The Apprentice final, review: Carina Lepore makes an unusual winner – she’s worthy and also likeable

Heralded by his very own Prokofiev theme tune, flanked by his true and faithful servants, Karren Brady and Claude Littner, and like the semi-benign autocrat that he is, Lord (Alan) Sugar tells Carina Lepore and Scarlett Allen-Horton that they are “very, very driven” and “two of the best finalists” in The Apprentice‘s 14-year history.

So that’s praise indeed for the brace of wannabe billionaires. For a change, you feel as though Sugar doesn’t actually begrudge them his largesse, in this case an equity stake of £250,000 for 50 per cent of their business (as they say on rival show Dragon’s Den).

Carina, the self-styled “pocket rocket” of the business world, is an extremely worthy winner, as well as being (so unusual for The Apprentice) actually likeable. Like all of them, she has to do the corporate speak and dress in clothes that no one who actually does manage stuff for a living would ever wear. But her humanity somehow shines through all the colour blocking. There she is in front of hundreds of top execs in a vast auditorium at County Hall in London, powder-blue trouser-suit with cropped leg and high, high heels, literally lost for words. Quite a moving moment.

Just as well, then, that she is rather a good cook, as well as sharp in business. This is not a sexist remark – her “scalable” (the buzzword here) proposal for a small chain of family-style artisan bakeries was backed up by her own special recipe for a speciality sourdough loaf, universally lauded by the assembled bosses for its yumminess. She claims to be the “non-baker baker” (her dad being the craftsman in her existing store/bakehouse), but she sure knows how to make bread, in all senses.

Similarly with Scarlett, the runner-up. But, unlike Carina’s relatively restrained outfit, Scarlett’s spectacular painted-on eyebrows (at least I assume that’s what these brow-borne apparitions are) and taste for fuchsia trouser-suits and pussy-bow blouses distract too easily from personal achievements (young single mum) and business plans. She runs a recruitment firm, and wants Sugar (who owns two already) to join in. It is an overcrowded market (even more than the baking game), but Scarlett has the bright idea of specialising in female recruitment in engineering. Not quite bright enough, though, to get Sugar to bung her a quarter of a million quid.

Carina and Scarlett are talented entrepreneurs, but that’s not really what The Apprentice is about. Mostly, it’s a thinly disguised platform for some eccentric types to become celebs, populating other reality shows and sensations on Twitter. Thus, the cherubic Ryan-Mark Parsons is the real winner of this series. He describes himself as “a 60-year old in a teenager’s body”, and according to his BBC biog, his role model is HM the Queen. With his extravagant style, I can quite imagine him graciously opening a stately home.

More problematic is Lottie Lion. Usually, Apprentice finalists have to wait until they’ve left the show before they become in the spotlight of controversy (although she has now acknowledged that she has “apologies to make”). Think, for example, of Katie Hopkins, who visited Tommy Robinson in jail as if he were a modern-day Nelson Mandela (and I know exactly what her Twitter response to that would be). Or Michelle Dewberry, who, last time I looked, was standing for the Brexit Party in Hull West and Hessle (she scored a respectable 18 per cent of the vote). Or that Alex bloke who goes on the rolling news channels sticking up for random Tories.

Lottie made some unwise remarks on the contestants’ WhatsApp group (“Shut up, Gandhi”) and was not only fired by Sugar but was meta-fired by the BBC – but only after the filming of the series ended. Thus she was still in the final episode, in a ghostly way, helping Scarlett make some particularly uncool corporate videos involving an imaginary car.

While Carina and Scarlett will no doubt spend their rest of the lives quietly making a fortune for themselves, I think we will see a great deal more of Ryan-Mark and Lottie. After all, panto season is already upon us.