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The Apprentice BBC – Men and Women behaving badly to make money and make us laugh

Tweet      The Apprentice (1) – Mission (sadly) Possible “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to scour the land to find: irreducible egotists with a delusional conviction of their superior abilities and talent, devoid of any objective evidence to justify it and which is disproved by every self-aggrandising word that escapes […]

BBC The Apprentice – The Final: Ricky gives them what Thor.

Tweet        The Apprentice – The Final: Ricky gives them what Thor.   Professor Michael Sandel*, in his excellent new book What Money Can’t Buy – The Moral Limits of Markets makes some very useful distinctions. Both professional Economist and Philosopher, Sandel remarks: “without quite realizing it we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. […]

BBC The Apprentice (7) – Smelling What’s Selling Azhar: falls short.

Tweet      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 […]

The Apprentice (3) – A Cause Without a Rebel

Tweet  The Apprentice (3) – A Cause Without a Rebel That intelligent, successful young people check in their brains on entering The Apprentice and pick them up on the way out is so clear that we are no longer surprised by it. More disturbing is that most leave behind their pride, their self-respect and any […]

BBC Young Apprentice – Corrupt and Corrupting (A personal view)

Tweet      BBC – The Young Apprentice The protesters camped outside St Pauls are trying to stimulate a debate about business and the framework of free market capitalism within which it operates. Whether you regard this as an issue of ethics, politics, economics, social equality and justice, or even a combination of them all, […]

The Apprentice Episode 11 – Five Go Off To A Safe House

Tweet    The Apprentice Episode 11 – Five Go Off To A Safe House The first thing to say about this programme profiling the final five is that every single one of them comes out better through these individual profiles than from anything we have seen them do in the previous 10 weeks. This does […]

The Apprentice Episode 10 – Helen of Ploy

Tweet  The Apprentice Episode 10 – Helen of Ploy True story: waiting last night at Wembley for Take That to take the stage my teacher daughter Ruth was talking about some school fund-raising activities at her school last week. She has a form of 30, year 7s i.e. 11/12 year-olds, all girls, at a good […]

The Apprentice Episode 9 – The Melody Lingers On.

Tweet  The Apprentice Episode 9 – The Melody Lingers On. Solipsism is the philosophical theory that only the self exists; or can be proved to exist. More generally the dictionary defines it thus: extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires and thoughts; egoistic self-absorption. Question: how do you stop Melody talking other than […]

The Apprentice Episode 7 – ‘Allo ‘Allo Meets French Retail Resistance

Tweet    The Apprentice Episode 7 – ‘Allo ‘Allo Meets French Retail Resistance Helen is the best listener I have seen in 7 series of The Apprentice – over 100 candidates. Rarely for a beautiful woman she can also take a compliment without that mock-embarrassed demur of someone who knows only too well how attractive […]

BBC: The Apprentice Episode 6 – Steptoe vs Pickfords

TweetThe Apprentice Episode 6 – Steptoe vs Pickfords Best decision of the week: when Tom and Jimmy (some mouse that Jimmy) wanted to quit a job half way through because it was taking longer than they thought and wouldn’t make money, PM Helen immediately and decisively said “no – we can’t leave a client with […]