US Edition 
The Apprentice: By firing Sarah and Steven, has Lord Sugar ruined the series?
Tonight on The Apprentice, the candidates tried to make entertaining TV of their own – but Lord Sugar made a bigger bladdy mess of it than anyone
The Apprentice is funny when the contestants are being serious. This week, the contestants were trying to be funny, with the inevitable result that it wasn’t funny at all. Lord Sugar had ordered the two teams to script and star in videos for YouTube. One team decided to make exercise videos, the other to present cookery tips. Which would have been fine – if they hadn’t both decided to make their videos “humorous”.
Anyone can make their friends laugh. But the aim of comedy is to make people who aren’t your friends laugh. This is difficult. The cookery team attempted to be funny by getting one of their presenters, James, to fling a rubber chicken around the kitchen, and generally act the idiot. This came naturally to James – indeed, he appears to be an actor of the Method school, because he’s been inhabiting the role all series – but the enforced zaniness hurt to watch.
The team presented their efforts to the staff of Buzzfeed. One of the team caught a glimpse of what the site’s editorial director had written in his notepad. It was “Kill James”.
The exercise team called their video series “Fat Daddy”. It involved Felipe, a vaguely chubby contestant, competing in fitness tests against a slim colleague, losing every time, and then being humiliated by a swaggeringly muscular gym instructor. (“How many push-ups? Five? That’s why you’re Fat Daddy!”)
To an unamused Lord Sugar, the team insisted that the humour was affectionate. (“We were trying to use the essence of Felipe’s wittiness.”)
But the teams weren’t alone in getting it wrong. Lord Sugar did, too, because as well as firing Ella Jade, the losing team’s captain, he also fired the two most entertaining contestants: Steven, the tirelessly argumentative nuisance, and Sarah, the woman who tried to sell a mop and bucket to London Zoo for £250.
He fired them on the fatuous and irrelevant grounds that they’d performed poorly. Even after 10 series, Lord Sugar remains under the bizarre impression that the purpose of The Apprentice is to reward entrepreneurial talent.
The purpose, as is nakedly obvious to anyone who’s not actually in it, is to make the audience feel superior by encouraging it to jeer at halfwits. In a way, it’s just a better made version of “Fat Daddy”.