Mike Ward At Large
The Apprentice
As someone who makes a living from watching television programmes out of which I can then take the Michael, I’m always enormously thrilled by the return of The Apprentice. It’s just one long stream of mirth-inducing idiocy.
Last week, then, was a double treat for me, because we had two whole glorious episodes, launching us into series eleven. The first saw our two competing sides – Team UtterlyClueless and Team CommonSenseOfATadpole – being packed off at the crack of dawn to London’s Billingsgate Market. Once there, they had to buy a selection of fish and seafood, take this away, then quickly whip up a selection of lunchtime dishes that they could flog on the streets of London, targeting the “Yes, of course we’re happy to eat dubious, overpriced food prepared by blatant ninnies” market.
The second set them the challenge of marketing and advertising a new shampoo containing cactus oil, a task that included filming their own TV advert (“It looked absolutely amazing, we was all buzzing off it…”), creating a huge digital billboard and pitching to a panel of industry types who didn’t seem sure whether to snigger, weep or just cringe at the sheer toe-curling awfulness of what they were witnessing.
The main point of The Apprentice, despite what it may claim, is to take a bunch of young and youngish business people who reckon they’re the bee’s knees, encourage them to big themselves up in a laughable fashion (“I’m a Swiss Army knife of bouncy skills”) and then set them various challenges guaranteed to prick their egos, expose their inadequacies and bring them down a peg or twelve.
And obviously this is something of which, being well out of their age group, I wholeheartedly approve. The BBC comes in for a lot of stick – increasingly so – but The Apprentice continues to play a valuable role, taking thrusting, twentysomething business types, with their dreary clichés and their nasty suits and their relentless self-aggrandising, and their dispiriting lack of anything approximating to real wit, and making them look fantastically stupid. TV needs to do this more often.
Having said that, there’s been one guy I’ve actually warmed to in this latest series. A guy called Dan, who dared to poke fun at the pompous process via which the teams choose their names, by suggesting his lot should call themselves Sugababes. Not the funniest gag in history, I grant you, but at least the sign of a guy with perspective.
In episode one, Dan also happily admitted to his weaknesses as a businessperson, which was hugely refreshing. And in episode two? Sadly, Dan didn’t appear in episode two. Honest, humble, funny – he was never going to last that long.
Mike Ward is the TV Critic of the Daily Star and the TV Editor of the Daily Express Saturday magazine. Hear him every Monday afternoon with Guy Lloyd on Brighton’s Juice 107.2
Twitter: @mikewardontv
