Who won The Apprentice last night?

icym, Rachel Woolford has been crowned winner of ‘The Apprentice’.

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Having honed their survival strategies over millennia, mammals have evolved to be masters of the cold. In this episode, we journey across the globe, exploring a frozen world, from icy seas to snow-capped mountains and meet the unique mammals that call them home. For most, the cold is a killer. But for mammals, with their unique physical traits like warm thick fur and rich nourishing milk, and remarkable behaviours like hibernation, conquering the cold is possible.

We begin our journey on the Arctic islands of Svalbard, where polar bears, synonymous with this cold archipelago, dominate this remote frozen world. But as their world warms, and the frozen seas that are their hunting grounds disappear, they are being forced to find new sources of food. For the first time, we follow a polar bear hunting on land as it heads high up into the mountains in a rarely seen long-distance pursuit of Svalbard’s reindeer.

Mammals have been forced to adapt to the cold for millions of years. Whereas other species avoided the series of thick ice sheets that once covered a quarter of all land, mammals were able to survive the freezing conditions, and by adapting their behaviour, many are now completely at home in these inhospitable lands.

One land that has little changed since the last ice age is the tundra of northern Alaska. In this remote, hostile landscape, a mythical and rarely seen mammal endures: the wolverine. They rely completely on snow to survive, providing them meat from animals that have succumbed to the cold and dens in which to raise their young. Whilst other animals either flee or hibernate to avoid the coldest time of year, they stay active all winter, traversing the vast landscape in search of food. This privileged view reveals a surprisingly caring side of a highly elusive animal.

Knowledge can play a huge role in surviving the cold. Rather than roaming huge distances, some smart mammals will return annually to places they know will provide them with food. In Canada’s northern Yukon, a unique community of bears has been passing knowledge down the generations of a special ice-free river. While most bears are already hibernating, this late flowing river allows chum salmon to spawn into the winter months, giving the bears an opportunity for one last feast before hibernation that they simply cannot resist.

Mammals’ ability to hibernate is a clever way to avoid winter, and deep underground in an abandoned mine, little and big brown bats are well into their hibernation. But not all stay asleep. One sneaky bat wakes in order to mate while the rest of the colony sleeps on.

Bringing newborns into a world of snow and ice has many challenges, but mammals’ unique ability to produce fat-rich milk allows harp seal mothers to have one of the shortest weening periods of all. In just 12 days, off the coast of Greenland, they race to fatten their pups to independence as the icy nursery melts around them.

Far above sea level, the remote Kluane Mountains of North America support the largest ice field outside the poles. In this rugged landscape of rock and ice, pika, a relative of the rabbit, patiently wait for summer. Having stayed awake all winter, surviving on food they collected last year, once summer does return, they will all have just a few weeks to harvest nearly a year’s worth of food before the winter lockdown begins again. But storing your hard-earnt supplies all in one place comes at a risk if you can’t trust your neighbour.

Averaging 4,000 meters above sea level, the thin air of the lofty mountains of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China struggle to retain much heat at all. As a result, life here always feels cold. Snow leopards are the top predator and have lived here for millions of years, but recently their lives have become linked with humans and the domestic yak they herd. It’s too good an opportunity to ignore. But through a community initiative, they have found a way to live alongside each other, even when the yak are taken by the leopards.

Back at sea level, on the shores of Canada’s Hudson Bay, for mammals specialised for life in the cold, a warming world is now the biggest challenge. Here, arctic fox and polar bears wait together by open water where there should be ice. For arctic foxes living here, as food ashore runs out, they would normally move and follow the polar bears onto the ice in order to scavenge off the bears’ kills. But as the winter freeze, and arrival of the ice is delayed, the bears cannot hunt, and life becomes more and more desperate. This has led to the foxes resorting to cannibalism, desperately fighting with each other to feed on the unfortunate foxes that have succumbed to hunger.

The 28-year-old fitness entrepreneur from Leeds is the fifth female contestant in a row to win the reality show, judged by 77-year-old Lord Alan Sugar.

She revealed after her victory was announced on Thursday (18.04.24) she has two goals – signing TV host Alison Hammond as the first client for her gum business, and getting married.

She told Mail Online after beating 37-year-old pie shop owner Phil Turner to Lord Sugar’s £250,000 investment prize: “It’s an honour to have been chosen by Lord Sugar and for him to invest in my business which at the end of the day is my baby and something I have been working on for almost five years now.

“For him to see something in me and think my business is investable is just an incredible and overwhelming feeling. 

“I am really looking forward to working with Lord Sugar for a number of reasons. He is investing a lot of money into me to enable my business to grow to open a third site and potentially a fourth.

“We don’t have a lot of big celebrities in Leeds and Harrogate but I would love Alison Hammond to come in, she’s hysterical. I met her last week when I went on ‘This Morning’ and she is so great and funny. I know Lord Sugar cycles too… I would love to get him on a spin bike.”

Rachel set up her boutique North Studio fitness business aged 23 and added she misses out on “socialising” like her other friends in her 20s due to grafting on her firm.

She paid tribute to her fellow business owner partner Benjy for understanding the sacrifices she has made.

Rachel added: “I am so lucky to have a fiancé who also has a business so knows what it takes. If I’m working late or missing something, he knows it’s business especially in the first few years… it’s not an easy ride and I’m so grateful from an early age I got stuck in and I was never put off by things going wrong. I will continue to work like that but now all the blood, sweat and tears were worth it.

“I got engaged in December last year so a month before ‘The Apprentice’ started airing. We haven’t actually set a date yet because I have been a little busy, but we plan on getting married next summer.” 

Catch up with The Apprentice on BBC iPlayer.