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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. […]

The Apprentice (8) – Connor Sores of Art

Tweet      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 […]

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 […]

BBC: The Apprentice (6) – ‘Call-Me-Lord’ fires Miss Right

Tweet      The Apprentice (6) – ‘Call-Me-Lord’ fires Miss Right There are three groups each week on the show: the two Apprentice teams and the Board ‘team’. As perhaps the most likeable bunch of Apprentices in this franchise so far are beginning to struggle towards something approximating teamwork in an intentionally divisive structure, the fiction of a Board […]

BBC The Apprentice (4) – More Shabby Than Chic

Tweet        BBC The Apprentice (4) – More Shabby Than Chic Best comment of the week: the woman at the car boot sale to the PITA (Pain in…) Apprentices “yes you can have it for a £ if you promise to go away.” All good deal-makers are good negotiators: not all good negotiators […]

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 […]

The Apprentice (2) – Discovering the Bin

Tweet      The Apprentice (2) – Discovering the Bin I’ve never believed the claim that if you give an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters an infinite amount of time they will produce the works of Shakespeare. However measured against the likelihood of this year’s batch of apprentices coming up […]

BBC The Apprentice (1) – Learning When To Shut Up

Tweet        The Apprentice (1) – Learning When To Shut Up An Apprentice first: firing a likely winner in the first episode. No, don’t shout at me: I agree Bilyana had a bad attack of verbal diarrhoea in the boardroom and played a full part in the undignified but regular Apprentice game of shaft the sister. However […]

BBC Apprentice Final – Cometh the Hour – Cometh the Tom

Tweet    The Apprentice Final – Cometh the Hour – Cometh the Tom Suicide note in two words: ‘non-profit’ to Lord Sugar.  Suicide note in one word: ‘Sugar’, without the Lord.  Thus ‘in-it-to-win-it’ Jedi Jim Eastwood’s AMSMART battle plan, codeworded AMCREEP, went word-spinning out of orbit and was incinerated while trying to re-enter planet Sugar’s […]