Change & Decay In All Around I See

Thursday 26 March 2009, 11:57PM

Melancholy reflections on The Apprentice

Sacked Apprentice candidate Anita Shah

It’s that time of year again. Lent? No. The first episode of the new series of The Apprentice.

Kate and I have been hooked, quite hopelessly, for at least the past three series. It really is a very funny, entertaining programme. I’m glad that they don’t seem to have changed the formula the slightest bit for the new series. It started, as always, with an cacophany of soundbites from the candidates, which did not disappoint. One I haven’t heard before: ‘Being successful is more important than being popular. You don’t need to make friends on the way up when you’re not coming back down.’ So good that I watched the first five minutes of the show again on the BBC iPlayer just to make sure I heard it aright the first time.

Just before the programme started I’d been watching an item on Channel 4 News about a group of earnest, idealistic campaigners for global economic justice who were organising a (peaceful) protest to be staged outside the G20 summit that’s taking place in London in the next few days. They were arguing, quite reasonably I thought, that the recession presents an opportunity for the developed world to reflect upon and reconsider the fundamental workings of the global economic system. Should there be such faith in the benefits of untrammelled economic growth? Should we all be working such long hours? Should we seek to narrow huge inequalities of wealth? Shouldn’t growth be environmentally sustainable? In short, the argument went, a kinder, gentler world is within our grasp if we really want it.

Watching The Apprentice is a sober reminder why this new world would be so desparately hard to realise. The show’s candidates and business gurus inhabit and exhibit an utterly different world and worldview from that of the protestors. They are accepting, indeed enthusiastic, of the way the world works, and just want to get on and master the means it offers of making money. They are pragmatic, uninterested in ideas, abstractions, and utopias, wanting the good things of this life, and quickly. They are not too concerned about precisely what it is that they are selling, so long as its profitable. The arts and ‘culture’ are viewed with a degree of suspicion, as luxuries that should be on the peripheries of life, so as not to distract from the more important business of business.

As a rather hopeless idealist myself - although certainly not a stranger to selfishness and wanting things I don’t need - I find this hard-headed materialist view of life quite hard to comprehend, and even to present without a degree of squeamishness. But it’s clear to me that the Apprentice candidates are not bad people. Most of them have always struck me as perfectly decent, and in many cases witty and charming. It’s the intense, impatient desire for concrete, material things, and lots of them, that I can’t get my head around.

I wonder how the Apprentice candidates would fare in a world designed by the high-minded folks in the Channel 4 News report. Restless, probably, frustrated by the requirement to moderate their actions and desires to harmonise with fussy notions of a common good. Impatient with perceived restrictions on their freedom to take what they want from life. I’m not sure whether there are more realists in the world than idealists, but there are certainly enough of them to make it very, very difficult to think how a more altruistic economic system than the one we’ve got is going to rise from the ashes of the credit crunch…