The Apprentice (BBC One)
Top Dogs (BBC Two)
Charlie Brooker's Newswipe (BBC Four)
The Great Sperm Race (Channel 4)
Business people are gonads. That is the unkind, yet essentially correct,
assumption on which The Apprentice rests.
Actually, to be totally accurate, The Apprentice doesn't think that all
business people are gonads. Business people who are just getting on with
ordering stationery, and keeping on top of the invoicing, are fine.
No - it's the business people who want to walk down corridors, screaming, “I
was born to sell!” that the programme finds gonadious. The ones who say,
“I'm really hungry”, but not in reference to breakfast, or some soup, but a
big plate of business. That kind of thrusting, almost majestic,
no-holds-barred ur-nobbishness; where every negative personality trait,
however hateful, can be rendered immediately inconsequential if you can slap
a big wad of profit on the table, and say, “I play hardball, and I have a
bloody big bat, Sir Alan.”
And who can say that being invited to laugh at these people on The Apprentice
is wrong? After all, at this point in the 21st century, it no longer feels
ethically viable to laugh at Big Brother contestants any more: we can see
that, emotionally and intellectually, they fall into a category somewhere
between “child” and “cat”.
Meanwhile, each successive series of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!
suggests that the format is very similar to Ecstasy; in that the first one
is pretty much definitive, and every later experience is centred on
increasingly desperate gurning. Can we ever top the virgin, hands-in-the-air
rush of seeing Wayne Sleep crawling through a tunnel of rats, with a waffle
stuck to his head? I think the answer to that is “No”.
But these 15 contestants on The Apprentice don't care about anything except
making money. They drop bits of chicken on the floor, wipe it on the side of
the table, sell it and shrug “That's business”. It's actually an act of
social coherence to laugh at them. Them having to dress up like a “sexy”
bear, selling kisses, then being shouted at by Sir Alan while we laugh at
them - it's a victimless crime. The reality TV equivalent of that animal in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who's been bred to want to be eaten.
So here we are, with The Apprentice 2009. Ostensibly, everything's exactly the
same. London is depicted in a series of swoony, neon-and-sunset panoramas.
Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer are the eye-rolling, snowy-haired
snitches. Sir Alan is an angry little bear - sitting, we now know, thanks to
the exposé by the contestant Jenny Celerier - in a specially built-up chair,
because he's so short - just half a Sugar. The losing team still repair to
the Caff of Failure, the Bridge, drink tea from the Polysterene Cups of
Doom, and claw at each other's windpipes over who was the worst
businessperson that day.
However, within minutes, it's clear that there is one - fairly sizeable -
change in 2009. For Alan Sugar's politically incorrect “sexism” (passing
over ballsy Kristina for the essentially vapour-like Simon; doing the same
the next year with Claire Young and Lee “That's what I'm talking about!”
McQueen; asking Katie Hopkins what her childcare arrangements were) appears
to have severely affected this year's female candidates. They're a nervous
lot. In the first episode, not a single woman volunteers as Team Leader.
This gives the impression that any sane, experienced businesswoman has given
up on entering The Apprentice, and that a load of secretaries have entered
instead - seeing the show as some training course to be like Melanie
Griffith on Working Girl. Then you remember: duh! It's The Apprentice!
There's never any sane, experienced businesspeople on it anyway! It's that
gameshow for deludo second-string sales reps.
I don't know what your favourite, recurring thing is on The Apprentice, but
mine is when contestants go in very hard on what a competitive deal they're
striking - then name a price so ludicrous, it's a bit like when film stars
at a press conference guess that a pint of milk is $28.50. Last series, we
had one team quoting a hotel manager £3,990 for his laundry, when he usually
paid £200. This year, in Episode 1, team leader Mona offered a car dealer
the “amazing price” of £300 to wash three cars. “We usually pay £20 per
car,” the dealer said, blinking in the white-hot light of Mona's ignorance.
“I'm sorry. I think you've got that wrong,” Mona - senior finance adviser -
told the man in charge of getting the cars washed. “£20! There's no way you
could get a car washed for £20.”
The girls' team subsequently had to get their client to help them to turn
their power hose on, to Nick Hewer's immense disapproval. “You'll get a
spanking in the boardroom,” he said, mouth moued into a cat's bum, as he
watched the girls splash about.
“Between a Porsche and a Ferrari - where every girl wants to be, eh?” the
blonde, Kate Walsh, said. No, not really, Kate. That sounds like a
potentially terrible accident, where one might lose a leg.
From apprenticing to shadowing, on Top Dogs, where three eminent men -
the BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, the polar explorer Sir Ranulph
Fiennes and the round-the-world yachtsman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston - take it
in turns to “experience” the “reality” of each other's “adventures”.
The first thing the viewer “experienced” was the suspicion that this show had
been commissioned under the title “Old Dogs” - as in old dogs learning new
tricks - until the distinguished subjects found out, and told them, quite
rightly, to get stuffed, in their lovely posh voices. Certainly the narrator
couldn't leave their ages alone. It wouldn't have even occurred to me that
we were watching “old men” unless I'd been repeatedly, warningly, told that,
at 64, 65 and 70, Simpson, Fiennes and Knox-Johnston “still had plenty of
life left in them”.
Still, once you were allowed, once more, to think of the men as Sir Ranulph
Fiennes, John Simpson and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston - rather than three
grandads from Bread - it was a great programme. Simpson was the first to
job-share - taking the other two to Afghanistan, and world-exclusive access
to the Tora Bora caves, former secret lair of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, it
turns out, has a pretty good eye for a sweet spot, location-wise. I'd always
presumed those caves would have been pretty bleak and windswept - classic
“evil lair” stuff. In the event, however, they're actually in the middle of
a particularly beautiful and green valley. It seems that we haven't so much
been fighting the “War on Terror” as the “War on Terroir”.
Obviously - what with wars, oceans and, in next week's episode, John Simpson
losing the tips of his fingers to frostbite in the Arctic - the format is
already pretty sprightly. It's very much not Judith Chalmers on a lilo,
lifting a huge cocktail and saying “Cheers!” Emotionally, however, the show
becomes alarmingly top loaded when it is revealed that, since Sir Ranulph's
heart attack in 2005, he now has a weakened cardiac system, and cannot let
his heartbeat go above 140 beats per minute - “or he could die”.
This basically turns the show into Rush Hour, but with Fiennes as the bus.
Every time something alarming or unexpected happened - a fight breaking out
by the Dogs in the marketplace, say - the viewer became unbearably tense.
When Simpson takes the Dogs up the Khyber Pass, and comments, “This makes
the heart beat faster”, you're too nervous to enjoy the living, breathing
innuendo - your eyes flick nervously to Fiennes, as you silently mouth the
phrase “Deep breaths”. Thankfully, Fiennes looks a bit bored, and low
heart-beaty, and we carry on. Simpson, meanwhile, is able to open a window
on what it's like being one of the most respected reporters in the world:
“That was just waffle,” he said, sadly, after one live, high-profile report
to the Ten O'Clock News. “Still, that's what they want. Waffle.”
News waffle was the enemy on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - the new show
from the newspaper critic. Newswipe began on an odd note - tortuously
spending five minutes explaining what it was, when anyone who'd seen it in
the listings had simply thought: “Oh, Newswipe. That will be like Brooker's
previous series - Screenwipe - but about current affairs, instead of telly.”
Also - and perhaps inevitably - Newswipe had the faint, cordite smell of The
Day Today clinging to its hair. For half an hour it was a show that
basically wanted to say, in the words of Chris Morris: “These are the
headlines. I wish to God they weren't.”
Still, Brooker's schtick - an intelligent, liberal man brought to the brink of
despair simply by looking at the BBC's homepage - is as welcome dissecting
the German high-school shootings as it is Holby; and having an ROFL
Newsnight is something to cling to in the schedules.
Finally, The Great Sperm Race - a programme that anthropomorphised
conception by getting hundreds of extras to dress up as sperm, and then run
for miles up an imaginary, hostile vagina - did two unexpected things. One,
for an idea that seemed very stupid, it proved to be entertaining,
informative and something I will be showing my children, whether they like
it or not. And two - perhaps the greater achievement - it made you feel
really sorry for jizz. Amazing.
