The show that built President Donald Trump‘s TV persona is finally getting a full celebrity version in the UK.
Lord Alan Sugar will front The Celebrity Apprentice for the BBC next year, marking a first full season for the broadcaster. Several specials have featured celebs in the UK over the years, primarily attached to telethons such as Comic Relief.
Fremantle-owned Naked and MGM Alternative UK are co-producing the six-part series with a currently unnamed line-up of celebs set to take on Sugar’s business challenges and attempt to avoid hearing the words, “You’re fired.”
“We’ve had some great celebrity names walk into my boardroom over the years, but they’ve only ever had a small taster of what it’s like to be a candidate,” said Sugar. “It’ll be interesting to see how our future celebrities fare across a full series, removing their PAs, PRs, agents and all the other assistance they have in their day-to-day lives to fully immerse themselves into The Apprentice world.”
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The plan is to broadcast the season “later in 2026,” with more details to follow. Two Christmas-themed Celebrity Apprentice episodes are running on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on December 29 and 30 in the UK, followed by the latest season of The Apprentice early next year.
Sugar has fronted the regular series for 19 seasons, starting back in 2004. It was originally on BBC Two, but as with many high-ratings series for that network, it transferred to the flagship network BBC One in 2007.
“The Apprentice is a much-loved part of the BBC’s entertainment offering and we can’t wait to see how the celebrity candidates rise to the challenge when the series launches later in 2026,” said Kalpna Patel-Knight, Head of Entertainment at the BBC.
Paul Broadbent is the executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice for Naked, with Francesca Maudslay the consultant executive producer and Rachael Hankinson is production executive. For MGM Alternative UK, Dom Bird is executive producer, while Sarah Clay and Jo Wallace are the commissioning editors for the BBC. The series is distributed by Amazon MGM Studios Distribution.
Mark Burnett created The Apprentice for NBC, with the first season running in 2004. Trump, who fronted it for the first 14 seasons and was a co-producer, used the series to build his public profile as a TV personality and, eventually, as a springboard to enter politics.