I said in a blog posting earlier this week that the Apprentice would be utterly boring if the producers didn't inject something a little different into the mix.
By chance, it appears they have: class warfare. Whether they meant to add it in or not doesn't matter I suppose, but there's no doubting that at the end of week one, it's Alex Wotherspoon who appears to have come out of things best.
Going into episode one of The Apprentice, the BBC had made a right meal of selling it to us. They had pitched it as basically more of the same arrogant, deluded gobbos who only spoke in cliches pitting the few wits they had against each other in a battle to win one of the most jinxed prizes in the history of television.
Seriously, the winner of series one no longer works for Sir Alan, I'm pretty sure series two's winner - ie not the Badger - doesn't and when you look back on the BBC website at the contestants from series three, it seems being fired is a sure-fire way to do well in business.
What the BBC didn't sell very well was the fact that, Channel 4 stylee, they've found a batch of very upper-class male toffs who genuinely think they are a cut above the rest, but who are actually very stupid.
And that little stick of dynamite worked very well last night as the two teams, a male team and a female team, were sent out with £600 worth of fish to sell down Islington market. One of the public school boys, Raef (!) whose mouth is only slightly smaller than the combined head space taken up by his remarkable eyebrows - imagine Oasis at Eton - cocked things up royally by trying to sell lobster for £5 instead of £20.
Another of the upper-class lads, Nicholas De-Lacy Brown (quote: "I have been a success in everything I do, apart from one GCSE, when I got a B) then flogged off some of the stuff too cheaply, so the boys team rattled back into Sir Alan's boardroom with the sum total profit of about £30.
At which point, caterpillar eyebrows and Mr Double-Barrelled turned on Bolton lad Alex Wotherspoon, the only one of the lads to have volunteered to be team leader, and accused him of prsiding over playground divisions based on class and education.
Now, if I've read the BBC website correctly, all of the Apprentices are supposed to be high-flying businesspeople in their own rights, so you'd think doing your research would be a priority in everything they did. Bearing in mind Sir Alan, who looks increasingly like a grey version of Fozzy out of the Muppets, sells himself as the barrow-boy-done-good, is anyone with a silver spoon in their mouth ever going to make the class argument work?
Especially when Raef trotted out the line: "I can get on with anyone, prince or pauper." Sadly, only De-Lacy-Brown's lack of fight saved Raef. A barrister who doesn't put up a good argument in his own defence? What was he doing on the Apprentice?
Adam deserved to stay. Raef should have gone, he ballsed up. But dropping the guy most likely to cause divisions wouldn't make for good telly. So he stayed.
However, amusing tales from graduates of the Heather Mills School of PR aside, the problem with The Apprentice remains: The first 50 minutes of it are boring. Does the ability to sell fish really demonstrate whether you can handle a job at Amstrad? Of course not. And the 50 minutes of task each week are dull because the same thing always happens:
1. Group is very nice to each other at start
2. Power goes to group leader's head
3. Rest of group slag off group leader behind his or her back
4. They charge round London in People Carriers trying to complete a simple task
5. At they end, they blame each other
It's the stuff back in the boardroom which is the fun stuff. Rather like Big Brother. Forget the round-the-clock feeds and the nightly updates, just give me the evictions. It's the drama round the boardroom table in The Apprentice which makes it worth watching.
The Apprentice needs more surprises. Lets have Sir Alan poppng up mid task to see what is happening. Lets have different tasks. Lets have a panel of business executives deciding who stays or who goes.
None of the above will happen, of course. So we'll have to make do with this year's crop of management speakers (note none ever take a decision, it is always an executive decision) slowly hanging themselves with their own arrogance. Which, for now, will just about do.
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