Last week, I was privileged to attend the recording of the final of this year’s Apprentice, the two-hour special featuring the deciding task and the “you’re hired” moment,  followed by interviews with the candidates and Lord Sugar.  It was a great experience which allowed me to taunt fellow Apprentice devotees with hints about the final task and the winner for several days, even though most people had – correctly – guessed that Stella would triumph.

I love the Apprentice, partly because I think it’s clever, well-made television, partly because it manages to make the fairly mundane business of selling, managing and negotiating look interesting and partly because the films make my home city look the most glamourous place on earth.

And from among the posturing, the self-deception and the backbiting, some home truths emerge about human relations and the reality of effective communication.

The standout points from this series for me would have to include Karen Brady’s magnificent, withering boardroom condemnation of in-fighting among the female candidates.

And, of course, Stuart Baggs. Or “Baggs The Brand” as he would have it.  I’ve been puzzling over why he became such a widespread object of hate during this series, and why his eventual downfall (“you’re not a big fish..” etc.) was greeted with such glee. He is, after all, far from the most annoying candidate in the programme’s history, he’s still young and he clearly has some ability and drive.

I think in many people’s minds, he came to symbolise a much disliked aspect of modern life – the replacement of real talent and hard-won experience by arrogance and an ability to spout buzzwords and cliches.

It may sound an odd thing from a company which makes its living from helping people to present and communicate more effectively, but substance is still much more important than style; the best presentation in the world won’t help if your basic message is flawed and you can’t deliver on the promises you make.

The humbling of “Baggs the Brand” was a timely reminder of that.

But for me, the star of the series will be Joanna, “the cleaner from Leicester” as she called herself, whose transformation into a more thoughtful, collaborative young businesswoman was a revelation.  A key moment came in the interview programme, when one of Lord Sugar’s aides told her:

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a cleaner, still less running a cleaning company, why don’t you concentrate on making that more successful?”

It was a good question, which clearly made an impact on Joanna, and a reminder that sometimes we all need other people to tell us the obvious.

It also reminded me, oddly, of the speech given to high school students by Martin Luther King a few months before he died, which can probably serve as Think Again’s Xmas message:

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.  Be the best of whatever you are.”