I was nailed to the sofa after a few bottles of Belorussan Pinot Noir (not bad after the first two) late last night and caught something which appeared to involve Alan Sugar shouting at young people. I assume it was on BBC15 or something because, I now learn, it was first broadcast last week. At least a wine bottle falling over had not switched the TV to Channel People's Porn or XXX Amateur Factory Workers as it often does. Apparently, the programme was about business or something similar and called the Apprentice. Anyway, despite my befuddled state, I soon realised what a terrible, terrible thing this was. First, what does Alan Sugar (Sugar, Schmugar, I say) know anyway? Amstrad were crap, weren't they? Secondly, the young people concerned (who all seemed to be called things like Syed, or Mani, or Strange Girl With Big Tits, although that one could have been just in my mind) were clearly all knobheads. Today, Sugar is in trouble in the Mail for saying his televisual school of bearded Jewish capitalism and East End aggression was not a Further Education college "where dumbkopfs come to learn to make mistakes". As the Mail helpfully points out, his new computer firm, Viglen (is that crap as well?), supplies a great many FE colleges. He has been complained about by no less a body than the Association of Colleges. Quite right too. Git.
But I digress. This programme is a disgrace. It promotes the vacuous, meaningless, management-speak culture in which we are now forced to live and which has if anything been encouraged by this poor excuse for a Labour government. The knobheads all described themselves as "management consultants" or some such bullshit, but they could not appear to work out that if you sell a piece of pizza for less than it costs to produce it, you are not going to make money. Even I know that and I think a command economy is cutting edge stuff. Now it might be said that such a programme is actually exposing the ridiculousness of these people, but I fear that may be just false consciousness on my part. In fact the very idea that these appalling wannbes have to give up their proper job (its amazing - actually, perhaps not - that they have ones) to compete for Sugar's approval and a job with the multi-millionaire for a whole £100,000 is capitalism run riot. Add to that the modern media culture where this is entertainment and you have a society gone absolutely mad.
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4 comments:
But at least in The Generation Game it was only a cuddly toy and a cruet set the unfortunate contestants were competing for. After it was all over they went back to making widgets, when we made widgets. Nobody said you are shit because you have been suckered into something you don't really understand, but have been led to believe by a spurious education system and your own media-fuelled self-belief that you do. They just thought it was funny you could not do country dancing.
cuddly toy schmuddly toy say I - all these are people who wanted to be on telly - the Apprentice people think they're a cut above Big Brother housmates, I think not, the BB lot are cleverer on the whole at pretending they're not in it for the money
I agree - though I do quite enjoy the show (in an ironic sort of way).
Ah - wait a second - I don't FULLY agree with you: a lot of FE colleges are full of dumbkopfs...
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