Shut Your Trap: Alan Sugar's Bizarre Descent Into Self-Parody on The Apprentice

Let's talk business. Business. Enterprise. Entrepreneurialism. It's what makes the world go round. You might be doing your stupid meaningless job somewhere in a shop, or a hospital, or a school, but while you're doing whatever that is, there are very important people doing very important business. And none of them are doing more important business than Alan Sugar. Lord Sugar. My Lord, my sugar.

I often think about Lord Sugar just before I fall asleep. As clouds of darkness consume my line of sight and my joints relax into the mattress, I see him, his small wrinkled face, his grey curls pressed down upon his scalp, standing in front of a big window somewhere looking at some buildings. Yet I'm never quite sure what I'm actually seeing. Are these visions of a billionaire? Visions of the archetypal business man? Or are they visions of a man who tweets football scores for no discernible reason? A man who says there's no such a thing as poor people? The strange and beautiful answer is: he is both.

You might not know this, but Lord Sugar started his business from the back of a van. This is very important. Back in those days, he didn't have fancy technology like BlackBerrys or Nutribullets. No, he just had a van which he stuffed full of dreams and television aerials which he then began to sell to dealers. These magical seeds soon grew, and – like a humourless Dick Whittington – he made old London town his playground. He invested in a warehouse, employees, an accountant, and before long the Amstrad empire came into being.

Then The Apprentice happened. In many ways, and I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking this, it's the greatest television series that has ever existed, and possibly even the greatest entertainment format ever conceived. The Hunger Games with Tories instead of teenagers. An Olympics for estate agent lookalikes. Blood, sweat, and aftershave. Crucially, it is also guilt-free. Unlike the X Factor or Big Brother, The Apprentice presents a reality television situation where you can revel in the idiocy of others without a shred of regret. The Apprentice presents a set of characters who most likely already have more money than you, and once the programme is over, will continue to have more money than you. So you can freely laugh at them, for they are the idiot elite. The dumb percent. And they answer only to Sugar.

The only reason The Apprentice works is on the basis that we understand Lord Sugar to be an impenetrable business obelisk. We see shot after shot of him getting in and out of shiny business cars. He picks up business phones and makes business calls. His suits are sharp and business-like (perfect for doing business in), and sometimes he stands on a heli-pad. Yet I posit this: what if Lord Sugar no longer knows what's real and what isn't? What is a genuine business deal, and what is a fabricated task for a TV show? What if The Apprentice has become some horrific BBC-funded Synecdoche, New York and this poor, vulnerable man is lost in the mess of his mythology?

Let's begin with a brief unpacking of the current model behind the TV series. The premise is that 20 candidates arrive at Amstrad towers (in the business district of business town) with a business plan. A divergence from the show's original concept, Lord Sugar is now seeking an investment in one of these business plans. So, with 20 business plans to choose from he does the only sensible thing you can do: put them all in a big pile and ignore them completely. He doesn't need to read them, he's got a better idea. In order to work out which candidate has the best business plan, he's going to make them play pretend business games in fields they have no experience in. That way he'll know for sure, exactly which plan to invest in.

"You made a bloody mess of this shampoo advert," he shouts at a young, muscular man who has never made a shampoo advert before. "You really ballsed up making 1,200 portions of salmon en croute for a culinary convention," he balks at a wide-eyed woman in a pencil skirt who has never made a salmon en croute before. "I think I've heard enough," he muses, "you're fired."

It's easy to see why Lord Sugar has been consumed by it all. In the world of The Apprentice, everything he does is an event. He strides down a corridor and Mark Halliley' booming narration sternly reiterates how important he is, and how much money he has made. His every move is soundtracked by a piece of music called Dance of the Knights – something that manages to make the act of him walking down some stairs look like the dramatic entrance of some weird goblin king in a scene from one of the Hobbit movies that Peter Jackson was forced to scrap to cut down on run time. Then there's the contestants, all of them buckled in awe, respect, fear and frenzy before the sight of their malevolent business overlord. Everything he says is greeted with a "yes Lord Sugar," in the tone of hushed teenagers trying not to get a bollocking from their mate's dickhead dad. And then, there are the puns.

In many ways, now on its 11th series, The Apprentice is basically just a vehicle for Lord Sugar's puns. The puns are, in my humble opinion, the true driving force behind Lord Sugar's descent into complete disconnection. Watch the boardroom exchanges at the end of each episode and you will notice that the pun to actual feedback ratio is about 80:20. Ever keen to quip, week in, week out, he assesses the content of the task (for example, DIY businesses) and begins to compile an extensive list of all possible puns ("you're the only tool here" or "you are a spanner" for example). He then proceeds to deploy them, like sharply aimed weapons at the contestants' failings. Why? Because this is the world of business, and that means getting loads of puns thrown at you about everything you do wrong. Botched attempts to prepare cakes become "half baked," terrible children's books result in things "not ending happily ever after", a misguided try at creating a new detergent "should have cleaned up" but inside "you were left washed out and/or hanging out to dry."

And they laugh, oh how they laugh. Clawing for survival by any means necessary the candidates chuckle through gritted teeth at pun after pun. As the endless stream of sub-par wordplay continues, belittling their incompetences gag by gag, so does the laughter. It is a tortuous echo chamber. They will never not laugh, and he will never run out of puns, and so the cycle of The Apprentice goes on. A bizarre fictitious world that is gradually swallowing its main character.

By this point, Lord Sugar is basically doing a very bad impression of himself. So imbued with his own prestige he is living out a constant Apprentice promo reel. Every exchange he has drips with the false power entrusted to him by his fictional TV universe. Look at him telling Ian Beale to lose some weight. This must be a man who sits in front of his armchair to watch Eastenders with the same grizzled scrutiny he applies to the efficacy of a small business. "I think I've heard enough from you, actually, Shirley," he mutters to himself staring ardently at the TV. "What's that love?" his wife asks. "Nothing…nothing."

It's likely he thinks the same when he watches Strictly Come Dancing, or the X Factor. Driven so power-crazed by his heady ascent to the top of a constructed business kingdom, even when the cameras stop rolling he continues to call out and destroy inadequacy. Like a child convinced his water pistol is a machine gun, Sugar wields barbed and badly-worded criticisms at anyone who stands in his way, for now he knows nothing else. He'd always been a bit of a character, but now, that's all that is left.

I can hear him, in his suit, coming down the stairs to his wife Anne preparing breakfast, clasping his hands together saying "Good morning," before telling her "the cooked breakfast industry is worth over 70 million pounds a year in UK." I see him riding his bike, an autumnal gust flushing past his cheeks, whistling the theme tune to his own TV show. He points at his brand new telly, no longer sure if he's launching a new Amstrad emailer or about to watch Masterchef.

Ultimately, this is our fault. We have created this wonderful character. We took a reasonably aggy bloke from Hackney and placed the drama of a 50-piece orchestra underneath him. We took a man who otherwise wants to watch X Factor and make swipes about Simon Cowell's hair and tried to turn him into a deity. We tricked your uncle into thinking he was president of London. And the best part? He'll never know. He is impervious. He has developed a defence mechanism more immediate and effective than a scorpion, and it is only three words long: "shut your trap."

If anyone attempts to burst the imaginary business kingdom of Sugar they will be hit with a shut your trap faster than you can say "shut your trap." Going to tell him to be more polite now he's a parliamentary peer? Shut your trap. Reckon he's "pimping" in this episode of The Apprentice? Shut your trap. Thinking about laying into his bizarre practice of tweeting football scores as they happen? Shut your trap. Like Jeremy Corbyn do you? Shut your trap… idiot. Critique will bounce off him like a squash ball from a racket. And, unchecked, the Sugar charade continues unfettered.

And continue it will, for how can it ever stop. Like a set of Russian dolls expanding ever outwards, Lord Alan Sugar will continue to apply layer upon layer of his own glorious legacy upon himself. With every series of The Apprentice he will edge further and further away from reality, until eventually he never takes his suit off, and insists on eating dinner in the boardroom. He'll begin to fire his pets, and chide pavements for allowing people to "walk all over them". Further still, he will then turn to the setting sun and grumble "where do you think you're going?" Expecting a "sorry Lord Sugar" that will never come, he will then, and only then, rest. And in those final moments he will hear a voice. A voice he hasn't heard in long, long time. The voice of a Hackney upstart, packing aerials into the back of van. "Do you remember me, Lord Sugar?" the voice will say, "my name is Alan." And he will pause, and reflect, and respond:

"Shut your trap."

@a_n_g_u_s

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