Sir Alan Sugar returns with The Apprentice

Sir Alan Sugar is back with the fifth series of The Apprentice, and producers have been doing everything they can to make a show about making money as recession friendly as possible. This means replacing the programme's trademark exotic foreign trip - in one episode last year the contestants trawled around the markets of Marrakech - with something a little more mundane.

"As we go through the series you will see some shows that are specifically made towards recognition of what difficult times we are in," Sugar said. "At the moment, people are having to consider whether they can go on holiday and so there is one episode about reinvigorating one of our seaside towns."

He was talking about Margate, on the Kent coast, and contestants were also sent to help small businesses in Manchester and Liverpool sell their merchandise to other firms.

The contestants are, as always, a varied and self-confident bunch. They include Mona Lewis, a Tanzanian beauty queen, Ben Clarke, a trainee stockbroker who once worked as a Gavin Henson look-alike, Kimberley Davis, a New Yorker who has played Mozart in Carnegie Hall, and Rocky Adams, whose hopes of playing football for Middlesbrough were ended by arthritis, and who now runs a chain of sandwich shops across north-east England.

One (as yet unnamed) candidate pulled out of the series before the first task had even begun. He "bottled it", Sugar said.

The Apprentice starts on BBC1 this Wednesday, with the 15 remaining contestants divided into men and women and told to start up a laundry business. ·