Nathalie and Markus

 Delicacy - David and Stephane Foenkino

I’m worried about Audrey. That girl is far too thin: painfully thin. I just don’t think she’s eating properly: not looking after herself. She needs feeding up and pampering for a couple of weeks. I’d offer but I’m not sure my wife would agree.

I’m also worried about me. I’m gonna get drummed out of the critics’ club: not only does nothing much happen inDelicacy; it’s all talking; no one is seen getting killed; not a gun in sight; and the clinchers critic-wise – it’s intimate without being sexy; romantic without being passionate; charming without being arch. And I loved it.

I’ve pondered long and hard over the years why no other nation on earth appears to be able to make films about love in all its forms as well as the French. My only conclusion, provisional, to this almost paradoxical fact, is itself a paradox: the French know that love is far too serious to be taken seriously.

Nathalie (Tautou), beautiful, gamine (a bit too gamine Aud – kick the diet) is in love with François: articulate and stubbly; sexy and funny; strong yet vulnerable. The kind of guy that makes we normal blokes not so much feel at a disadvantage as give up the ghost altogether. We mere mortal men can make a stab at being sensitive and protective; we may even be able to fake a little bit of exciting non-menacing danger. But guys like François manage to be both at the same time. Effortlessly. And the ones that aren’t actually French seem in this alluring sense, to have something of Frenchness about them. Be honest: isn’t there something distinctly non-American, very European; no let’s admit it – French – about say Johnny Depp? Calm down you girls at the back please.

As for French women: well I’d better not go there. Based on a long list of favourite actresses at least, they are both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Suffice to say that if I were in a sinking hot air balloon with Audrey, Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche and to save ourselves one person would have to be sacrificed – I’d jump. And die happy.

Nathalie and François’s idyllic romance is tragically ended when he is mown down by a truck while out jogging (really bad for your health, all that fitness nonsense). She shuts down and buries herself and her grief in work. Her focus and commitment leads her obviously enamoured, unhappily married boss Charles, to promote her to a project leader.

Resisting all offers, especially from the boss; in a moment of uncharacteristic madness, having asked her grungy, gauche, diffident Swedish employee Markus (François Damiens underplaying superbly) to come and discuss a business issue with her, she gets up from her desk, walks over to him and kisses him long and passionately; then returns to her desk, back in boss-mode as if nothing untoward had happened. A Saga Noren moment.

I’m not sure what the Swedish, or even the French, for gobsmacked is – but that is literally what Markus is. In any language.

The sole advantage we regular guys have over the Depps and the Clooneys of this world is that we can enjoy the delicious fantasy of a beautiful woman just randomly doing what Nathalie does to Markus: they are denied the frisson of such dreams because this kind of thing actually happens to them in real life. Poor schmucks. I pity them. Don’t know what they’re missing.

If the beginning of Nathalie and Markus’s relationship is the stuff of fantasy, what follows is even more so. As the bewildered looks of disbelieving friends and colleagues demonstrate, beautiful, strong women like Nathalie onlysettle for men like Markus, leaving their instinct for passion and danger in relationships to be played out in fantasy. And yet: the lightness of touch, in the writing and the playing, of this slowly building connection begins to acquire a palpable sense of warmth and intimacy that belies the cynicism of our conventional expectations. Asked by the jealous Charles why he loves Nathalie, Markus replies “because she enables me to be the best version of me that I am capable of being.”

For me, the ending of this subtle little film is a delight: perfectly judged and fully justifying the risk in calling a filmDelicacy in the first place.

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Silk

Silk – BBC1 Tuesdays 9.0pm

If you didn’t see the first series of this Peter Moffat written legal series – don’t make the same mistake again.

Based on this 1st of 6 – superb. It promises to be as good as anything you’ll see for many a day. Apart from the writing, the characterisation is acute and the playing across the whole cast nigh on faultless: led by Maxine Peake who is laying down work to justify the judgement that she might just be the best actress currently working in TV.

A treat. If sometimes, as this week, an uncomfortable one.

The Lion

He is an old lion
but he still
kills his own food

The old lion lies languidly
before another parting sun
He has watered
he has fed
Contentedly he stretches
to his full
still powerful extent

He has hunted
the guile of age
disdaining the extravagance
of youthful speed

He has satisfied
his hungry love of life
with time-defying pride
in the courage
passion and desire
to stay alive
now his lioness
has gone

The old lion
resolved
when he could
no longer
kill his food
he’d pick a fight
to lose

Saga Norén - Sofia Helin

Snapshot of Saga Norén  - the wonderfully perplexing, infuriating, disturbing female detective at the heart of this superb drama

Noren is an autistic Swedish detective driven by detached logical analysis, and an emotionally dysfunstional approach to human relations. Martin Rhode is an emotional Danish detective married to Mette, and who, feeling his masculinity undermined by a recent vasectomy and to prove his continued virility, has uncharacteristically responded to the advances of a beautiful wealthy woman (Charlotte) recently widowed by one of the men connected to the serial killer case Martin and Saga are investigating. Saga is perplexingly direct and disarmingly but alarmingly honest and outspoken.

Martin has confessed his disloyalty to his wife Mette who has thrown him out. With nowhere else to go he is sleeping on a camp bed in Saga’s flat.]

In the car on the way to interview a suspect.

Saga: Is Mette ok with you staying at mine?
Martin: She doesn’t know but it ‘ll be ok
S: She doesn’t think we’ll have sex?
M: Not at all
S: Why not?
M: You’re not my type
S: Have you got a type? Charlotte and Mette are very dissimilar. (Pause)
Will you get a divorce?
M: No it will work out
S: Have you worked it out before?
M: Yes
S: So you’ve cheated before?
M: What the hell are you up to?
S: Just chatting….as colleagues do.
M: Don’t. You’re no good at it.
S: Am I annoying you now?
M: No.
S: Sometimes I do?
M: Yes you can be very annoying.
S: More than others?
M: In a league of your own.
Why do you ask? You don’t care what people think of you.
S: No, it’s important what you think of me. (Pause)
Does Mette cheat as well?
M: No not at all.
S: I’ve read that in unhappy relationships both often seek happiness elsewhere.
M: We’re not unhappy.
S: Then why do you cheat?
M: Stop right there!
Do you really care what I think?
S: Yes.
M: Then give it a rest..thank you.
S: (matter of factly) – OK.

Later:Saga has to tell her team of detectives who think they have solved the case that they have the wrong man and are back at square one. Her team are sitting together when she enters the room.

S: The case isn’t over. Why are you sitting here?
D’s: We’re taking a break.
S: Really?
D’s: A coffee break.
S: What are you talking about?
D’s: Nothing special. We’re just chatting.
S: Really?
(S draws up a chair and joins the group around the table. An uncomfortable silence ensues. After and embarrassingly long pause Saga breaks the silence).

S: I got my period this morning.

The informal atmosphere evaporates. They get up and get on with their work.
Saga looks perplexed but also get’s up and goes back to work.

This is more fun than the hunt for the killer!

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Tell Laura I (Love) Fire Her

The Apprentice (8)  - Connor Sores of Art

A few years ago the Australian medical community were pondering a problem: they were receiving a worrying number of complaints that significant numbers of hospital doctors, especially surgeons and most especially Consultants, were remote and detached; lacking in warmth and empathy.

This will come as no surprise to many of you who have been treated by Consultants; many of whom would make God feel inadequate and who manage to induce an acute sense of guilt in me that my culpably trivial ailment is taking up nanoseconds of their infinitely valuable time. My star of the genre was the gentleman who swooped up to my bed of pain followed, as most of them usually are, by a skein of deferential nurses in full v-formation. To establish the puny facts of my slipped lumbar disc, this star of the medical firmament spent 5 diamond-studded, gold plated minutes mystifyingly interrogating my feet. Having not made eye contact with me once during this peremptory process, He swooped off, his starchy acolytes remaining in a precise formation that would have been the envy of the Red Arrows. We only needed the two rear trainee nurses to let off coloured smoke canisters for the performance to be complete.

So it’s got nothing do with being Australian. However, if the problem is occupationally generic not ethnic; the response of the Australian medical establishment was as interesting as it was wise. They rejected the assumption that all doctors as part of their training should undergo additional classes in psychology or even neuro-linguistic programming. That had been tried and hadn’t worked. Instead they introduced a study module centred on literature and drama: they studied great novelists like Tolstoy, George Eliot and the Brontes; and dramatists like Shakespeare. The rationale, which seems to me to be insightful, was that these people did not need moretechniques; they needed to think about people, relationships and emotional insight in complex, disturbing situations.

I have no idea whether the initial success of this genuinely left-field thinking was sustained but I like to think it was.

This Michael Cainism – ‘not a lot of people know that’ – came to mind as I watched this week’s Apprentice. The emotional immaturity of the candidates on the show is clear every year but never ceases to surprise me when ostensibly most of them have either achieved some degree of success in business or at least successfully faking such success on a CV. Reminded of the Australian doctor dilemma, it struck me that there were parallels: both groups seem to think that a set of techniques unilaterally applied with enough arrogance and determination – not only must succeed, but constitute the only way to succeed: you’re always in full control and the patient, customer is a passive participant in the process with nothing relevant to say. Talk-and-tell for Apprentices always trumps listen-and-persuade. The otherwise admirable Tom this week demonstrated this fallacy to perfection: one could see the look of scarcely concealed contempt on the part of the artists when assailed, nay assaulted by Tom’s self-important ingratiating, name-dropping style. He asked little and listened to nothing. Not surprisingly the most saleable artist, sardonically marketing as ‘Pure Evil’ went for the subtler approach of Gabrielle and Co: it wasn’t really better – it was just less crass.

The Apprentices had to sell themselves, to the artists; before they could sell the art, to the customers. Tom’s saving grace was that post hoc he had the self-awareness to realise that he’d probably screwed it up and even why.

Tom was clearly what Steve memorably described as a Connor Sore of street art and artists; or in Steve’s definition “nutcases who’ve got a bit of genius”. That’s not bad. Certainly Tom did pretty well pitching to his Renault corporate clients, asking the right questions and for once listening to the answers. It is a good job he isn’t a Formula One fan or he’d have gotten up their noses too. Out of her depth throughout this week, Laura at least demonstrated the common sense to shut up when she obviously had nothing to say. Although I think she was rightly this week’s sackee, her contribution to the selling evening wasn’t that awful; despite Adam’s apparent success with his “I can do you a couple of Kilos of Art with 20% off” approach. I’d have thought Art, even street Art was a demonstrably ‘soft’ sell and Laura did circulate, chat and establish a friendly atmosphere. If, as it should have been, a team-selling ‘Azhar’ (strategy) Laura did ok. It is one of the regular contradictions of the The Apprentice that the candidates are enjoined to display teamwork and then measured purely on individual results. Laura could have done better but she rather represented a challenge to another underlying assumption of Barley and the Beeb producers – that a good salesman can sell anything: well it is true that a good ‘flogger’ can flog anything – but that’s not always the same thing.

In the all-pervasive ‘show-don’t-tell’ department Jade was only the most recent Apprentice who failed to recognise that propositions like “he/she is a born leader” have no legitimate first-person singular form of expression.

Each year we are bewildered that the 16 chosen candidates can possibly be the best that are available: but there are usually one or two delusional megalomaniacs to make us long for their downfall to be swift, complete and total. Truth is this year there is not much genuine talent on show and the hubris is definitely of the self-consciously unconvincing variety.

Tom and Nick look the best bets left: though if Adam doesn’t become the Sugared One’s partner there is a distinct possibility that he’ll adopt him instead. The talent gap is most noticeable this year in the women – I still think the best of them was fired in the first week. Gabrielle is likable but disorganised; Jade is neither a born leader nor sufficiently numerate to excel; and Jenna’s skills are a bit narrowly based. Stephen has fallen into the salesman’s trap: believing his own sales pitch even when, indeed especially when, it manifestly isn’t working. He seems instantly devoted to the first fatuous thought that enters his head – like the half-arsed idea of sticking his artist out in the yard all evening and not letting anyone know he’s there. Banksy eat your heart out. He’s also a bit leaden in the think-on-your-feet department: his response to the ungreeted, ignored, drinkless executive of their Beefeater Gin corporate client’s rueful “we thought we might get a gin and tonic” of “we wish” being a classic of the genre.

It is hard to see this rather humdrum bunch setting the last half of the series alight. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the Producers are trying to think up something to re-energise what is beginning to look like a pretty tired formula.

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She is There

When sleeplessly I tease my mind
She is there
When tangled threads of life unwind
She is there
When sweet-death music turns my head
She is there
When I embrace indulgent dread
She is there

When cherished pain my heart enfolds
She holds me close
When the story of my doubt unfolds
She holds me closer still
When self-destruction beckons me
She calms my soul
When only love can set me free
She loves unselfishly

When I believe I have no worth
She trusts in me
When my time comes to leave this earth
She’ll honour memory
Until that time this loving friend
Returns my love
Lighting up my life until its end
For she is always there

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov: 1873-1943

Filarmonica Della Scala 30th Anniversary programme of music by Rachmaninov  – Conductor Matteo Franceschini

I have seen opera and National Theatre drama in the special presentations that are regularly beamed to cinemas across the world. This is the first classical music concert I have seen in this way and it is if anything the best so far.

Occasionally these presentations are re-showings of filmed live performances. While a good way to see notable, first class music and drama, it is the live transmissions that carry a special quality of immediacy, even danger and get closest to actually being at the performance.

This concert was a case I point: beamed live from the extraordinarily beautiful La Scala in Milan one had a very keen sense of active participation in a live event. In fact technically, shot in full HD both images and sound were of the highest quality. Not only that but with 7 cameras and pre-planned, live editing carefully choreographed to the music, the sense of intimacy and immediacy of involvement was far, far greater than I have ever experienced in a live concert hall.

Superb direction takes you into the heart of the orchestra, where the sheer visceral physicality of playing is palpable. As a non-musician this must be as near as one can ever get to a sense of what it is like to actually play a musical instrument. We also get a powerful sense of involvement in the passionate expressiveness of the conductor (23-year-old prodigy Matteo Franceschini); not just in the broad physicality of his body language, especially of course arms and upper body. This involvement is available in the concert hall, though to a less intimate degree even if in the front seats. However, unique to this form of presentation we see facial expressions and the extraordinary experience of the intensity in the conductor’s eyes. We both see and sense at first hand the ever changing-dynamic of the conductor’s breath-taking simultaneous connection with the members of the orchestra and can feel the connection of this with the shared passionate engrossment with the music.

I learned more about the structure of the musical forms – here the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony – than I have ever learned from reading and previous concerts I have attended. The editing choreography showed for example how a motif, theme or melody was introduced by one instrument, taken up in turn, first by other single instruments, then on through whole sections of the orchestra; strings, woodwind, brass and of course eventually, all these sections literally in concert to build either to say or crescendo or to the diminuendo that presages the introduction to a melodic theme. Anyone familiar with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini knows that a dazzling display of virtuoso solo piano sections, picked up and developed by the orchestra, build through a series of crescendos to a moment of silent pregnant pause, achingly anticipatory of the inevitability of the opening, almost inaudible, first notes of one of the most beautiful melodic themes in music. I have never yet heard this transition in performance without tears in my eyes and for those who take a superior attitude to Rachmaninov’s more accessible melodies like this one – all I can feel is sympathy. Yes it is romantic and tuneful; but not to sense the underlying melancholic sinews, the sheer Russian soul in his music is for me at least, to miss something deep about why so many people have always and will always, love his music.

The concert opened with the world premier of a contemporary piece Ja Sam, (Rachmaninov’s childhood nickname), apparently inspired by his music. I confess this was a bit beyond me though interesting. After the Rhapsody took us to the interval; the soaring romanticism of the 2nd Symphony made a beautifully satisfying second half.

Whatever your view of Rachmaninov, my underlying point here is that the absolutely distinctive intimacy of the filmed close-up image with which we are so familiar in movies, here adds a dimension to our absorption and involvement in the music which simply is not available to the regular concert-goer.

All the diverse and blending visual textures of shining brass; glowing, grained woodwind woods; fragile bows; vibrating percussion are superbly and absorbingly photogenic without distracting from the music for one second. We see the elegant, elongated fingers crowned surprisingly with run-ragged nails, of young piano Virtuoso Alexander Romanovsky; racing, no dancing, in an impossibly fast, controlled intricacy that defies belief. We are struck by the incongruity of the oddly sideways indirectness of playing the flute; as we look at the chaotic scramble of pipes that is the French Horn we wonder not just how such an instrument was ever conceived, but also having been created why almost surreally, it is actually played with the player’s fist stuck in the outlet for its sound. Images abound; evoking thoughts of the miraculously diverse application by music and musicians of the simple scientific principle of friction.

Apart from the special sense of being physically present at a performance whose pleasures are often as much social as artistic; I am tempted to suggest that the engrossing, intimate involvement that almost defines the cinematic experience, makes this way of experiencing great musical performance absolutely unique and in many ways preferable to physical attendance at the concert.

Test it for yourselves: the next Filarmonica concert to be broadcast live to cinemas in on Monday 21st May and includes Beethoven’s 4th Symphony and some Italian pieces. More precise details should soon appear on the Cineworld websites.

This was a revelation to me. I cannot recommend more highly this way of experiencing in a sense at first hand, the excitement and satisfaction of great music – at remarkably modest prices (£14 for adults).

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Sofia Helin as Saga Noren in The Bridge

The Bridge/Bron/Broen – written by Bjorn Stein (Update)

This just gets better and better. In Saga Noren, Stein has created a female detective to rival Denmark’s now rightly famous Sara Lund from The Killing series. As superbly played by Sofia Helin with an at times disturbingly evocative deadpan demeanour, this autistic, emotionally detached character is becoming as intriguing and mysterious as the tight, intricately plotted serial murders she is investigating with such rigour. Perhaps slightly prettier than Lund but less attractive, what unites these two disparate characters is obsession: the unstoppable focus of the hunter.

As Saga’s Danish counterpoint partner Martin Rhode, Kim Bodnia is wonderfully grungy and gruff, comfortingly thick set and amusingly bewildered by the paradox of Saga’s incisively analytical reading of their serial killer prey’s motivation which owes nothing to intuition or emotional insight. He mischievously teases her instinctive conformity to rules and procedure with unorthodox, dubiously legal short cuts in their pursuit of the killer.

Superbly shot, impeccably edited, there is consummate technical expertise up there on the screen with a brooding, menacing atmosphere you could cut with a knife and the unlikely creation of an iconic star in the beautiful Øresund, the longest road and rail bridge in Europe stretching 5 miles between Copenhagen and Malmö. The Øresund offers a powerful visual metaphor for both the physical link and cultural distance between two very different Scandinavian countries: a difference perfectly mirrored in the characters of Saga and Martin. This is a drama superbly conceived and beautifully realised.

I sure as hell hope BBC4 has something lined up to replace The Bridge in a couple of weeks’ time as it’s going to leave a painful void in Saturday night’s viewing.

Marley

Marley – Kevin Mcdonald

Kierkegaard wrote:

“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

Again:

“Be that self one truly is.”

And:

“During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”

Having fathered 11 children from 7 different women Robert Nesta Marley, in his brief 36 years on this earth fulfilled all these injunctions from the father of Existentialism – though perhaps often in ways of which the resolutely Christian Philosopher would not have approved.

There are individual human beings whose lives take on a significance that transcends themselves; they acquire a symbolic force that somehow captures something about human beings in general in their struggle to cope with the truth of their own mortality and the pursuit of joy.

Historically these were often exemplary figures, usually religious, from Jesus and the institution of sainthood, to Bhudda and similar iconic figures in other world faiths. Such figures were used to mitigate the fear of death with a promise of a hereafter and to enjoin a way of living that would earn a place in heaven.

The mere facts of Bob Marley’s domestic life imply an inescapable level of pain and distress for those who loved him at least equal to what were clearly times of great love and joy. Kevin Mcdonald’s thoughtfully structured film about Marley’s life both captures and implies this contradiction along with many others that his choices created. There is a moment when his adopted daughter Sharon, strong and even a little bitter, about her mostly absentee father whom she clearly adored, almost breaks down for the first time as she says that even at the point of his death, she could not have him to herself, be with him alone. Icons, heroes, however flawed, belong to everyone. The Faustian bargain of fame.

Marley, in a sense only ever a young man, certainly took the risk Kierkegaard identifies and perhaps in Mcdonald’s inevitably doomed but valiant effort to capture a free spirit on film, we see a man who learned to know and to be truly himself. As we know, our capitalist culture has a genius for cultivating and promulgating myths, investing in icons and milking them for profit: from Jesus to Dylan; Elvis to Che Guevara.

The role of the Rastafarian faith in Marley’s life was obviously very important to him but is perhaps the most perplexing, even distancing element in this film. There seems something strangely arbitrary, almost quixotic, about the apparent deification of the tiny, insignificant seeming Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. That this exotic belief system with its use of Ganja (marihuana) exercised a fascination far outside its Rastafarian roots is perhaps not surprising. His political influence upon the bitterly and bloodily warring factions of Jamaica appears to have sprung more from his fame and celebrity than any systematic activism.

But amidst all the mythology and hype, the core of this quite extraordinary performer seems to me to be captured by the first of Kierkegaard’s remarks above: the one thing upon which a sense of purity of heart in this hypnotically charismatic man rested – was the will to make music. It was the constant around which the maelstrom of a chaotic life revolved.

Music is the unmediated art: analysis, intellectual appreciation and description are all secondary, post-hoc; music is primal, visceral, it strikes straight to our senses and as some may say, our soul. Musicians do not write or create music – they channel it; shape it, organise it to make it accessible to us; to help it connect to each of us, and to one another. The possibilities of music derive from the contingent fact that could be otherwise, that human responses to certain sounds displays a pattern, common to and therefore, shared with others much as we might say similar consistencies of response to different light wavelengths enables us to develop an agreed language of colours.

With immense sophistication, developed over centuries, musical notation represents these patterns to us and provides a mechanism through which instinctive responses can be developed into conscious, methodical, enhanced responses. That we can talk of the radically different responses generated say by a Minor as opposed to a Major key does not derive from the musical notation that represents it: the musical notation can only represent it because as a matter of fact we display the distinctively different responses to each. This is a primary experience – not based upon, or explained by something else. Wittgenstein: “explanation has to stop somewhere.”

Reggae music demonstrates this phenomenon in a very distinctive way: for its unmistakable and immediately recognisable, repetitive rhythm seems to harmonise and synchronise with our heartbeat. Through this, reggae rhythm takes on a sense of continuity and inevitability that echoes the life-giving, life-sustaining pumping of blood around our bodies. And just as our hearts may race with excitement or fear or both, so changes to the cadence of reggae can express a range of emotions and experiences.

The metaphor of the heart is deeply entrenched in our language – from ‘heartfelt’ to ‘sweetheart’, from ‘heart-warming’ to ‘heart-broken’. When it is said that Reggae music comes from the heart there is a sense in which this is both literal and metaphorical.

It is clear that women figured prominently in Marley’s life. Judging by the incredibly strong, feisty, even powerful women we see talking of their time and relationship with him, it would be a brave man, or woman, who tried to portray any of them as victims. There is however a powerful sense of indulgence towards what was obviously a self-centred emotional life. Particularly impressive is Rita Marley Prendergast mother of 3 of Marley’s children and Sharon, a daughter from another relationship but whom Marley adopted when he and Rita married. Cuban born, Rita sung in Marley’s backing group the ‘I Threes’ and it is clear that their bond was centred as much upon a shared passion for their music as anything else.

Previously unseen footage of Marley’s life includes many friends and members of The Wailers with whom he found world-wide fame. That many, indeed most of the people who knew him best and talk on camera about him are now dead adds a poignancy to Mcdonald’s film. The scenes from the last year’s of his life, battling cancer take on a touching incongruity as this man of the sun, whose music was so expressive of his Jamaican roots, sought treatment in Josef Issels’ controversial Bavarian cancer treatment clinic amongst unfamiliar mountains snow and ice.

Fittingly Mcdonald chooses this painful period and hostile setting to feature perhaps Marley’s most evocative and eloquent composition – Redemption Song. One can see why this especially became an anthem for the poor not just of his native Jamaica but in Africa and around the world. It’s lyrics also provide a fitting epitaph for a flawed man who truly willed one thing – to make music.

Won’t you help to sing, these songs of freedom
Cause all I ever had, redemption songs
All I ever had, redemption songs
These songs of freedom, songs of freedom.

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Azhar falls short

BBC The Apprentice (7) – Smelling What’s Selling

“You have sent a message to Britain” – Lord Sugar on his favourite task in The Apprentice. The achievement this praise recognised was that 10 bright young people had fetched up at a general wholesale warehouse, bought £150-worth of randomly selected merchandise and then flogged it off as quickly and profitably as possible either in the street or in a shopping mall, in market-trader style. They then re-invested in re-stocking being enjoined to ‘smell what sells’. Project Manager Nick took this advice and his team won; Jade ignored it and her team lost. On all levels the fundamental message of The Apprentice is – do what Lord Barley tells you.

The winning Sterling team were further praised for their ability to buy self-tanning spray at £2 and sell it for £10. Despite Phoenix’s narrow defeat their talent in buying electronic bugs for 60p and selling them, largely to children, for around £3 was lauded.

This was a fairly entertaining bit of fun. A largely likeable bunch of Apprentices had a good go at it and while those not from buy cheap/sell dear backgrounds responded well outside their comfort zones, none could quite match Adam’s instinct for Dell-Boy chat and everyman bonhomie. Ricky and Steve may not offer much of a threat at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe comedy awards for their Mop Sketch – though lost in the burble of sales-speak it was a nice moment of over-selling when Ricky offered a lady moppist the special extra benefit of personally selecting her own individual mop from the dozen on show. The lady punter demonstrated perfectly that there are undefined limits to the odd conspiracy of half-truth in the impulse buy process by mocking the so-called benefit with – “they’re all the same.” Just so. Sub text: ‘I know this is cheap tat and I don’t mind you ripping me off – but don’t take the piss.’

Jenna seems so have undergone an ad hoc Thatcherite voice-job; her originally teeth-gratingly shrill somewhere up t’North whine having now modulated into a surprisingly effective instinctive friendliness at low volume settings. She was another one in her natural comfort zone this week in flogging cosmetics. I must add cosmetics to ladies shoes and handbags as areas of transactional analysis beyond the intellectual reach of a mere male. But results speak for themselves.

Nick looks increasingly impressive: he has that unflappable confidence which is the real reason rich and financially dedicated parents send their sons to Public School. But he carries this off-putting privilege lightly, venting his inner discomfort at the performance aspects of the Apprentice role with a distinctly louche flick of that rugger-chap mop of hair.

Gabrielle becomes more of a charmer week on week with that sunny-day smile and a nice line in whimsical creativity – discovering that if you are going to sell beard-trimmers to an 80% female demographic you may need a more confidential and private setting than a shopping mall. So the offendingly masculine non-movers (commerce imitating life) where transformed in a moment’s flight of fancy, into bikini-line trimmers. This, like the cosmetics, not only enters into the impenetrably, er….profoundly, esoteric world of women’s grooming, but in this instance operates in an area of feminine anatomical geography as fascinating as it is terrifying for the average bloke. I didn’t see any evidence of the promotion of the sub-text benefits of the re-designated beard-trimmer for more creative efforts at follicle-fashioning – but it doesn’t mean they weren’t there. I suppose a “just in from Brazil” sales pitch would have been a bit crass.

Laura stayed under the radar this week but does need to do something notable soon. Tom is the other quietly impressive candidate, assessing what needs to be done in a task that isn’t being done and doing it – this week controlling the numbers. He graciously accepted a role in ‘three-for-the-chop’ when it became clear that Jade had no idea either how to play the Apprentice game or the clarity of business judgement to have picked Laura instead.

Pure speculation of course but my hunch is that certainly ‘Call-me-Lord’ and perhaps other participants are under some behind the scenes pressure to try to avoid an all-male competition. Certainly Azhar’s failure was more one of vocabulary and communication than business sense. Jade was all at sea: not even being aware that she had what Azhar was constantly accusing her of not having – a strategy. This is instructive: it seems counter-intuitive that someone can have a strategy but not recognise it as such. Jade’s strategy was clear and diametrically opposed to Barley’s advice: she re-stocked with the same general spread of products as the initial buy, ignoring the experience of what was selling and concentrating there. This is a perfectly legitimate approach – and got close to winning. But the advantage of having a clear appreciation of having adopted a certain strategy firstly makes it possible to communicate to those you manage what you are trying to do, how you want to achieve it and thus providing the thread of common purpose around which team-members can contribute fully to overall collaborative success. The other advantage of this clarity of thinking and purpose is that you have something against which to measure your results as you go along.

As Jade didn’t discipline her thinking about her leadership and approach to the task with a recognised strategy she could communicate, her team were constantly having to pester her to tell them what to do next. By the same token Azhar, as is only too common, conflated a planned method to succeed, a strategy; with the plan of action designed to implement it. Sound strategies can fail because of poor implementation; just as a well-founded strategy can fail in practice because the facts upon which it was formulated were wrong; or more often, the volatility and unpredictability of customer response and other factors renders it redundant.

The lesson for Jade was: unless you know you are following a plan you can’t communicate it, test whether it is working; and thus change it if necessary. The lesson for Azhar was that he needed to be clearer: he had two legitimate objections to Jade’s approach: first that the generalist re-stock was the wrong strategy; or that theimplementation of that strategy wasn’t working.

We may be discovering The Apprentice Paradox: the nicer the candidates are; the more civilised is their behaviour to one another; the less fun we get as viewers. I have always argued that for me just as for everyone else, schadenfreude lies at heart of its appeal: we enjoy, perhaps shamefacedly, watching other people make fools of themselves and getting their often well-deserved come-uppances. The further The Apprentice gets from being a Game Show – the less entertaining it becomes: the more one takes it seriously as having anything much to do with business, the more the limitations of the concept and Lord Sugar’s presentation of it become clear.

What does Lord Sugar’s ‘message to Britain’ mean for our economy? A ‘Poundworld’, ‘Everything below 99p’ High Street or on-line market. The task he was so enamoured with was predicated upon immensely earth-resource wasteful, speculative, largely 3rd-world manufactured consumer baubles. Buy ‘em cheap, sell ‘em dear is a parasitic business philosophy: it risks and often does entail affluent First world consumers being endlessly coaxed into buying things they don’t need and often don’t really want, that have been produced by the underpaid, badly treated, 3rd world poor. That’s not a viable, let alone worthwhile message – to anyone.

As Azhar remarked – “it’s not just a question of selling is it?” Quite so.

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