The Apprentice fans will be delighted to know Alan Sugar’s series is returning on Thursday, with a new host of hopeful entrepreneurs hoping to end up as his business partner.
With a new series beginning, GB News spoke exclusively to previous candidate Reece Donnelly, who famously had to leave the 2023 show during a task in Dubai, with Sugar explaining he had “left the process”.
Speculation soon swirled that Donnelly, 28, had been axed for getting “drunk” on the flight to Dubai, with The Sun reporting at the time that producers deemed it “unsafe” for Donnelly to continue in the task by the time the flight landed.
Despite the rumours, the Scottish theatre school owner has been full of praise for Sugar, who was reportedly “furious” at the time.
“I think what you see is what you get with Lord Sugar, I really liked him and I really respect him,” Donnelly told GB News, speaking on behalf of Spin Genie.
“I think that he’s not got to that level of career by, you know, being a nice guy.
“He’s worked really hard, and actually, there’s probably a lot of people that have so much to say about him.
“But for me, I think he and Baroness Brady really restored faith and the process for me, because they look at the process from an aerial view, whereas when you’re a contestant, they’re getting caught up in the small stuff.
“Whereas they look kind at, ‘Is this person the right person to go into business with?’
“And I think ultimately, that’s where he makes his decision from. But I loved working with him.
“I thought he was fun, cheeky and most important, he had a bit of a laugh in the boardroom. That’s all we can ask.”
Opening up about his early exit, he added: “I always say this to anyone who asks about that – I was absolutely gutted.
“I wanted nothing other than to win that show. However, in hindsight, I don’t need to give Lord sugar 50 percent of my wages.
“I don’t need to give Lord sugar 50 percent of my assets. And now that you reflect a couple of years later, I think, ‘What would he have brought to a performing arts school in Scotland?’
“And where his skill sets lie is in finance and profit and loss sheets. And actually, I can employ an accountant for that for a couple of 100 quid a month.
“So I’m really, really, really grateful I didn’t win. And I think for me, because of the way that I had to leave, I got to do so many interviews and so many chats after it, where I got to show Reece as Reece, rather than “Reece in the suit who was on The Apprentice”.
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“And that’s now put me into much more of a broadcaster space where I now get to work do TV appearances.
“And I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do that had I won the show.”
The news series of The Apprentice starts on Thursday at 9pm, with the first task seeing the 18 new candidates sent to Austria to sell and run alpine tours.
