Labio Dental Fricative

Yes, I know, talking about reality TV is pretty boring but I'm just finding my way here on my nascent little blog and just trying to catch my stride.

Somebody once asked me who I'd least like to find in my local boozer one evening. My answer at the time was a bunch of Premiership footballers out for their Christmas party. I have a new answer to that the question now. It would have to be any or all of the contestants from The Apprentice. The premise of the show is that a top British businessman puts a group of young hopefuls through their paces with the intention of offering one of them gainful employment at the end. The businessman in question is the notoriously testy Sir Alan Sugar. The young hopefuls, despite being described as the cream of young corporate British talent, appear to have all the business acumen of the average Woolworths' trainee. One of them is quite possibly mad. Described as an HR Manager (redundant) she has the interpersonal skills of Pol Pot but without the charm and cosiness.

Each week Sir Alan has to despatch one of the fourteen hopefuls. By the denouement of each show they have been whittled down to that week's shortlist of three. I'm sure he's already decided that at least ten of them were utterly unsuitable for any sort of work that involved anything more challenging than the use of a pencil sharpener. Given that's it's unlikely that all the ones who might potentially have some aptitude will make the shortlist, he has a pretty easy job of winding them up, and then, using fantastically fractured and irrational logic, firing one who he'd almost certainly never planned to employ in the first place anyway. He carefully leaves the loonies in the pack to bewilder and frighten the other survivors and so maintain interest in the show.

I once heard reality TV described as "voyeuristic, manipulative and degrading, but it has it's bad points as well." This show has got all those qualities in shedloads. I kinda like it.