Lord Alan Sugar explains why there has been a major change to The Apprentice format in recent years
Lord Alan Sugar thinks it has been "refreshing" to do 'The Apprentice' without gendered teams.
Lord Alan Sugar thinks it has been "refreshing" to do 'The Apprentice' without gendered teams.
The 77-year-old businessman - who has fronted the BBC reality series since 2005 and will feature in the new series when it launches on 30 January - often split the contestants by sex on his show but decided that for the upcoming 19th series, the whole thing would be gender neutral in an effort to "mix it up" from the start.
He said: "We’ve split them into sexes in the past purely to help the audience get to know the candidates quickly, it just felt like an easy thing to do. But this year we decided to mix it up from the outset.
"I think it's quite a refreshing addition to the first episode and it’s interesting to see how they handle being a mixed team because it’s not what they necessarily expected from the start."
The billionaire businessman also noted that the quality of contestants - who initially competed for the chance to secure a £100,000 a year job but now receive a £250,000 investment into their own business instead - just improves with each passing year.
He said: "as time goes by and we do more and more series, I think we find that the quality of the candidates gets better and better, and it’s important because the candidates make the show.
"The series is not about me or just the tasks that we set, most of all it’s about the individuals that join the process. I think this series is going to be great. We start off with a great trip to Austria which really sets the tone for the series. We also have lots of really good tasks, from buying and selling potatoes, making a virtual pop star to creating a banking app for kids."
