Hearts & Minds: Retire The Apprentice? Slay the Dragon? The time may have come

Lord Sugar has signed up for another three years of The Apprentice which see him firing and hiring into his eighties. Nothing wrong with that but it does focus attention on the programme and those like it, as to whether they represent the truth of business, if they do much to enhance its reputation.

Yes and no is the answer. The commercial world is tough, it is brutal, you sink and swim according to KPIs. Get the results, do what is expected of you and you survive, don’t and you’re out. That is what those shows are portraying, writ large and with both eyes locked on the need to entertain. On The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den, Shark Tank and others, the contestants are put through the mill, they must step up and respond to the challenge, or they lose and the money goes elsewhere.

They are compressed and exaggerated, but the process, the interrogation is not unlike real life. Seek another person’s cash, ask them to trust you and believe in you, and you will be asked similar – albeit, usually, in a politer, more considered format. If you do not have the answers, the result will be identical. No.

The participants leave a lot to be desired. Just as the contest is a caricature so they tend to be. Their ideas may be ludicrous, they might be clueless, they’re spending more time attending to style rather than the detail of the task in hand. Some, as Sugar says, are doing it for their social media numbers. If we’re honest, we’ve encountered people like this; we can relate to them.

The sadness is not so much that these strands exist but that they are all we see. It’s the same with the fly-on-the-wall documentaries and the reconstructions of an epic commercial triumph or disaster.

What we’re nor witnessing are the deeper layers of commercial life. All we experience is the ‘cut and thrust’, swagger without substance, the sharp end minus the rest.

There have been attempts to convey something closer to reality. Years ago, the British corporate chief, Sir John Harvey-Jones, fronted Troubleshooter, in which he advised struggling businesses - think Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares but without the swearing. Likewise, Back to the Floor, which saw bosses return to the shop floor to understand the issues faced by staff and customers. They were popular but not enough, their ratings were low. Performance is always key.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.