‘The Apprentice’ dons a stiff upper lip

While most American reality game shows are based on European models, back in 2005 the BBC reversed the westward flow with a London take on NBC’s “The Apprentice.” Now that version, currently in its fifth season and featuring self-made billionaire Sir Alan Sugar in the role of Donald Trump, is getting a belated stateside rebroadcast. Slightly rechristened “The Apprentice UK,” it premieres tonight on BBC America.

As in the original, wannabe moguls -- “the best of Britain’s young business prospects,” they’re called here -- present themselves to the host, whose success they hope to emulate. They’re lodged in a fancy dorm, split into teams and given stunt-challenges that relate thematically, if not always practically, to the business of business. (They go out and sell flowers. They invent a new toy.) Each week the winning team gets a prize (a ride on the London Eye, a day out shooting skeet), while members of the losing team scramble to throw one another under the nearest bright red double-decker bus. Like nearly every such competition on TV, it is designed to bring out the worst in people, to catch them in or prompt them to displays of inflated self-regard, Machiavellian self-interest and catty spite. The satisfaction such shows provide is not so much a matter of seeing the best person win as it is watching teacher throw the bad kids out of class.

To my taste, this is the better “Apprentice.” It looks better and plays better, and even though the content is quite similar, it is subtle where its American cousin is over-dramatic. I admit I may be swayed by the accents, manners and turns of speech: Exotic things are always more persuasive on TV than familiar ones. But mostly it’s a matter of superior production values, editing choices and narrative structure. It dispenses with the constant cutaways in which the players comment on the action (standard practice in these shows and a lazy way to tell the story), and lets the action do the work. It’s also the more handsome and visually intelligent: It feels more like a (half-amused) documentary on a social experiment than it does a game show -- compared with the U.S. version, anyway, which for all its investment in the trappings of wealth still seems to say, “This is a cheap way to fill an hour of TV.”

Most important, there’s Sugar, a rough-hewn if expensively dressed East End Londoner who might be played by Bob Hoskins. Trump has made a lot of money in his life, to be sure, and might be a more dangerous character than his self-propelled media overexposure suggests, but pop-culturally speaking, he’s a clown, a man whose floating wraparound comb-over is as awful to behold as the unlovely buildings that bear his name. It might just be that he doesn’t take himself too seriously -- and that’s a good thing, as his one-time pal Martha Stewart would say -- but I find it hard to take him seriously too. Sugar, by contrast, comes across as deadly serious, someone with the power not only to fire you, but to personally tie you in a knot and dribble you from his building like a basketball. There might be an element of show business in that, as well, but it works.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘The Apprentice UK’

Where: BBC America

When: 5 and 8 tonight

Rating: Unrated