What I've learnt from The Apprentice

So that's it for another year. Along with about 10 million other people in the UK I watched The Apprentice final last night.  I'd like to say that I watched it for some noble, social anthropological research reason, which I suppose I did - I mean social anthropology is the study of people, which I do all the time.  Usually my Mum calls it being nosy though.  I am so good at being nosy that I did a semester of it at university, but it turned out it was mostly about the significance of yams for the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea (this is not a joke - I had to write a 3000 word essay on this sparkler of a topic.)

Wow. Digressing again.

So The Apprentice - I had an absolute ball watching the whole series.  I have been both admiring of the candidates' bolshiness and weary of their indomitable blue sky thinking and envelope pushing (don't they ever get paper cuts?)  Jim's capacity for clichés was exhausting, though worth it for Nick's cat bum faces in the background, Melody's voice made me yearn for my post-Christmas ear infections, anything to stop that noise.  Liam's ability to draw teapots will, in light of the Paris challenge, result in a downturn in modern languages GCSEs and a flocking to the nearest art studio.  Edward Hunter - now there's a chap - winner of the first P45 and owner of this honker of a defence: "Not only am I the youngest, but I'm the shortest." I howled at this.

Any time that the candidates were challenged with anything remotely non-British, was always guaranteed TV gold.  Susan's imbecilic "Are the French very fond of their children?" when they were perusing products to bring to market in la France was one such example. No dear, as a nation, French parents are Mr & Mrs Wormwood from Matilda, but in striped jumpers - ARE YOU SERIOUS??  This was probably only beaten on the penultimate week with Team Venture's "Caraca's" fast food joint, closely followed by some hum-dingers from the My-Py guys.

With Venture, I could *probably* forgive the kind donation of an apostrophe to a word that doesn't have one...apart from the fact that most people with a reasonable grasp of the English language were left wondering, "Caraca's what?"  Which Susan clears up nicely by waxing lyrical on its neat rhyming with maracas!  "Aaah! Caraca's maracas! Obviously!"  But then again it was Susan, she of the children-hating-French, so perhaps I'll let that one go too.  But then it gets a little worse, when My-Py's Tom - nice, smart, gentlemanly, geek inventor Tom - decides that yeah, Christopher Columbus is like, totally English.  Absolutely Tom.  It even says it on his birth certificate, y'see, right there next to his name....Cristoforo Colombo....and his birthplace - Genoa, that lovely hamlet in the Home Counties. 

But I think, possibly, the absolute clanger of the task was not a grammatical error that, let's be honest, only people as pedantic as me would care about, nor was it the moronic maracas reference; I'd probably even let the whole cockney Christopher Columbus mix-up slide as well because, come to think of it, "Would you Adam and Eve it, fellas? We've only gone and reached Asia*!" seems completely plausible. I think, on reflection, it was the small, teeny, 2.1 million people-sized whoopsie of Team Venture's Mexican restaurant, complete with its jaunty sombrero, being named after the capital of Venezuela.

As a small aside, I'd just like to finish off this post on an uncharacteristically non-ranty note.  Each one of those candidates was chosen for their terrific careers; be that in sales, entrepreneurship, youth work or just generally being a high flyer in the business world.  Yes, they were also picked for their appeal on TV, and - similar to Jeremy Kyle's only-if-you've-never-visited-a-dentist criteria - the Apprentice candidates must also have failed GCSE Geography, but they were each exceptional achievers and willing to put themselves out there, not only under the scrutiny of Lord Sugar, Nick's cat bum mouth and Karen's on-the-money insights, but in full glare of the British public. Yeah, sometimes they got their countries mixed up, sometimes they were pushing actual bullshit up a hill or nailing it to a wall, but most of the time, they were out there, fighting tooth and nail to do something special with their lives.  Except Edward, he was looking for a stepladder.

* He was convinced it was Asia he'd reached and refused to believe otherwise. I like this man.