The Apprentice 2009 - Yasmina

The Apprentice - Week 12: The Final

Capitalism is a paradoxical system. Sralan expressed it perfectly if unwittingly as I’m not sure he has much taste for irony. In an evenly balanced contest according to Sralan both women got it almost right. Kate won the personal presentation, her three-tiered box of ‘one for her, one for him and one to fight over’ was thought innovative; and the box received compliments though I thought it insipid. Her small range of chocolates, 6 flavours, were generally acknowledged to be delicious. After some false starts the last minute ‘Choc d’Amour’ name was good. But back in cost mode Sralan baulked at £13 a pop even though in the supermarket they researched there were premium brands at £16 +.

All the Apprentices, except perhaps for Debra have been far too willing throughout to treat Sralan as an oracle whose every pronouncement must be right; and Kate more than most. So she immediately agreed with him that she had pitched at the luxury market through the wrong outlets i.e. supermarkets rather than specialist niche luxury outlets. His argument was that the £16+ chocs got on the supermarket shelves only because they had established the brand in niche outlets first. This is certainly a realistic argument though I’m not sure that a massive ad-buy investment hasn’t launched quality brands straight in to critical mass sales levels without the slow build of niche marketing first. It is true though that Sralan likes low cost high margin products – that was the ethos of Amstrad. And I doubt very much if he is a big ad-buy launcher: like many cost-obsessed CEO’s he has a risk aversion to the investment in a market that kind of high cost launch entails.

In contrast Yasmina hit his hot button: what we might call low cost flash. He admitted later that he had been immensely impressed in week two when Yas had knocked together the cheapest, tackiest sandwiches making about a 200% margin. His enormous respect for this achievement was not diminished one jot by the fact that the ‘can-o-peas’ looked tired and unappetising and generated a significant number of complaints. Yas’s coup was a one-off success. She had a contract for the night and toughed it out. But no one would ever have gone back to her again.

This time thanks to an uncharacteristically cooperative attitude by all concerned, of which more later, Howard and Co came up with an absolutely first rate box – different, a design that was literally striking, high impact colours and an innovative slide opening. The ‘Coco-Electric’ name sucked a bit . But one can’t induce that much poetic exhilaration with the name on a box of chocs. I quite liked Shockolate but can’t disagree it’s a bit schlocky as we might say. I hate to say it but Lorraine’s mystical instinct was absolutely on the button when she saw immediately that the graphic had inherent brand impact so stripped all but the name from the box. Phil’s usual boorish disruptiveness was defused by letting him prance around like a berk with embarrassed dancers pretending he knew how to choreograph. Lighting, music, theatrical effects for Coco-Electric were buzzy and lively enough to make the Choc D’Amour show look pedestrian. But Yas doesn’t have Kate’s ease with presentation. In an echo of week two – most people were impressed with everything about Coco-Electric except the chocolates. Well you can’t win ‘em all I suppose.

The glaring weakness of the objective comparison here was not rigorously relating cost to margin and in turn to projected sales. As Yas was totally at fault on the absolute cock-up of £5 max for 500ml of Sandalwood costing about £750 and at interview seemed to find profit, gross, net and turnover conceptually slippery, I’m not sure how much faith we can place in her 6/7p per chocolate cost claim. Sounds a bit ‘sandalwoody’ to me. Kate claimed to have a good margin but this was not quantified either.

Like many cost-obsessives Sralan frequently treats ‘cost’ as an absolute concept, whereas in strictly business terms surely it only makes sound business sense treated as a relative term: without selling price you have no concept of margin: and without cost, selling price and margin one’s estimate of potential sales is a pure punt in the dark. There is a valid reason to talk of cost as an absolute but it is a managerial, not directly profit-related issue. CEO’s like to induce a sense of absolutism in the ethos of a company so that every moment, every employee remembers that minimising costs is a good thing. Except perhaps when you make something so cheap(ly) you can’t sell it.

These critical parameters were completely ignored last night. When Sralan, said that Yas had got all the important things right and that the fact that no one liked the chocolates was something that “could be tweaked” he totally undermined his assessment of the relative performance of the two candidates. How much more would it have cost to remedy the problem identified by one of the experts, that he could see the merchandising selling one box but that the crap chocolates would make it the last.

It wouldn’t have taken long or been boring to have told us the numbers – actual costs for each, selling price and therefore margin. The balance could then be expressed by the simple equation of how many sales each would have had to make to bring in say a target gross profit of £100,000.

This is one of the paradoxes of capitalism for me: in the overall mix of so-called skill, art even science of business the actual product, here the chocolates and how they taste, becomes not just a mere single criterion but not even an essential one. As consumers we have the experience of the truth of this lunacy in our everyday experience. We have always sort of known it, found it so often true to our experience, and yet we can never quite bring ourselves to accept it because it is so manifestly counter-intuitive as to be ridiculous. If you want to see these paradoxes deliciously and hilariously explored check out Milo Minderbinder in Joe Heller’s magnificent Catch-22.

If this crazy unintended outcome is mad for products – don’t even begin to get me going on the same lunacy applied to services. To cite just a couple of the commonest paradoxes: the quality of customer service is rigorously in inverse proportion to the number of Customer Service Departments and Customer Service ‘Executives’: and ‘Quality’ as in Quality Management has nothing to do with excellence or ‘quality’ in the normal sense at all – it just means consistently of the same level of ‘quality’. Macdonalds is the paradigm of ‘Quality’ management. They may sell crap but it’s always exactly the same, guaranteed crap. Milo Minderbinder rules OK. (And I ran a Quality Management System).

With this woolly, half-baked context lacking even the rigour of which such imponderables are capable, I’m not sure whether Lorraine saw the irony or Sralan would have acknowledged it – but in the end he waffled on about ‘instinct’, ‘flair’, ‘acumen’ as being at the heart of his decision. Well with crap analysis and half-baked assessment I guess we have to accept what we knew all along – to win the Apprentice being good isn’t enough; you have to be ‘Sugar-good’. The distinction between that and plain personal prejudice is opaque to say the least. But then I have instincts, intuitions – it’s all you other b**ggers who have prejudices – right?

In the end though I guess it was a bit of a toss-up and could have reasonably gone either way. And there’s been a lot of fun to be had on the way – malicious at times but no less fun for that. Sralan’s Mr Chips act later, with his “best ‘mob’ I’ve ever had” – hear that Lee? - did set my teeth on edge and there was a distinctly dodgy outbreak of niceness that made me a bit queasy and sounded as genuine as a chocolate teapot. Char-colate?

The attitude and performance of all the fired Apprentices was transformed in this last programme when they were no longer trying to win. People listened better, co-operated infinitely better, were more relaxed, had more fun, enjoyed a challenging experience precisely because they shared it. “Doh” as Homer might say – maybe the aggressive, dog-eat-dog, selfish, egocentric, testosterone fuelled ethos that Sralan engenders and the programme exploits might not be the way to get the best out of most of the people most of the time after all.

Wash your mouth out Zettel – we wouldn’t have a programme then. Well of course that would be a tragedy for the common weal wouldn’t it?

I do find myself wondering with Jo Brand about how so many bright young people can get so ‘passionate’ about how to sell crap chocolates by ‘good’ marketing and selling: about the waste of intelligence and youthful commitment devoted to persuading people they want things they don’t need, and need things they don’t want. Is selling crap chocolates the kind of thing our brightest young people should get passionate about? But then I’ve never got used to the modern criterion of good citizenship – spend as much as possible as often as possible, even if you haven’t got the money.

The final paradox of course is that free-market capitalism in its globalised form is now the only viable economic game in town; a system with an irreducibly voracious appetite for consuming finite resources that is on a train-wreck course with the inescapable and potentially terminal environmental consequences precisely of its success.

We are a strange species: in order to feed ourselves we have to destroy our ongoing ability to do so. And the Debras and the Kates and the Yasminas with their slightly chilling passions will make sure the process doesn’t slow down.

Looks as if many of these paradoxes are getting much more rigorous analysis than mine in this year’s Reith Lectures by Political Philosopher Michael Sandel – first one today sounded very promising. Check them out.

PS: Both teams about-faced on initial strategies because a few dodgy-looking blokes claimed men don’t buy chocolates. Oh yes? You think so do you? Can I have years of expenditure back then please? No one told me.

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You're hired!

What’s it to be do you think?

Lord Sugar of Lump?

If Sir Alan is going to be the Enterprise Czar - will he outrank Spock and Kirk?

Gordon Brown and Sir Alan Sugar

With Apologies to The Rolling Stones

If Brown, Sugar can’t get no Satisfaction, Between a Rock And A Hard Place they’ll Paint it Black Not Fade Away; but As Tears Go By, All The way Down, Down in The Hole, they’ll realise they’re Out Of Time and though they Ain’t Too Proud To Beg but are Crackin’ Up, Gordon, Mr Pitiful, for the Last Time will realise It’s All Over Now, and at last he can say I’m Free, I’m Movin’ On - time to be Walkin’ The Dog.  Politics is a Bitch - but we’ll have little Sympathy For The Devil.

In the words of Buffy Sainte Marie - Mr Brown It’s Time For You To Go.

Zettel

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Ice cool

The Apprentice Week 11 - now only two can play

Sir Alan Sugar in government? It is rumoured tonight that SAS has been offered a job by Gordon Brown. Given the rest of the news, this is a bit like the captain of the Titanic inviting you on a cruise. This invitation, if true, is worrying on so many levels. First it suggests that our lugubrious PM can’t tell the difference between ‘reality’ TV and reality itself. Second, it is another of Dog Born Worn’s pathetic attempts to court a vicarious popularity he can’t generate himself. Worst of all it looks like another example of a politician who actually knows nothing about business buying in to an approach which is Neanderthal in conception and divisively pig-headed in practice.

That said this week’s Apprentice wasn’t half bad. With the original rat pack of 15 reduced to 5 before this show, last week’s gradual emergence of actual people continued. An extended profile of each remaining candidate humanised them a bit with parents siblings and friends offering encouraging proof that there were some real people hiding within the TV-induced ego-onanists of the last 10 weeks.

It was especially interesting and to a degree engaging, to realise how very ordinary in a good sense their backgrounds are. No silver spoons in sight, one began to understand a little better the sometimes grotesque over-reaching and self-image delusions that have both exasperated and made us laugh each week.

The ‘interview’ process was simply no contest. Primed to be aggressive and brutal, every candidate’s CV, as in fact last year, seemed to have been about as truthful and accurate as Hazel Blear’s expenses claims. Because they are perhaps the one business requirement that Universities actually know something about, there is no excuse for getting years and time spent factually wrong. It was painful to watch the ease with which the interrogators, no interviewers these, were able to hang each candidate with their own words or those of referees apparently selected for their inherent hostility rather than support.

It may be that Darth Debra really doesn’t have a friend in the world but her chosen referees basically filleted her then fed her failings in bite-sized pieces for the inquisitors to chew on. Yasmina was so astonished that publishing the accounts of her business meant that someone might read them, that her brain went walk-about suddenly bewildered by abstruse terms like profit, sales, turnover and the distinction between gross and net. Lorraine used what is now known as the MP-gambit: describing lying about her length of experience as a ‘mistake’. At least she didn’t say the CV system was rotten and had to be changed. Kate was positively animatronic in her blithe assumption that being called “robotic” was somehow a compliment. She had an advantage in that she seemed the only one of the five who took her brain with her into the interviews instead of leaving it in on the sofa downstairs.

One always leaves the best till last. Yes you’ve got it – James, Oh James we, the people of Britain will miss you. James is a true entrepreneur: not in business, there he seems pedestrian and banal. No James’s innovative genius is with words. He has invented a new grammatical form: what we might call the ad lib metaphor. Time and again he wanders into a sentence like a drunk in a minefield staggering past semantic oblivion by what looks like sheer luck and then escapes with an image that just pops into his head. This seems to be the way thoughts struggle free of the Jamesian mind. Mentally he sets out for Edinburgh, finds himself in Cornwall and persuades us that’s where he meant to go in the first place. Extolling his own virtues, not sadly an uncommon dialectical form for this programme, he told Sralan that with him our Knightette wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel. Sensing this solemn cliché stood in need of some elaboration he blurted out “ maybe just change a couple of spokes.” Thinking on his feet or what? We just know in our water that when he set out on the mystery tour of that sentence he had absolutely no intention or even inkling of talking about wheels or spokes. James’s efforts at simple communication sometimes sound as if they come from the pages of Ulysses or even Finnegan’s Wake: obscure, abstruse, at times simply incomprehensible – but usually funny.

All these linguistic powers appeared to have been indulged in James’s application for the programme: not so much a Curriculum Vitae as an extended suicide note. James’s great strength as a comedian, for such he is, is the endearing quality of his constant, child-like surprise and delight in the words that come out of his own mouth. James’s own expression of triumph at each of these remarks bears the satisfied smirk of a baby boy who eschewing his potty, has finally peed solo down the loo and has just realised that this really is a pretty cool piece of kit with other exciting, but as yet undiscovered possibilities. James’s unwitting witty wordplay is occasionally accompanied by a kind of Eric Cantona-like philosophical gravity on his CV and not for one second doubting the sagacity of his own remark, James vouchsafed his greatest contribution to business was his ability to “bring ignorance to the table.” Look for that one in the canonical tomes of the business gurus why don’t you? Far from understanding the sagacious nuances in this Delphic aphorism, the interrogator asked, a little insensitively I thought, whether James was an idiot. As for his other eloquent CV phrase of preventing people from “spunking money up the wall” his interviewer looked incredulously into James’s eyes just to reassure himself that our boardroom clown was not actually taking the p*ss.

There is a fortune to be made this Christmas in bringing out a little book of ‘Apprentice Sayings’. James would fill half of it. “If I was selling funerals – people would stop dying.” Etc.

As I said last week it was impossible to see Sralan employing either Lorraine or James. I think only his insecurities about Darth Debra’s intelligence and uncompromising independence led him to choose Yasmina over her. I don’t think Sralan feels threatened by Yas in the way he did by DD. It would have been a more interesting final to have left all three in. It will be fascinating to see how losing apprentices especially Deadly Deb, co-operate in Sunday’s tasks to help someone else win the prize they wanted for themselves. Who will benefit from Lorraine’s Spock-like Vulcan mind-melding; Ben’s business conversion on the road to Sandhurst; Philip’s Pantsman perceptivity? Etc Etc.

Gotta hunch if it’s close it’ll be Kate. But Yas might just do well enough that she has to get it. I wonder whether they get to choose their team members? If so, for all her supposed unpopularity my bet is first pick will be the Dark One. Rightly so.

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you aren't a warrior - you're fired

The Apprentice Week 10

- intelligent, thoughtful, skilled team-player, good listener, good manager - you’re fired.

If Sralan Sugar had been in charge of the European Champion’s League Final this week they’d still be playing: he moves the goalposts so suddenly and so often no one could ever score.

Last week the high-ticket Rocking Horses were a mistake; this week according to Sugar Lump high ticket items on a TV selling channel had to be the way to go; even though the team that followed that strategy lost. Sralan’s reaction – you’ve got it – his strategy was right – Howard’s team just didn’t implement it well enough. Last season offering exclusivity (ice cream to an 8 cinema chain) was a sacking offence; this season it was a great deal – the body-rocker for John Lewis. Every week cost, cost, cost like a mantra – yet we never had comparative manufacturing costs for the body-rocker etc. This week costs were ignored: the Apprentices could pick any product they wanted – no sale, no penalty. They were judged purely on sales/turnover not profit.

There is a logical fallacy called ‘affirming the consequent’: Sralan commits it every week. The fallacy is a misapplication of a valid argument form: it runs like this. (Remember this is a hypothetical form of argument that simply says “if p is the case – then q will follow.” It doesn’t say “p is the case” only what will follow if it is).

Proposition: If you are the best salesman – then you will sell the most things.
you were the best salesman
therefore: you sold most things - Valid

you sold the most things
therefore: you were the best salesman. Fallacy

Proposition: If you are a good Project Manager – then your team will win.
your team won
therefore: you were a good project manager. Fallacy

Valid:

If p then q
p
therefore: q

Fallacy: If p then q
q
therefore: p

Sralan’s constant moving of the goalposts combined with systematic application of this fallacy is close to making this meaningless as any kind of fair contest. In the past few weeks he has fired people because:

• They were bad team players. But kept people who are even worse team players.
• They are too young. But kept people just as young and with less potential.
• They took a risk with choice of product. Then fired Howard because he didn’t.
• They couldn’t sell or present. But kept Lorraine who can’t do either.
• They pushed to be PM and lost. Kept Debra who screwed up at least 2 tasks as PM

He said it himself this week when he commented after Lorraine claimed she had business flair and acumen – “why do you want to work for me then?” Just so. This seconds after he had said he was looking for someone with good business instincts and flair – and Nick basically said these were Lorraine’s strengths.

As a consequence The Apprentice ‘fun-graph’ looks like a ski-jump with week 1 at the top. It is hard to take the thing too seriously at the beginning with so many massive, but transparently unjustified egos jockeying not to win but get noticed – but it’s sort of guilty fun watching intelligent people do stupid things in order to win something worthless in the first place. They are all encouraged to be so mouthy, arrogant, and supposedly ruthless that our guilt at laughing at their discomfort is completely allayed.

As the numbers reduce then individuals get more space to be heard – for better or worse. With blowhards like Ben and Philip gone Howard’s qualities have begun to emerge. He is the first person to be able to manage Lorraine and in so doing, removed her so far successful excuse that her lack of contribution was because of someone else. She can’t sell and is an embarrassment as a presenter. Her choice of products this week, courtesy of her unexamined, unfounded whimsical ‘instinct’ were the ludicrous polystyrene ‘craft’ animals and the outrageously priced £240 Dinosaur. How would Howard have got on in the Boardroom if he had rejected both? How would Lorraine have reacted?

No one could have sold the polystyrene pets but it is hard to understand why Kate’s OTT but fun presentation of the air guitar was so unsuccessful. Maybe the kind of people who buy from the shopping channel take the business of shopping so seriously that they have no sense of humour or appreciation of a bit of fun.

It is scary that Debra Barr is only 23 years old: she must have been raised on a shark farm. Were it not for an ‘unfortunate’ streak of independence and being both a woman and intelligent she’s a shoe-in. She can sell, present, argue you to death, and dominate virtually anyone. And she’s a bully. Does that sound familiar? Does Sralan like mirrors? She has that one-dimensional obsessiveness characteristic of highly successful business people. It has been said that all you really need if you want to be rich is for being rich to be the only thing you want to be and devote your life to that to the exclusion of all else. Without a trace of irony, business obsessives extol this quality as ‘focus’. To follow the metaphor, to be absolutely focussed means to see one thing or one part of a larger whole very clearly: but by definition focus means you don’t see the wider ‘picture’ or the irreducible complexity of any organisation comprised of large numbers of people each with their lives, their aspirations, their hopes. These are the motive forces of success.

The Apprentice has flipped. After several weeks where the name of the game was for us to watch Alan Sugar assess and judge the qualities of the Apprentices; we are now irresistibly drawn to judging Alan Sugar’s qualities of judgement, his philosophy of management. Now the fun has gone that is the only substantive issue of any interest left.

Could Debra ever delegate, motivate, formulate a plan and implement it through the activities of others? As Yas is the only one with the gumption to stand up to Debra and may just be a bit less threatening to Sralan could this be key? Can James stop playing the silly-arse? Is Kate’s one-trick enough?

It is getting so that it is hard to care very much. But I would like to see Sralan Sugar’s judgements and philosophy of business put to the test. I am not the only person who thinks they stink. That they are not worthy of the young intelligent people we need to run organisations public or private. Week in week out The Apprentice format permits Sralan Sugar to move goalposts at whim, make unfounded, capricious judgements based upon frequently fallacious arguments. The air reeks every week with self-congratulatory post-hoc rationalisations. And he doesn’t even notice.

As SAS might put it “you was wrong, they was right and anyone can be right with bleedin’ hindsight.” And before you take me to task for being ’snobby’ about the way SAS expresses himself - articulacy, a feeling for the nuances of words and their effects on others is part of civilised behaviour let alone the art of management. It does matter - surely George W Bush proved that beyond a doubt. Wittgenstein: “where there is an error of grammar, there is usually an error of thought.” Every week Apprentices unneccessarily alienate and put up the backs of co-workers simply through careless, lazy, arrogant use of language. Our care with language, including when we need to be blunt, is a mark of respect for others especially when they are wrong and need to be told. It is not a matter of accent or idiom - it is a matter of quality of thought. But then Sralan’s philosophy of business that we see every week is pretty much ’sod the planning - get out there and sell’. Nick Hewer and SAS let the Sugar philosophy of business out of the bag this week when they told the most competent PM of the series so far that he lacked ambition because he was not a “brave warrior”, not the “BIG GUY who risks all to win.” This testosterone-fuelled tosh sounds almost homophobic addressed to an intelligent, competent, gay man. It also indicates, to put it with Sugar-like delicacy of language, that to survive in the Sugar business ethos a woman has to grow balls. That injunction must favour Debra as she acts as if she was born with said anatomical accoutrements. And even if she wasn’t she can easily pick a couple of someone else’s from her back pocket after each week’s task.

SAS should not be allowed to get away week in, week out, with giving a reason for firing someone not the reason. There’s not much justice or reality in that. Or disciplined business judgement.

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Giulio Andreotti - Il Divo

Il Divo - Paolo Sorrentino (2008)

Shakespearean in content, operatic in tone, writer director Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (the extraordinary life of Giulio Andreotti) is a masterly work. Richly textured and at times demanding, Sorrentino’s film is a profound study of power, and its irresistible affects on men who possess it and those drawn to them. Il Divo is also it seems to me deeply Italian – obviously in its actual historic setting in place and time but also its elegant use of the Italian language and finally its philosophical context. The extraordinary enigma that was Giulio Andreotti, in Sorrentino’s sumptuously shot film, walks the imposing halls of the Quirinal Palace redolent with the ghosts of Machiavelli and the Borgias.

Andreotti, now 90, still Senator for life, seven times Prime Minister, dominated Italian politics for over 40 years as head of the centre-right Christian Democratic Party. These were tumultuous years for Europe in general and Italy in particular: Italy’s ‘anni di piombo’ - years of lead. Marxist-inspired dissident groups turned to terrorism to attack established political orthodoxy – in Germany the Baader-Meinhoff Group; and in Italy Mario Moretti’s Brigate Rosse – The Red Brigades - who among other acts of violence, in 1978 kidnapped Andreotti’s one time friend and colleague, and predecessor as Prime Minister – Aldo Moro. Moro was executed 54 days later when Andreotti refused to negotiate and make concessions for his release.

Toni Servillo, unrecognisable from his role as corrupt politician Franco in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra, is mesmeric as Andreotti. But it is Sorrentino’s direction that puts this perfomance to such powerful use. There can hardly ever have been an outwardly less charismatic figure of power than Andreotti: small, hunch-shouldered, strange flat-to-the-head misshapen ears, a mincing straight-legged walk and an implacably expressionless face where even the eyes were hooded and whose occasional flashes of venom seem to sneak past the rigorous control of their possessor. And yet, Andreotti the man, commanded almost reverential admiration and support - political, personal and electoral. This despite a dry, even cruel intellectual wit turned indifferently upon friend and foe alike. Andreotti the man’s deeply un-prepossessing physical presence makes the way that Servillo and Sorrentino convey so well his power and enigmatic menace a supreme achievement.

Il Divo would be impressive simply as an historical political thriller. Certainly the bald facts of Mafia intrique and murder, serial suicides, political assassination and the constant air of corruption, required little embellishment to create a sense of dramatic tension. But to say that Il Divo is just about Post-war Italian political figures is a little like saying that Shakespeare’s Historical plays are just about the kings and queens of England. With surreal imagery at times reminiscent of Bunuel, and a wonderfully eclectic musical score discarding historical appropriateness in favour of the right tone and atmosphere, Sorrentino conjures on screen for us the elusive spirit of the cipher of a man known variously as the ‘Black Pope’, ‘Hunchback’, Beelzebub’ and the ‘Prince of Darkness’ A man admired and hated in equal measure.

Sorrentino’s Andreotti is like the eye of a hurricane: the calm, even empty epicentre around which powerful forces gather and circulate. However much the hurricane builds or uncontrollable the forces it unleashes, its eye at the centre in a sense remains untouched – but defined by the terrifying forces encircling it. And though there are reasons why the storm moves in this or that direction, we cannot know them or predict its advance. When the storm dissipates, the epicentre disappears, until the conditions for gathering force begin again to re-form another hurricane with its eye at the centre, creating another period of unpredictable destructive power. Unpredictability was one of Andreotti’s great weapons. Revealing so little of his inner thoughts and guided more by a kind of fatalistic pragmatism than anything like a moral or political principle, those around him were reduced to trying to read his mood from tiny scraps of body language: twisting his ring, tapping or inter-lacing his fingers.

Such extraordinary, even counter-intuitive charismatic personal power is as rare as it is unmistakable. And its most extreme examples, like Andreotti, were also unlikely candidates. Hitler was an odd little man with a funny moustache; Stalin though physically big, not much more initially than a stolid peasant. Yet having persuaded people to give them power then wielding it with absolute ruthlessness, they took to themselves the power of life and death which in turn induced in far more people than we like to admit, a sense of reverence and blind loyalty rather than just fear. Despite the proven horrors of their rule, there are an alarming number of Russians and Germans who look upon Stalin and Hitler with admiration and their times with nostalgic regret.

”Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again”.

(Brecht – The Rise and Fall of Arturo Ui)

Andreotti was no Hitler, or a Stalin but he had great power and was directly or indirectly through action or inaction, an instrumental figure in many violent deaths. The fascination of this man is that he seems to refute one of our more comforting beliefs: that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sorrentino’s film portrays Andreotti as a kind of carrier of disease, able to infect others but symptom-free himself. His devious secretiveness always left it unclear, even to this day, exactly what he did influence and bring about. It’s as if all the appalling events in Shakespeare’s Richard the Third took place but that we never saw him plotting them: the play becoming more a kind of morally ambiguous whodunit than a study in the power of ambition and self-hatred.

It is apt that Servillo is also in Matteo Garrone’s superb Gomorra. In a key moment in Il Divo Servillo delivers a monologue to camera where all the normally repressed passion in Andreotti explodes. His credo roughly: where irreconcilable forces create constant turmoil someone, something must create some form of order, stability, even if he must compromise with those forces in order to do it: order cannot be generated by being just another competing force for that only increases the turmoil and further undermines any possibility of control. In Sorrentino’s film and perhaps true to the man, Andreotti comes over as a kind of conduit for the chaotic interplay of power structures in Italian society at a time of social upheaval in the wider world. One feels his famous remark was perhaps meant seriously not as mock modesty.

“I recognize my limits but when I look around I realise I am not living exactly in a world of giants.”

The Andreotti of Sorrentino’s film is Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ incarnate. (Niccolo Machiavelli 1469-1527).

From what I understand of the history and the times and the non-judgemental presentation of the man in Sorrentino’s film one can imagine Andreotti saying that when anarchy is abroad, and it was, an irreducibly volatile Italy could only resist through someone like him to channel the uncompromising forces of chaos rather than compete with them. Andreotti tapped the power structures around him, the secret P2 (Propaganda Due) anti-Communist Masonic group within the Christian democrats; assiduously cultivating through personal patronage the goodwill of his ordinary constituency voters; and developing mutually beneficial links with the Catholic Church. If an historically volatile political and social culture and the immensely powerful Church of Rome both the spiritual heart of Italy but also world-wide Catholicism, were two of the competing power structures at the heart of Italian society it was Andreotti’s deeply ambiguous relationship with the third – the Mafia – that threads its way menacingly through Sorrentino’s film.

This is where Garrone’s Gomorra is almost a companion piece to Il Divo. A brilliant, baleful portrayal of the family-based criminal fraternity (the Comorra)in and around Naples in which we see the brutal uncompromising nature of a loosely-knit group of families united by only one thing – a refusal to accept the rule of law in society as a whole and an implacable willingness to use violence to maintain their de facto right to do so. It is a mistake to conflate the Comorra with the Mafia for the former apparently lacks the hierarchical structure for which the latter is infamous. However in trying to understand the reality and thus limitations on political effectiveness Andreotti faced as a politician, Gomorra perfectly illustrates the impossibility of compromise. Il Divo shows us an ultra-pragmatic politician seeing clearly what he would say romantic idealists refused to face – you can’t fight these power structures for they observe no limit and will never stop. So it seems in order to create stability for mainline politics, to get things done, the impression is that Andreotti simply accommodated the Mafia, let them maintain their power as long as it did not create waves. While courageous men and women of the law, Magistrates and Judges rightly battled against the corruption of the Mafia in Italian society, many being murdered for their pains, one can almost imagine Andreotti saying of the Mafia “What can I do? It’s what they do.” He was much criticised for failing to attend the funeral of Judge Giovanni Falcone assassinated by the Mafia in May 1992 depicted through a recurring visual metaphor in Il Divo.

The film suggests this ‘mutual areas of interest’ pragmatism was the only political credo Andreotti followed. Sorrentino represents him as a kind of paradox of power: like the eye of the hurricane he lay at the very heart of power yet was in a sense powerless himself – as the balance of the forces shifted so he had to adapt in order to remain at their heart. This came to a head when the legal arm of government caught and turned ex-Mafia boss Tomasso Buscetta. This success led to the Maxi Trial (1986) which put hundreds of Mafiosi on trial based on Buscetta’s evidence. Almost for the first time, the forces of the law led by Judges Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – both later assassinated – genuinely threatened men at the very top of the Mafia and therefore the centre of the historical power structure it represented. Thus threatened The Mafia had to ask more of Andreotti than he could deliver, actual protective help rather than ‘spheres of self-interest’ passivity. Of course Andreotti could not comply – his whole rationale was to balance such forces not be part of any one of them. Sorrentino shows Andreotti and Corleonesi Mafia boss Salvatore Riina in a symbolic meeting but offers no conversation between the two men. Later Andreotti denies the meeting altogether. Certainly Andreotti later took strong action against the Mafia but it is hard to see how he could have done otherwise given the public uproar at the dramatic assassinations of Magistrates Falcone and Borsellino.

Amidst this socio-political background Sorrentino shows Andreotti somehow constantly shifting and adapting to forces around him in such a way that he remains central. The ultimate pragmatist, accepting good, even necessary results may come from bad actions; and sacrificing any principle to the necessity of political stability.

“In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check”.

(Machiavelli – Discourse on Livy Book I, Chapter II)

It is an extraordinary achievement on Sorentino’s part to have distilled this philosophical and political complexity into a stunning montage of evocative scenes and images. In one superb moment as Andreotti crosses a massive room in the Quirinal, armed guards silently watching, a cat appears in his path. Andreotti just stops and he and the cat stare each other out. You can feel the anxiety of the guards, unsure whether to intervene. In a battle of wills with the cat it is clear it will move out of the way, either by its own or volition or because Andreotti’s expectation will force the guards to intervene. In the end the cat skulks off and Andreotti carries on his way. This beautiful little scene captures a curious mixture of comic menace, a kind of sinister absurdity. The sheer motive force of Andreotti’s presence brings about the results he wants without his actually doing anything. If Andreotti was instrumental in mens’ deaths and Sorrentino suggests he was - this is how he brought it about.

Andreotti was tried twice, found guilty once and then subsequently acquitted of all charges on grounds of lack of proof. He exemplified the seemingly inherent paradox of Italian politics; large numbers of people even an electoral majority, are drawn to the stability that strong, ruthless men can generate and they are indulgent towards the perhaps extra-legal or plain illegal pragmatism with which they bring about that stability. If that sounds familiar today we should remember that one Silvio Berlusconi was once a member of an Andreotti Government and Propaganda Due). Even in England large numbers of Londoners look back with some affection to the days when the Kray twins created a kind of orderly tyranny in the poorest parts of the East End.

With Gomorra and Il Divo it has been a good year for Italian cinema. One feels there is another great Italian film just begging to be made: having focussed on two of the three major centres of power in Italian society, the third awaits the same rigour, incisive examination and courageous clarity. The Roman Catholic Church despite its deeply spiritual core is itself profoundly Machiavellian in spirit. Notoriously the Church of Rome, immensely powerful and rich, can often be argued to put its temporal continuity above its stated spiritual mission. And the rationale is strikingly familiar – without the structure and stability that The Church offers in a world of chaos and sin – then goodness has no room to grow. Thus the continuity and stability of the Church itself becomes the moral imperative that pre-dominates over individual ethics.

The role of the Catholic Church both in relation to the Mafia, political intrigue and endemic corruption in public life has been opaque at best for centuries. When one sees these immensely powerful groupings at the heart of Italian society, in many ways with nothing but preserving their base of power in common, one can begin to understand why Italy over one 40 year period had more than 40 governments – some, like one of Andreotti’s lasting just two weeks.

Challenging, demanding, eloquent, visually innovative and absorbing, Il Divo justly deserved its jury prize at Cannes in 2008. It is a film that rewards more than one viewing, for its richly textured conception takes time to absorb. Together with Gomorra, Il Divo is profoundly Italian. It would perhaps need an Italian Bunuel to complete the trilogy that beckons. But the history of men who have taken on the Catholic Church is perhaps even more disturbing than those who have like Sorrentino and Garrone courageously tackled the unpalatable truths of Italian politics and ‘organised’ crime.

*(Sometimes called Divo Giulio (from Latin Divus Iulius, “divine Julius”, an epithet of Julius Caesar)         

Filed under: 5 stars, Action, Drama, Europe/World cinema, Extended essay, Film Essay, Historical, Humorous, Paolo Sorrentino, Philosophical, Political, Thriller | No Comments »

Just listen! won't you - I've got to get to Sandhurst

The Apprentice Week 9 - Getting Real

This was my come-uppance week. Sralan had a good show and even Ben showed a bit of the self-knowledge one despaired of him ever acquiring.

It is a troubling aspect of The Apprentice that everyone later on The Apprentice You’re Fired (TAYF) suddenly becomes more likeable, more truthful, less aggressive and arrogant than when they were still in the show. This touches on what seems to me to be the most important issue – independence of mind, character and spirit. I want someone to say courteously “good morning” and withhold the apparently obligatory “Sir Alan”. Someone able to focus totally on satisfying the requirements of the task on hand rather than trying to satisfy Alan Sugar, or even the demands of the producers. I’m looking for the genuine signs of leadership – and it is as rare as hen’s teeth.

In Ben we have lost the best ‘Closer’ I’ve seen on the programme in two seasons. ‘Closers’ should not be confused with Salesmen: many very good Salesmen are poor Closers; and you have to use Closers carefully or they will simply blow long and careful negotiations out of the water with their impatience and arrogance. But for the right business – high volume, repeat sales, middle to low ticket items, good Closers are both efficient and essential. The art of ‘Closing’ is knowing the critical moment in the sales process when the balance of initiative switches. Good Salesmen make a customer want to buy: the Closer spots the moment at which they are ready to, and intervenes confidently and decisively to reinforce the customer’s instinct to go for it before other possibilities, other options, doubts return and the process almost has to start again. Many excellent Salespeople sell themselves out of the sale. There is the skill of bringing someone to the point of wanting to buy and the separate and distinct skill of recognising the moment when you have succeeded. So locked in to selling mode, even good Salespeople often miss this moment - the Closer never does. He has the deal wrapped up, the money in and is on to the next customer while the poor Salesman is still trying to further convince someone whose need has switched from someone wanting to buy to someone seeking more and more reasons not to.

Closers are efficient: they turn in sales because they play the averages and don’t waste time on people their instinct tells them aren’t going to buy. It is a critical sales skill to distinguish between these main types – people who will buy; people who might buy; and people who ain’t gonna buy no matter how much time you give them. But Closers generally make poor Negotiators – they don’t have the patience – they just want to close and move on. This was a critical element in the key failure for Ben’s team this week. When challenged rightly by AS about not negotiating a better deal on the very high ticket Rocking Horses – Ben said “we tried to get him to come down on price, but he wouldn’t”. For the Negotiator the game starts when someone says “no“; for the Closer it ends. Closers always believe they can make a sale: Negotiators always believe they can get a better price.

I hate the whole business of selling but one has to admit it is a psychologically rich process. It’s not just hindsight: Debra and Ben both realised that selling top ticket, high quality rocking horses at £1500 - £4,000 was as much a risk as an opportunity. Their sales mentality dominated their negotiating instincts – “we only have to sell 1 and we’ve won.” The Salesman always believes he can sell. The Negotiator says “I can get a much better price and that will either improve margins or tunrover, or both.” It is a matter of articulacy and refined linguistic skills. The guys offering the rocking horse would know all about the problems of selling a kid’s toy however well made, for the cost of a small car. A low throughput business by definition, it was obvious that they were operating with a fat margin. Negotiators live off the fat of fat margins. If Ben or Debra had had the instincts of Negotiators rather than Salespeople they would have ‘sold’ back to the vendors all the problems they would themselves already be familiar with in getting people to part with such serious money. They might also have pointed out that the kind of people who have thousands to spend on a child’s toy with the inevitable transience of children’s passions, are not necessarily the kind of people flogging round a Baby Show with the hoi polloi looking for a bargain. (Their sentiments – not mine). They needed a bottom line from the vendors and to get it they would have had to construct a reason for them to give it e.g. sharing the benefit of marginal sales equally. For the vendor the more horses they get out there the more their beautiful horses would sell themselves to admiring friends and relations who want the same thing. For the Baby Show, either don’t choose the rocking horses or screw the margin: get 5 or 6 horses out there at better than cost as a ’special one-off  Baby Show price’, exploit the publicity and wait for the on-sales to come through. Then you can hold your margin: e.g. by limiting supply, “sorry these are all made to order by craftsmen and that takes time; if you want one soon it has to be at this price” etc etc.

I thought the birthing pool at about £70 had a lot of potential and James seemed absolutely right for selling it. I think they sold about 6 or 7: if they had focussed on that as their key product they really could have sold more. For under £100 just the pre-birth opportunities for relaxation, safe exercise, and floating away the constant drain of gravity would have made it a winner. They didn’t sell enough benefits. They had all their money on the horses – never a good place for money to be.

If not negotiating was the key failure of James’ team Lorraine was guilty of a real Lulu too. Not knowing that others would be selling the same product against you at the show was a novice mistake. That the other seller was undercutting you on price was plain stupid. Either you do a deal with the vendor for an agreed minimum price on the day and compete on selling skill or you demand the same buy-in price and then compete on price/value. The buggy was a good choice of product and they sold them well until word got round about the price disadvantage.

Lorraine’s struggle with the buggy was a set up for the cameras. If she was in trouble then Howard and/or Kate could have shown her. There was absolutely no reason for any one of the three of them to screw up opening and closing the buggy on the day in front of customers. That was just for us to have a laugh. The kiddie scrum cap wasn’t necessarily a dumb choice £16 is well inside the average anxious parent’s guilt limit. First question every time should have been: “is this your first?” Put all your effort into first time parents. By the time you’ve got 2 or more lids you begin to realise that in spite of the odd tragedy, toddlers are remarkably hard-wearing and you aren’t going to get a muddly scrum cap on to any kid with siblings to take the mickey of him.  As for getting all the kids into them – in your dreams.

That said Lorraine has blossomed since the departure of Pretty Phil and Howard is beginning to come into his own in the same way i.e get the aggressive blow-hards out of the way and reason and intelligence has a bit of room to breathe. Proven post hoc absolutely right about the Margate campaign poster last week Howard was positive, on the ball and committed this week. He Kate and Lorraine made a good team. Given the gigantic egos on The Apprentice when the number is odd, smart players long to be on the smaller team. Both Kate and Howard have good presentational skills, though Kate is on balance the better Salesperson. Horses for courses though: any project manager not putting Howard’s thinking and analytical skills to good use is being stupid. The crunch will come though when Howard is PM again. With only the non-aggressive James left he might just come into his own now. He at least has two strong points against Debra that she is bright enough to accept privately at least. If he can get her working with him that would be a managerial accomplishment of some weight. One has to say that might be more likely in the real world than on the show – Debra is playing the ‘game’ to the hilt.

An interesting week. If you watch for the fun of seeing unpleasant people behaving stupidly and getting their just come-uppance then it was a quiet show. However there are signs that some of the maturity that these young people probably brought to the show is beginning to come through now they have got past the ‘on-TV’ mugging and bragging.

I was very surprised that Ben went – he was this year’s ‘Michael’ the rough-edged, lots to learn but ballsy guy in whom Alan Sugar sees his younger self. I knock Sralan enough each week – so credit where it is due, he acted against his partial instincts this week and probably got a marginal decision about right. I really can’t see him employing Lorraine or James. Yas seems to me to be as good as the PM she’s got. Her instinct to bossiness seems to distract her when she’s in charge. However with Kate v Howard and Yas tucked in behind the two leaders it looks as if the interest in the series will last the course.

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Germany - two points

Eurovision Song Contest - Russia

“Ooohh Graeme, you’re such a bitch……but I like you.” (With apologies to Dick Emery). The pink pixie of presenters done good – in the end. Slick, technically stunning Russian production stripped away most of the ‘lose-the-will-to-live’ inter-song tourist board-style films that used to offer such rich pickings to Sir Tel’s smirky irony; so at the start our Graeme overdid it, saying just a little too much; like a radio sports commentator transferred to TV. What made Tel so good was his pacing: he let the surreal idiocy and solemn nationalistic self-parody of the filler Balham, gateway to the South travelogues induce a semi-comatose state and then would slide in a little killer sarcasm or wicked witticism that immediately dispelled the unutterable tedium and self-recrimination at watching at all. Tel gave us both an excuse and a rationale for watching this annual It’s A Knock-Out – The Musical.

I suppose Russia’s switch from building bloody great walls imprisoning dissident citizens to shamelessly flogging their own CD/DVD in the middle of this £30 million national PR-fest is a sign of progress – what counts I guess as a triumph for Capitalism. At least no one died: except an endless succession of national presenters with incomparably bad timing, incomprehensible jokes, a truly bizarre range of clothing and a universal attack of gush the Rush that must have made even Putin puke. If it is true as Graeme claimed that the Russian entry was mysteriously shoed-in at the last minute and just happened to feature the daughter of a Russian billionaire, it would seem there are some aspects of our victorious Capitalist system better left uncopied. Certainly one listened in vain for any musical justification for the depressing Mamo whose selling feature was apparently that pictures of the singer Anastasia aged as we watched. I know how she felt.

The voting was Graeme’s finest hour. If his razor sharp salacious bitchiness was broader and lacked some of Sir Tel’s style, it was nonetheless at times wickedly funny and occasionally inspired. Any qualms one had about this were immediately dispelled by the succession of infuriatingly smirky, twitchy, mugging, lip-pursing ‘presenters’ from all over Europe shamelessly milking every second of their, please God, one and only time on camera. “Come on get on with it”, “I wouldn’t mess with her” “no jokes from him tonight except those two enormous plastic ears” wasn’t the half of it. I particularly relished “that’s either a national costume…or a very bad dress.” Graeme saved many of his sharpest barbs for what we might call the horribly hirsute – “good God, for a billion viewers…he might have shaved” and the tonsorially terrible “he looks like a technician.” A number of ‘creatures’ were unmercifully mocked with a laser-like precision for which Graeme’s scabrous style was perfect.

The ‘contest’ was as usual a wonderful potpourri of the manic, the lunatic, the bizarre, the quirky and the quaint; all displaying a desperation to make an impact and be admired which lay some considerable distance beyond the line defining a matter of life and death. True the only real bit of charm of the evening was put to the service of a cute, catchy song that won Norway the crystal microphone and a multi-million £ bill for 2010. The youthful, fresh-faced Alexander Rybak grinned his way through Fairytale with an insouciant charm that genuinely lowered national boundaries, female ones at least, and made it the biggest-winning song in the history of the contest.  Meanwhile, a gentleman named Olafur Grimsson and 304,365 (July 2008) people clinging parlously to an apparently beautiful lump of ice in the North Atlantic breathed a collective sigh of relief when the other charmer of the evening, the delectable Yohanna came in an admirable but unmistakable second for Iceland. Almost bankrupted by the world financial crisis, Iceland’s President Grimsson must have been the only national political leader in Europe praying not to win, as the winner hosts next year’s show. In football parlance - for Iceland second was a result. 

The Russian producers did everyone proud; but you can induce a fair bit of pride for 30 million quid. Graeme breathlessly informed us that 30% of all the LED screens in the world were used in the set. That seemed and seems incredible. Easier to believe was the fact that perhaps 50% of the longest legged, underdressed, artificially wind-blown women in Europe were on display. Literally. Don’t get me wrong: the full depth of my pleasure at watching beautiful, slightly-dressed gorgeous women leaping about as they beautifully sing less than beautiful songs, has yet to be plumbed. But one couldn’t stifle the subversive thought that there ain’t much for feminists in the old EuroSonCon. Objectified sex-objects or what. At least it makes for an uncontroversial division of labour in most households: we guys do the ogling; you partners do the voting. Fair’s fair. We concede that ‘Fairytale Prince’ Alex’s victory reflects a triumph for feminine enfranchisement. But we guys are sanguine at your electoral success ladies: given the succession of beautiful women dressed to stir many delicious male fantasies from wind-blown beauty to gigantic, statuesque, and I do mean statuesque, impossibly blonde Swedes, we are graciously content just to have taken part – we’ll generously concede the winning to you.

With a set  only marginally larger than some of the participating countries, I did eventually succumb to amazement fatigue. So it was almost a relief when the sombre, safe, almost somnambulant Lord Webber accompanied the talented, but for me a little too knowing and contrived,  Jade,  in our best placing for over 5 years; his It’s My Time rolling in a creditable 5th.

Judging by the frenetic pace of this year’s show – singing to musical accompaniment has been re-designated as an Olympic Sport. Many acts looked like Pentathlon competitors doing all five events at once – with a bit of pole-vaulting and gymnastics thrown in so no one on stage stopped moving for second. There were bewildering moments: a fair-skinned, innocent-looking, blonde Albanian with the obligatory long legs was surrounded throughout by what looked like a blue worm and a couple of immensely athletic oompah-loompah’s in black. Germany’s Alex Swings did less well than expected despite the pleasing if gratuitous embasqued assistance of American Burlesque star Dita von Teese. In a vain effort to rouse the British public into conspiratorial anger, Graeme pointed out that the Finnish dance group Waldo’s People, were doing a Singin’ in The Rain scam with the leader miming while a mysterious woman at the back of the stage sung for her. Well I’m sorry Graeme but after this last week in politics, that’s far too small beer to get the already incandescent Brits going again. Let ‘em win for all we care – it’s one thing we don’t have to pay for at least. Perhaps the only thing left.

The much-vaunted de-politicization of the voting I guess only partly worked. Even with so-called music experts combining their independent judgement with their country’s popular vote, there were still some only too predictable preferences. Indeed one began to wonder whether the whole of the dismantling of the former Communist State of Yugoslavia was not just a plot to get multiple entries to the Eurovision Song Contest. We wish.

The contribution of events like this ‘song’ contest are just as opaque as sporting ones with regards to fostering knowledge and understanding between nations. I’d love to think so but while I can identify with Italian or Spanish footballers, empathise with French Rugby Players, and warm to Scandinavian skiers etc; despite the charm of many of the song contestants, one does come away from this weird televisual experience with the distinct feeling that there are more than a few of our European brothers and sisters who are a few bricks short of a load.

Et tu Grand Bretagne – I’m sure. Ain’t folk great?

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The Guerkin - green, vinegary and often tasteless

The Apprentice Week 8 - Margate Mission Muffed

Sugar’s increasingly capricious firing decisions and inconsistent rationale for them invites analysis. The promising Rocky Andrews was fired in week 2, partly on the argument that he was ‘too young’; yet the strikingly immature Ben, just 22 remains after some of the crassest remarks and dumbest behaviour the series has ever seen. Mature and personable Paula Jones led a project with confidence and sensitivity but was fired because of an arithmetic mistake made by someone else to whom she had delegated responsibility and which Ben couldn’t be bothered to check though asked to do so.

Last week Mona led a very successful team well with quiet assurance, displaying excellent selling skills. This week supposedly uncommitted to the task, as far as the pictures we saw were concerned she was at least as committed to their chosen theme of re-branding Margate to appeal to the Gay market, as was James who worked with her. She talked directly and openly to people in a Gay bar while James looked on embarrassed. Debra first bullied Howard out of the Project Manager role, later lying that she hadn’t. In a project where time management and execution were critical she refused to listen to anyone, drove things forward, yet despite being office based throughout, failed even to ensure their brochure was finished and then lied to professionals about it – to their intense irritation. How this was somehow supposed to have been Mona’s fault was utterly incomprehensible on the basis of what we saw on screen. Although as the only Gay member of the team, Howard would have been invaluable on the ground in Margate - so to speak - he was consistently right about the key aspects of their poster and brochure, but as in every episode so far, Debra just aggressively ignored all ideas and contributions except her own.

It is ironic indeed that perhaps the most blatant ‘one-trick-pony’ on the show, Sir Alan ‘flogger’ Sugar himself should fire someone with potential for many of the wider business skills he so manifestly lacks: skills in communication, judgement, sensitivity, psychological insight etc. There is no doubt this week that having grabbed control and totally screwing up the exercise of it, dreadful Debra should have got the boot – literally, very hard up her aggressive little backside.

Put past facts and recent decisions together and one is drawn towards certain conclusions. A toxic atmosphere is created on The Apprentice first by Sir Alan Sugar’s bullying, aggressive psychology then re-inforced by the Production Team manipulating and editing to stoke up this hostile, anxious, totally selfish ethos. This favours aggressive, arrogant personal and management qualities that mostly men are at home with. This corrosive atmosphere forces women away from a healthy and valuable assertiveness into emulating the male aggressive models which both escape the bullet and dominate both groups each week. Thus strong, assertive, competent women with genuine team-playing skills are driven to emulate masculine bullying arrogance just to survive. Debra is good at this because she instinctively has these attitudes and qualities anyway. For Mona, Paula, and last year Lucinda, they have to try to adapt to this environment and fail because it is an ethos at odds with their natural personal instincts and qualities: they can’t be themselves. The same dilemma is faced by less aggressive, instinctively cooperative, team-playing men like say Howard, Rocky, even James. James is an interesting case for he simply mops up Alan Sugar’s gratuitously rude, insulting, unjustified remarks week in, week out. And like all bullies, when he finds an easy target Sugar just keeps on doing it. The worst possible thing that could happen to James is to win this competition: a Faustian bargain he would come to deeply regret.

The task this week was interesting enough: how to re-brand Margate to attract more visitors. Neither team was frankly that good. The winners (Kate, Ben, Lorraine and Yasmine) decided on the slogan “See Margate through children’s eyes” and then produced a poster without a child in sight, excessive verbiage with no appeal to children, and a stupefyingly banal picture of the beach and the sea which could have been almost any seaside resort anywhere in the world. Their brochure also had zero child-created or child-focussed content. If they’d popped into a Margate Primary School and given the kids a drawing/painting competition about ‘How I see Margate’ and then offered a few little prizes for the best they could have had a poster and brochure that literally was what their theme required; the kids would have been thrilled and the people of Margate would have been tickled pink and on board from the start.

As the professional Marketer Martine Ainsworth-Wells remarked on TAYF later - Mona, Debra, Howard, and James had a more distinctive concept: targeting the Gay market was at least different, and apparently a rather tolerant-sounding Margate population, including officials, seemed quite up for it. They had some better pictures but didn’t seem to know how to use them – unable to pick one key image for the poster and the 10 words or so maximum needed for impact. Instead of pursuing an excluding strategy one wondered why they didn’t offer visual signals to Gays but pitch at everyone? Perhaps fewer words; better utilised Gay-flavoured pictures and something like “Everyone is welcome in Margate” or “Everyone likes Margate” or even “Margate welcomes you.” Despite their often victimised gender solidarity, a gradual liberation of attitudes surely makes many Gay people want to be seen as people first and Gay second.

The best idea, the best pictures, and yet an unfinished muddled, muddling brochure offending all the principles that Howard knew but could not get Debra to listen to. Firing Mona and keeping Barracuda Barr on board was pretty much Sralan’s worst and unfairest decision so far. Even Martine Ainsworth-Wells wanted to reach into her TV set and drag Debra out. Aggressive bullying wins again. It’s the only true consistency the old Sugar Lump has.

This format is getting tired. There are so many questions being raised about Sralan Sugar’s role and attitudes they too should come under some challenge. So why not have two parallel shows next season. Pick a progressive, real manager (Jamie Oliver would be a great choice) let each manager pick 16 from the thousands who apply each year. Then each Apprentice group, Sugar’s and the other, turn and turn about have to do exactly the same challenges - half picked by Sugar and half by his challenger. Let’s pitch diametrically opposed styles and attitudes to management against each other.

I know where my sympathies would lie and my money would bet. The final programme would have the leader of the winning group telling his opponent – “you’re fired.” Now that would be worth watching.

PS: with thanks to Colin-M for his helpful critical comments.

Many of you may have read the original version of this review. I have removed my opening comments regarding ethnicity because they might have been open to misinterpretation. I also got it wrong – the winner of the first series Timothy Campbell was black and runner-up Saira Khan was of Kashmiri background.

The actual argument in the back of my mind was cultural and psychological – not racial. I found myself wondering whether white Anglo-Saxon women in particular might emulate more easily the open aggression and arrogance that the general ethos of The Apprentice seems to reflect and reward. I wondered whether women on the show from other cultural backgrounds, whether religious or social, found it harder to embrace this overtly masculine model of behaviour simply because of the frequently radically different perception of women in their own cultures.

I don’t know how much, if any truth there is in these speculations but it was obviously not enough to just mention them without exploring them properly. I guess the irrationality of Mona’s removal this week against the clearly under-performing, much more culpable highly aggressive Debra, illustrated this contrast perfectly. If cultural differences affect female gender types, they presumably could affect men candidates in the same way. I can’t answer this question regarding candidates from say Muslim, Hindu, Afro-Caribbean, Asian etc cultures, I don’t know enough about them. However many of the most hateful, even despicable attitudes and comments on the show seem only too characteristic of a certain kind of recognisably British personality.

The relationship of these ideas to The Apprentice is that the rampantly arrogant, individualistic, aggressive personal style not only displayed by Sir Alan Sugar but it seems to me favoured by him week in and week out, is precisely the attitude to Business, Management, Leadership and Team-spirit to which I am most opposed. And that conception is almost exclusively associated with White Anglo-Saxon attitudes to business and personal achievement.

I hate it; reject it; and do not believe for one minute that it is the best way to go, still less the only way to go – whatever message odd, misjudged firings on The Apprentice may suggest.

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Ready to beam you up now Sir Alan

The Apprentice Week 7 - who was a pretty boy then?

Pretty men don’t like plain women. The reason is psychological not aesthetic. Guys like Philip have to make virtually no effort with lots, even most women. And those who hold out he can usually charm. But really plain women not only distrust such charm because they know it is not genuine in their case, or they have come to terms with men’s reaction to them and are immune to such manipulation. Pretty boys like Philip are afraid of plain women like Lorraine because they can’t control them. So used to getting his own way, without even breaking into a sweat, Philip felt threatened by Lorraine from day one. When ignoring, then dismissing her didn’t work he moved to aggression and attack. The profound weakness managerially with a guy like Philip is that he has never had to develop effective inter-personal skills to get people to like or listen to him. A necessary condition for learning those skills is the ability to listen, to hear, other people’s thoughts, feelings and ideas. Philip can’t do it – because he’s never had to.

The only uncertainty in my mind about the Philip, Kate, Ben splinter group of Ignite was whether Ben was an active or passive member of the plot; and how much was Kate, less Kute than Killer this week, in on the set up? Most people, including many on the show, were convinced as am I that the splinter group were happy for Lorraine to manage the project because they felt confident that if it went tits up, working together they could easily lay the blame at her door in the boardroom. They rightly sensed Sralan’s dislike of her. Unfortunately for the plotters, in a week where selling was even more than usual the name of the game and recorded in individual sales books, Lorraine sold more than anyone while the 3 amigos sold nothing and couldn’t, well at least didn’t, even manage to set up any appointments with buyers except Ben-I-didn’t–go-to-Sandhurst Clarke who managed one good appointment and then gave up knowing he could live off that for at least this week.

I think the three chums were perfectly happy to go along with a really dumb choice of available products to sell. They hardly even argued about it – given the people that’s a clincher. Target: lose the challenge. Objective: blame Lorraine for it. And it very nearly worked. You could see Sralan wrestling with himself, desperately wanting to fire Lorraine. It is poetic justice that he really couldn’t get away with it and then, having malingered his way through the task, Philip ‘last-strawed’ by getting stroppy and whingey with his nibsness. Not in my boardroom you don’t sunshine. On yer bike.

Philip’s excuse on TAYF after was classic: when the deliciously incisive Ruby Wax simply and easily filleted him of his unshakeable self-admiration and limitless self-esteem, his coded excuse was simple – it was all Kate’s fault. How? Well he’d let himself be distracted by her, become too involved with her. Thus he didn’t really fail, because he didn’t really try; and he didn’t really try because he let Kate put him off. Mark this one ladies – it’s as close as we guys get to cleverness about relationships. It’s a simple code: ‘I let her distract me’ = she distracted me’. Note the active/passive shift here – losing focus, failing to perform was something that happened to him, not something he did. He was helpless before her charms. The sin of commission here in philspeak, no sadly, guyspeak is Kate’s; at worst he was guilty merely of a sin of omission. He had a moment of weakness; his head was turned; he fell under her spell. He was ‘unmanned’. Ahhh luv him. He plays the ‘little boy lost’ ‘I’m just too romantic for my own good’ cards to perfection. And as women around the nation were just begging for an excuse to forgive him, and give him a cuddle, it worked pretty well. Bad guys even trot out this toxic little piece of male sophistry in court to try to excuse rape. It’s complete bullsh*t of course but I guarantee you that Philip’s pitch to the media which he will now exploit to the hilt, will be that he would definitely have won if only…..Kate. Why not? A guy who left a meteoric* career as an engineer to become an Estate Agent…is clearly blessed with incisive self-knowledge.(* meteor - useless, dense lump of matter that, having caused too much friction, burns itself out).

If he could have, Sralan would have happily fired Lorraine, he just knew he couldn’t. You can bet your bippy, whatever that is, he’ll get her soon. It’s lucky for her she did sell something because she was pretty dumb in other ways. If she was worried about the Kate/Philip link, why put them together? And only a lunatic manager would put Ben and Philip together to plot against you. Then with simple emotional obtuseness and inarticulacy, for absolutely no reason, she alienated and almost lost Yas who up to that point was working well with her. Two dumb products, poorly presented; the usual lack of thought and common sense; and over half the team sabotaging the task - the girl done good. But old Sugar Lump wants her out – so she’ll soon be gone.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Sugar Galaxy, on Planet Apprentice the Empire struck back. Although most of the products on offer were Dragon’s Den dropouts, Mona, Debra, Howard and James picked the two best for potential saleability but ignored their inappropriateness to the two big-store buyers Sralan had lined up for them. Heals aren’t big on cheap two-handed dog leads looking like the business end of a tandem bungee rope: or as Ruby Wax called it “a G-string for an elephant.” And all-in-one sleeping bag suits though innovative, my son made himself one to reduce heating costs, needed a targetted sell.

Mona demonstrated excellent personal and negotiating skills on the second straight-sell day. Eye-to-eye, smiling, simple and direct, she demonstrated that at least one apprentice understands that the art of selling is to bring someone to want to buy. The lumpy, ordinary-looking guy in the shop confronted with this beautiful, smiling, confident young woman was a gonner from the start – but Mona’s negotiation was nicely judged, gracefully executed and her inviting hand out ’shake, you know you want to’ assumptive close was exemplary. Watch this one guys – she knows a thing or two. Mona also became one of the few to survive the apprentice suicide note – “I am the best person to manage this task.”

Jolly James begins to look like a Labrador puppy cuckooed into a wolf pack. He had easily the best line of the week: bemoaning his failure to make appointments on the phone his “if I had been an undertaker, people would have stopped dying” was a classic. Howard was overawed by Dark Debra. Like one of those parasite fish who keep whale-sharks clean, he flitted about while she just gobbled up sales. “When do I get a go?” he whimpered, like a male preying mantis not knowing what having ‘his go’ would mean.

Sralan is building up to a self-made dilemma. This has been a poor year for guys. Only I-didn’t-go-to-Sandhust Ben is remotely his kind of guy though I suppose he might like an uncomplaining work-slave like James. But he’ll have 4 strong women left after he finds a reason to get rid of Lorraine. Like Claire last year, Dark Debra looks a shoe-in. But unlike Claire, DD hasn’t yet learned how to manage Sralan. She’s got to find a way to stop him being afraid of her. Not an easy task: she scares the sh*t out of me. Debra head to head with Mona now looks an intriguing contest.

The real truth of the Kate/Philip saga is not that she undermined him, he’d begun to believe his own publicity and blew it with a dumb plot against Lorraine. No the damage done by the ‘relationship’ was to Kate. She wasted manipulative energy on Philip that she had previously focussed on winning. Whether they remain in contact will depend on whether she’s the kind of woman who likes a guy just a little bit dumber than her. That one could go either way.

So it is the ‘cat-fights’ to come that look promising. Not just for the battles themselves but also because Sralan hates dealing with feisty, scrappy women. Excuse me folks I feel my schadenfreude coming on. Go get him girls.

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I'm too young to pay tax

Is Anybody There? – John Cowley

Is there a nation on earth more contemptuous or contemptible about the old than the British? Politically and socially we under-resource shamefully large numbers of the elderly literally to the point of starvation; or we freeze them to death. Politicians with a toxic self-serving sentimentality exploit them. We ‘vanish’ them: either literally into care home ghettoes or socially into isolating flats or their now decaying houses. We squander their experience, their insight and their wisdom. We dishonour lives which at this point in history looking back, faced death in a World War and the hardship of a bankrupt post-war Britain. Men and women who have faced more profoundly radical change in their work and personal lives than any generation in history, including the present generation, are lectured to and patronised by the snake-oil salesmen of business – gurus – for whom change is merely a product to sell not a reality that has been lived and successfully embraced. Then they are discarded because they are supposedly unable to adapt to change. They have raised families with a tithe of the material security of the present generation and given the frequent fecklessness of their children’s, my, generation many of them have raised a family twice.

As if the old haven’t suffered enough, they now have to be used, patronised and exploited as emotional wallpaper to provide Sir Michael Micklethwaite with a movie vehicle with which to try to massage a lead role Oscar out of Hollywood.

Golden Rule: never, ever trust British critics reviewing likeable British actors or supposedly heart-warming, poignant, touching ‘British’ films. Whether out of genuine but self-defeating desire to promote our financially dependent industry, or some mysterious form of contagious mindstorm, they take their brains out to lunch and don’t come back. Is There Anybody There? Has been described as ‘tender’, ‘sweet-natured’, ‘gentle’, ‘warm-hearted’ and ‘poignant’. Hogwash. (If you want the truth and don’t believe me, check out David Frear – Time Out New York; or Rob Nelson – Variety)

ITAT or as we might say I-TAT, is manipulative, meretricious, irredeemably condescending and emotionally shallow. One half-way decent performance manages to claw its way to the surface to escape burial in cardboard stereotypes and that is by a 13 year-old – Bill Milner from Son Of Rambow.

Alfie Elkins, Harry Palmer, Charlie Croker, Jack Carter, Frank (Dr, Bryant), Ray Say. What’s the difference between these Michael Caine roles and Dr. William Larch and the nominally challenged ‘Elliot’?

Many of you will get the films which illustrates my point. The first six characters above were in: Alfie (’66), The Ipcress File (’65), The Italian Job (’69), Get Carter (’69), Educating Rita (’83), Little Voice (’98).

These six for me at least, are indelibly memorable Caine roles: each in its way good enough for an Oscar. Each was a leading role. In contrast, the last two were in The Cider House Rules and Hannah and Her Sisters and won Caine his two Oscars - both in supporting roles. I can vaguely remember Elliot in Woody Allen’s over-rated chamber comedy of marital infidelity; Dr Larch I can bring to mind as little as my vague memory of the sentimental tosh of the film he was in.

I raise the question because 76 years-old Caine’s portrayal of 83 years old ex-conjuror Clarence in I-TAT has “please give me an Oscar” written all over it. Never a shrinking violet, our sometimes less than lovable Knight has been complaining bitterly about his punitive tax payments and the layabouts who he, judging by his remarks, solely supports in their idle life of luxury on the dole. Between these shaming and shameful observations Sir Michael has been touting himself for an Oscar for I-TAT. Forgive my less than deferent response to a Knight of The Realm but – on yer bike Mike: equally sincerely meant in both contexts.

I won’t get into the political thing lest you conclude my dislike of I-TAT is simple prejudice against Sir Micky, whereas in fact he is pretty peripheral to my contempt for the movie. I will simply express relief that all of Sir Michael’s begrudged money is going to support the undeserving unwashed. That means my meagre taxes can be directed towards helping to educate kids, save lives, keep people healthy, and supporting determined honourable people trying to make ends meet or bringing up a child on their own. There is honour in paying your dues and I’m not talking about Knighthoods. I wonder what real percentage of total income the nouveau pauvre Sir Mick actually pays in tax. Not a lot of people know that. If even now it’s 40% I’ll eat my hat and he can fire his accountants.

Oh no dear reader, this film is bad in so many ways there is no need to resort to prejudice to demonstrate its inadequacies.

Everything in this film is knowing: from conception, screenplay, casting down to Michael Caine’s technically accomplished, emotionally empty performance. The only character in I-TAT who even begins to come to life is Milner’s 10 year old Edward trapped by his unqualified parents’ financial need to turn their house into a care home for the elderly in the ‘there is no such thing as society’ Thatcherite 80s. The rest are cardboard stereotypes, actors and characters alike who John Cowley plonks into scenes and moves about like full-sized Aardman Wallaces but with none of the animation, flair or affection.

Leslie Phillips does Leslie Phillips to evoke the ‘eeeuuw’ factor of the dirty old man; either Thelma Barlow or the late Elizabeth Spriggs to whom the film is dedicated, just sits around watching TV while popping bubble wrap like a semi-comatose Catholic with a plastic rosary; Sylvia Simms is there emoting something old and pathetic, I just can’t remember what; and finally the once menacingly powerful Peter Vaughan’s Bob whose Parkinsonian – James not Michael – tremors are a running gag. No I’m not making this up. This culminates in the movie’s big scene where Bob loses part of his anatomy to give Sir Mike a sight gag and Cowley his moment of PATHOS!

The only thing of any interest about the inmates of Lark Hall for Cowley is that they are old, pathetic, senile, ludicrous and pointless. They have no intelligence, personality, character (sic) or real life. I suppose we should be grateful he spares us the incontinence jokes - solid or liquid. Yet visually his film still seems to reek of stale urine. That is an achievement of sorts I guess.

To this collection of never-was-es, comes has-been travelling magician Clarence billeted to Lark Hall by the council in the time-honoured British tradition for the inconveniently indigent old of finding somewhere to dump them, forget them and house them on the cheap. Clarence is angry – at age, life, people, the world. We know this because with his excellent mastery of technique, Caine semaphores it to us as he is reluctantly drawn in to a kind of friendship with the slightly freaky young Edward. This offers the lad a father-substitute to his own life-worn Dad (David Morrissey) trying to recover his youth by having a crap haircut and hitting on Tanya their dogsbody helper.

Clarence offers Edward a break from lying under the beds with his tape-recorder preserving the sound of dying inmate breaths for posterity. The increasingly forgetful old derelict conjuror and the boy strike up a relationship with a join-up-the-dots predictability. Only Milner’s instinctive presence on camera mitigates Caine’s visible technique to create moments you almost believe in. Through a series of inconsequential events with a few good and many very sticky moments the movie emulates its characters by fading to an unremarked, unremarkable, unlamented end.

If tax over-burdened Sir Michael conjures an Oscar with Clarence I’ll eat my other hat. If you want to see a real film looking with imagination, insight, respect and genuine affection at the poignancy of time and age – a film that actually lives up to the fatuously misplaced claims for I-TAT, then go and see Benjamin Button.

We get most angry not with people we don’t like but with those we do, who let us down. And Sir Michael’s reactionary, self-important political pronouncements do him no credit. As a mere consumer of the Michael Caine public image he has always seemed a likeable down-to-earth-guy with an ‘own-man’ ironic independence and great sense of humour. A televised acting master-class he gave a few years back is one of the best, most insightful things I’ve ever seen about movie acting. Yet, and yet, perhaps with a pre-occupation with the money only we ex-working class lads can muster, he has mugged his way through so many crap films he has had to hold up that he has come to offend the very principles he illustrated in the master-class. His film star screen presence has gradually infected his performances. I-TAT looks like a stage play trying to get out. On stage this performance would work: on film one just wants to scream:

“Less Michael”…… “no less”…..”even less”.
“But I’m not doing anything now.”
“Perfect.”

Come on Mike – you must have one superb movie you can Direct. Don’t let this pap be your legacy: Alfie, Harry, Charlie, Jack, Frank and Ray will never forgive you. And nor will we.

Filed under: 1 star, Comedy, Drama, John Cowley, Philosophical | No Comments »