The Apprentice final, review: Sian Gabbidon won but will anyone remember her name past the closing credits?

The perennial problem with The Apprentice (BBC One) final is that it marks the point at which Lord Sugar’s reality series is required to grow up, slip into a freshly pressed suit and pretend it has something to do with the real world of business. 

And so, with a certain degree of corporate slickness, the latest grand-decider (the 14th) saw nut milk merchant Camilla Ainsworth vying with budding bikini bigwig Sian Gabbidon for a ￡250,000 investment. In the end, it was Gabbidon who carried the day with her pitch for a bespoke swimwear brand.

The decision had life-changing consequences, so there was genuine tension as Lord Sugar hummed over where his quarter of a million should go. But it’s the blithering, blundering and bragging buffoons who make The Apprentice entertaining, and the level of competence demonstrated by the remaining two hopefuls actually ended up killing the fun. 

As if to remind us of what we were missing, contestants who had been previously sacked by Lord Sugar were  brought back briefly for a spot of mid-level faffing about. They helped Ainsworth design a viral teaser, while Gabbidon sent her assistants off to film a dockside commercial. 

Their muck-ups were what kept me watching, with failed contestant Kurran Pooni particularly effective as a wannabe Martin Scorsese. Unfortunately, his swimwear spot resembled the opening of a straight-to-DVD horror movie from the Nineties (I half-expected a man in a rubber suit to leap from the water and chase the models). 

Camilla’s ethical nut milk, meanwhile, somehow ended up packaged with a splotchy cow-hide pattern – thus reminding its vegan consumers of animal slaughter. In the background hovered the perpetually cheesed-off Karren Brady and Claude Littner. 

Otherwise, it was a ho-hum ending to a ho-hum season of one of reality TV’s dinosaurs. Much like The X Factor’s lost ability to claim the Christmas number one, it has been years since anyone remembered the name of an Apprentice winner past the closing credits. Regardless of the success of Sian and her SYO (“style your own”) brand, she is surely set for a similarly abrupt retreat into obscurity.