Yes, I appreciate there’s little audience here for dispatches about NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice, but last Sunday’s episode (which I caught up with last night) gave us perhaps the finest boardroom battle ever staged across the franchise’s global turf. Don’t read on if you’re worried about spoilers…

Having lost on an advertising task, well… this happened.

So, that was poker player Annie Duke and Playboy model Brande Roderick – to use the show’s vernacular – throwing Melissa Rivers (daughter of fellow contestant Joan) under the bus. The background here is that Melissa has felt excluded by her teammates (it seems she’s had issues in high school which this has brought to light), while Joan has fallen out with Annie in a previous episode, comparing her to Hitler.

Of course, the real joy of this sequence is not Joan’s rant to Annie about “money with blood on” nor her observation that when it comes to poker players “none of them have last names”. It’s not even the bandying about of the wonderful phrase “whore pit vipers”. Nope, it’s clearly and squarely the bit where Melissa stomps through the fourth wall, bringing the show’s production staff on to screen, and prompting the wonderful snippet where we come back to the boardroom and Ivanka Trump squeals, “Guys, Melissa’s screaming!”.

All credit to the everyone on the show for keeping the cameras rolling, and laying on these insane, epic episodes week after week. Brentwood is slightly – ever so slightly – diminished by comparison.

…and I’m saying that bearing in mind the episode when Donald Trump fired four people in one sitting, or the time he entered into an indepth discussion about homosexuality.

But here I’m referring to last Sunday’s feature-length episode on NBC, which saw The Celebrity Apprentice teams running rival mini-hotels. Over the last few weeks, NBA star Dennis Rodman has been portrayed as chaotic and bad-tempered, walking out of tasks and feuding with country singer Clint Black. And throughout has been his continual penchant for vodka and cranberry juice.

However, the most recent task saw a fatal three-way collision between Rodman, leadership responsibilities and the hospitality industry, where booze flows freely. Frequently seen demanding his favourite tipple from the kitchen, Rodman eventually ended up disappearing into town with two guests for dinner, leaving the rest of the team very much high and – in comparison – dry.

Even The Donald’s aide, his daughter Ivanka, realised something was amiss: “I think Dennis was inebriated”. Although, as Anna Pickard points out on her Guardian blog (and, er thanks for doing this every week, Anna, but why?) Ms Trump then continued: “So I just hope it’s a consistent effort to bring forth with victory”. Erm…

The final boardroom, was bizarre. Strangely touching, in a way, as “entrepreneur and TV star” Jesse James spoke out: He thought Dennis had a drinking problem. A former alcoholic himself, you sensed James had no small insight into the condition. While the women’s team looked on with pained expressions, the men gently, but forcefully hammered the message home: Dennis was fun, but only up to a point.

Even Donald Trump showed some candour – Dennis was a fallen hero. A sorry state. This was, as Joan Rivers said afterwards, basically a televised intervention and an extraordinary moment for any show, let alone one prefaced with the word Celebrity.

“It’s all love!” shouted Black repeatedly as Rodman exited in the lift. It kind of was.

Here’s how it went down…

To put things in context, the most recent series aired by the BBC was the third, whereas I’m now sailing through the fifth, and the quality doesn’t let up. Take that aforementioned discussion on sexuality, which – naturally – took place in Trump’s teak-veneered boardroom. With one contestant embarrassing a colleague by calling him a “tight-assed Jew” during a task involving running an adult education seminar (their topic: “Sex in the workplace!”), discussion roved on to the offender’s sexual orientation. Yes, he was gay – something that surprised Trump, who immediately sought to clarify this revelation by asking the would-be mogul to confirm, in turn, that he didn’t find each of his female teammates attractive. 

Indeed he didn’t.

The Apprentice is blessed with off-the-wall moments like this all the time. A camera lingering on a player’s declaration of love for another just long enough for us to see the first traces of a second-thought fluttering across his face; a winning team being sent off to record a rap record by way of a reward – and said tune then being cheekily played instead of the usual stirring fanfare that accompanies the non-fired candidates’ return to the suite; a quartet of apprenti silently and uncomfortably squeezing together on the back seat of that cab, following the show’s biggest-ever mass firing; and The Donald inviting one of the wannabes to inspect his hair so he can finally quash those rumours about his rug (“You didn’t check the back!” chided her colleague when they subsequently retreated to the lift).

Trump is clearly TV gold. My missus summed him up best when she said he’s like a gleeful two-year-old who feels compelled to tell his mum about every toilet trip he takes. No thought seems to cross his mind which he doesn’t verbalise. After every sacking, he turns to his Greek Chorus of Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross/Bill Rancic/Trump Jr (whomever) and advises them he’s made the right decision – and that it was good. In fact, in the episode I watched last night we had, “I think you agreed with that Carolyn, did you Bill?”. “Absolutely,” returned Bill. “Good,” said Trump. “I agree too”.

As my stock of unseen Apprentice thins, inevitably I’ve already started to check out the ill-fated spin-off series featuring Martha Stewart. There’s no boardroom – it’s “the conference room” – and come the pay-off, no-one is fired, just told, “You don’t fit in”. It’s really not the same.

And then there’s this: “‘George [Ross] has been around a long time. He’s seen everything. He didn’t get excited even when women on the street started screaming when they saw him on his way to work … But Carolyn took it very seriously. She thought she was a freaking movie star.’” More here, and it’s spoiler free.

UPDATE: “Ain’t hard to find if you’ve got the mental power, you can find me in the suite at the Trump World Tower” - slightly spoilerific, as it shows who gets past the first few rounds of series four.

It’s this comic-book brand of entrepreneurialism that makes Trump – part Lex Luthor, part Willy Wonka and part Charlie from Charlie’s Angels – the perfect ringmaster for the show.

Never was this more effectively demonstrated than at the start of episode seven, as he unexpectedly called the protagonists away from the dining table and into the boardroom (“I wanted to eat my taco,” moaned one hungry candidate) for what Trump called a “corporate restructure”. Until this episode, team Mosaic had largely comprised of indistinguishable square-jawed Ivy Leaguers, while the Apex corporation had been dominated by a more disparate bunch of pouting harpies, united only by their love of air punctuation and bitching about each other.

Having seen Mosaic triumph once too often, Trump had decided to mix things up, but this being The Apprentice, it had to be done with maximum chicanery. The teams now had to elect new leaders on the fly, who each had to dispose of the three members they didn’t want.

Regrettably, the reshuffle proved the high point of the most lacklustre episode of the series to date. Setting the week’s mission, Trump boomed that the pet business is worth $30 billion a year, and challenged the teams to get a slice of it, anyway they wanted.

It’s ironic that although The Apprentice USA is notionally glossier than its grittier British counterpart, somehow it never looks and feels as impressive. For all Mosaic’s “Extreme Doggie Makeovers” banners, the reality of the task amounted to a lot of people hosing down dogs in Central Park for a few lousy bucks, not the fancy-schmancy pooch parlours the audience might have been expecting.

Not that this prevented garrulous legal munchkin Stacy from conceiving of a grander vision for Mosaic, namely dressing up dogs in costumes (“Badass dog, girlie dog …”) and taking Polaroids to sell to their owners. Unfortunately, a lack of funds prevented this master plan from being realised, but it did give Stacy another opportunity to talk a lot.

Her colleague Andy was hardly having a better time of it, losing his mobile phone in a cab (“If this was a military manoeuvre, he could lose an entire battalion,” declared melodramatic guest judge Allen Weisselberg) and seeing his idea of donating a cut of Mosaic’s profits to charity backfire when the only animal shelter he could find turned out to be a cats home. “The last thing dogs want to know,” Trump noted astutely, “is that they’re helping cats.”

Even in a rare uninspired episode like this, the real attraction of The Apprentice USA has always been its relentless dedication to the mechanics of the game, ignoring all the tedious detritus of their day-to-day lives. Nobody ever appears idly lolling on a sofa, unless they happen to be bitching, scheming or plotting at the time, something more and more of the contestants have a commendable enthusiasm for doing in front of the cameras.

In constructing a format where aspiring tycoons have to live and work harmoniously alongside people they secretly want and need to get rid of, the producers have accurately recreated the executive jungle in microcosm.

But what makes the game really succeed is that overtly setting out to “win” it somehow always seems to end in defeat, proving that there is more to success in life than a sharp suit and a big mouth. Perhaps the biggest waste of the programme’s brief 45-minute slot is the segment dedicated to Trump expounding on his cracker-barrel business philosophies (“SELL YOUR IDEAS”).

For Apex, things ran scarcely more impressively. Chris, the modest self-made New York stockbroker (“I have the largest salary”) complained that the task meant that the “dawgs” got dangerously close to his Rolex. Even Raj looked subdued, having begun to establish himself as the show’s hit act of late. In episode one, he loudly announced himself as a Republican party reptile with a Eubankesque penchant for canes and bow ties. But as the weeks have passed, he has become more likeable, even if his most notable moments have been running around in his pants in front of Anna Kournikova as John McEnroe and his team-mates fired tennis balls at him, and schmuttering up to Trump’s models during the fashion challenge.

Raj’s chief contribution this time round proved to be his poetic lament that Apex were “marching down a path to defeat and doom” after project manager Jennifer selected a poor location and priced doggie baths at $20. In fact, Raj and his team-mates turned out to be the winners, earning three times as much profit as Mosaic. Their reward was a meeting with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who dispensed fortune-cookie nuggets of corporate wisdom such as “Don’t ever compromise on your standards.”

In the boardroom, mercifully the shrill Stacy got the bullet for not showing enough responsibility. Trump’s engaging combination of showmanship and gimlet-eyed ruthlessness continues to chew up the unfortunate contestants. “I’m a strong leader,” asserted Mosaic’s optimistic project manager Wes. “I think you’re a lousy leader,” countered Trump. Nobody ever got to be a models-and-ice-cream magnate by being nice.

The format is bog-standard stuff. To whit: 16 hopefuls put themselves through a 13-week employment-vetting process in the hope of winning an apprenticeship with the world-famous tycoon. Via a series of tasks, one of their number is culled every week, prompting our man at the top of Trump towers to employ his catchy epithet.

There’s nothing here that’s especially distinctive, other than the notion of fusing a game show with big business. But, although that might seem a small point, it’s here this programme – and let’s get the pun over with right now – comes up trumps.

Business generally makes for great telly. All non-fiction entertainment TV is essentially about watching someone embark on an endeavour, but never is that undertaking so clearly defined as when it’s measured in terms of profit. All you need to know to grasp the main thread is that it comes down to the bottom line.

And talking about “grasping”, our moguls-in-waiting are a fine, typically acquisitive crew. Self confident, keen to assert their own interpretation upon the situation, sometimes delusional in terms of their own acumen, they make for a superbly entertaining collection of dysfunctional über-competitive combatants. No one really compromises here, they just use stealth and bitch about the decisions they didn’t agree with later when they’re called up in front of the big man.

The programme’s most notable casualty so far has been Sam Solovey, the co-founder of a successful internet company, and the man who’s been quoted as saying: “they’re all going to be working for me when this is over.” Sam, alas, couldn’t do stealth. Instead he naïvely put his trust in his colleagues. An inveterate bull-shitter, it seemed as though his game plan was to try and get the team to buy into his philosophy of life … as skewed as that appeared to be. Unfortunately, this genuine eccentric, who wasted crucial moments trying to deliver pep-talks based on footballing metaphors, never thought to raise his guard once, happily displaying his vulnerability and allowing team mates under the wire to provide him with counselling and support.

In the firing line from the first week, it was only his superb theatrics that kept him in the game so long. Offering an impassioned plea as to why he should be allowed to stick around, the gambit involved him – at the peak of his pitch – rising to his feet, which simply prompted Trump to order him to sit back down again. “Thank you sir,” came his response before resuming his appeal without missing a beat.

But it couldn’t last, and the manner of Sam’s sacking presented another pleasing twist in the tale. If the rest of the team wanted him out so badly (and they did) why didn’t they elect him leader for the day’s task and thus expose his weakness to everyone’s scrutiny? Well, that’s what I was shouting at the screen, and to my delight – it’s exactly what they did. A show where you can call the tactics, and call them right is surely a rare delight and as a result, even though I didn’t want to see “Sammy” (as they inevitably took to calling him) go, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit satisfied. That and Trump calling the girls up for using overt sexuality in all their dealings just minutes after I’d been moaning about the same thing, made me feel pretty clever.

And then, tonight, Bowie gets the sack mainly for just having a stupid name (inevitably, he pronounces it “Boo-ee”). With decisions like that, you can’t deny this programme’s got class, and unlike reality shows on this side of the pond, it’s also commendably taut. While longueurs of inconsequential chat and “character moments” traditionally blight the likes of Big Brother, The X Factor and, in particular, The Farm, The Apprentice USA only concerns itself with the game. We learn plenty about the contestants through their conduct, and, quite rightly, the programme-makers don’t consider it crucial we also join them for every evening meal, 4am toilet-stop or rueful fumble through their photos from home. This is just plain, simple businesslike television, and all the better for it.