It may no longer quite be essential television, but it is still fabulous.