The One Show, EastEnders, The Repair Shop… watching BBC1 can feel so much like you’re stuck in a continuously repeating pattern that you may start to hear the voice of Rod Serling. “Imagine if you will, a British TV viewer starting to realise they are watching the same thing over and over, trapped in a time loop. Welcome to… The Twilight Zone.” Or rather, The Apprentice.

Twenty series in, nothing whatsoever has changed. Trundling on screen was the latest bunch of besuited braggarts, seemingly interchangeable with those from previous series, and here was an opening montage of Lord Sugar saying “you’re fired!” Later came a moment where he told them: “I need you to go away and I’m going to decide which one of you is going to leave the process.” Hang on: not “which of you will get fired”? This was breaking new ground!

• Axe The Apprentice with its arrogant motormouth show-offs? It’s about time

The Apprentice has been coming under vicious sniper fire from the media lately, with suggestions it could be axed and revelations about a candidate’s historic racist tweets, but you wouldn’t have noticed anything was amiss from this episode. Sugar was on positively ebullient form — by his standards — as he mused on the country’s challenges over the span of 20 series: “There’s been financial crashes, pandemics, not to mention Liz Truss…” That one provoked a gentle ripple of laughter among the candidates (there’s a prime ministerial legacy for you).

Sugar didn’t stop there with remarks about former PMs. As he observed the CV of one of the berks in front of him, he offered: “It says here you was a bodyguard for Boris Johnson…” — toot toot! Joke incoming — “…what was you doing, protecting him from his wives?” Further chuckles came from the candidates, who by now were looking foolishly relaxed.

In fact when cuddly Uncle Alan revealed — perhaps in a ploy to throw in a reinvigorating splash of Race Across the World vibes — that he was sending them all to Hong Kong, they looked delighted, entirely forgetting that this would mean a 15-hour flight for a challenge stressful enough to make them break out in hives.

Soon they were on a wild goose chase around the city in search of shrimp paste. We were back to the usual frantic phone calls made in the back of cabs, with enthusiasm fraying fast as everyone melted in the humidity under the hawkish death stare of Baroness Brady, Sugar’s aide. The girls’ team were hopeless at navigating the geography of the city and, in borderline delirium, performed an on-the-spot song while bartering with a bemused shopkeeper. Pure Apprentice cringe.

• Lord Sugar: I told my staff, ‘Get back to work. If you don’t like it, sod off!’

Then came the boardroom scene in which, as ever, the incompetents all got het up (“Can I just finish, please?”), with those in the line of fire blaming their team leaders. Kieran’s smirking estate agent confidence was demolished as his team were barked at by Sugar — no longer cuddly — for being “a bloody disgrace”.

The bright-eyed blonde Georgina, leader of the girls’ team, had arrived on the show beaming naively: “Who says that business has to be mean? Why can’t it be sunshine and rainbows? I’m going to sprinkle my magic all over the boardroom!” By the time of her mercy killing, it was as if she had been steamrollered by brutal industrial machinery. Sunshine and rainbows have no place on this mean old show.

As for Sugar, he furrowed his brow, its lines etched like ancient runes, and burbled, “You’re a bunch of busy fools! It’s very disheartening for me — this is the 20th year…” The time loop continues.
★★☆☆☆
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