I know The Apprentice (BBC One, Wednesday, 9pm) is back because I'm laughing.
And cringing. Now I'm laughing again. That's what The Apprentice does to you: it keeps you teetering somewhere around the boundary between embarrassment and amusement – embarrassment at the modern business world and amusement at what the contestants are willing to do to be part of it.
Take Ricky, for example. He is wearing a Topman suit and a top-man attitude. He has eyes like Linda Blair and hair from the 1990s. And he has just said, out loud: "I am a reflection of perfection." In America, this would go down well. This would be seen as self-confidence and belief in yourself. This is not America.
But don't worry because here comes Nick, Lord Sugar's right- hand man and Postman Pat's dad. Nick has been tasked with following the boys' team around and has the perfect way of showing his disapproval. He raises one eyebrow or, if you've said something particularly fatuous, two eyebrows. His eyebrows were up all night. This week, the task was to come up with a brand idea that could be stuck on various products and then sold to the public, and early on the boys seemed to be floundering. Their first job was to appoint a project manager but no-one was willing to volunteer (they've seen this show – they know what happens to project managers in the first week). Eventually, a 25-year-old called Nick Holzherr said he would do it and the other boys patted him enthusiastically on the shoulder. But as everyone knows, sometimes a pat on the shoulder can be a push into the quicksand.
Once the task got going, some of the boys were clearly not coping as well as others. Michael in particular resembled a cro-magnon man who has just woken up in a branch of Dixons. Some of the other boys, who had decided to sell teddies with Union Jacks on them, did just as badly. "Would you like to see my teddy?" barked one of them at a bemused family. "Would you like to feel it?" said another.
The girls were a little better because they had at least spent some time thinking about what would make a quality product. They were led by Gabrielle, an architect from London. An architect is, as one of the other contestants pointed out, someone who draws buildings. Gabrielle said she was an animal who would roar her way to the top, but as the task started to unravel and the girls started to bicker, she and the others were more like seagulls squawking and screeching over a dropped chip.
In the end, the boys were declared the victors, which was fair because they'd made the most money, but depressing too because it seemed to prove that in this version of capitalism, cheapness wins. If you knock something up with no thought, like the boys did, and try to charge too much for it, you will make money and get on. If you take your time over something, like the girls, if you try to produce something of quality and charge a fair price for it, it's much harder to make a profit.
But then that's The Apprentice for you, isn't it? It's a celebration of money, and those who love it, and those who want more of it. All the rest of us can do is laugh.
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