The Apprentice starts again this week. It is both one of my favourite TV shows and the one that makes me the most frustrated.
When I was studying accountancy, one of my tutors suggested watching the show to learn about all the mistakes that businesses can make if they are run by idiots. I think that is a fairly good assessment of what happens in the show. I watched the series that was on and then became immediately hooked and started watching through all of the other seasons which had been on before.I applied to go on the show around 4 years ago. It was a very weird experience. I was unable to make the London date as I was at a festival, so I ended up getting the train to Birmingham whilst reading Sugar’s book What You See Is What You Get, in the vague hope that it would somehow help my chances of getting on the show.
I’m not really sure I wanted to be on the show, but I knew that I was much better than half of the people they had on who are basically complete chumps. I spend half of the time I’m watching the show telling whoever will listen that I could do it better and pointing out all of the mistakes that they had made. So I figured, why not give it a shot. It would be a fun day out and I might end up with fame and fortune.
What it actually amounted to was a hotel full of men in suits and women in power suits who waited for around an hour each to then be ushered into a room with 9 other contestants, asked to speak for 30 seconds about yourself before then dismissed.
The assumption is that they are intentionally picking people who would provide interesting TV. This seems logical and my experience of the two of three they picked to go on to the next round are they went with the ones that seemed instantly the most pompous.
So instead of progressing to the next stage, I went to Starbucks and read Four Four Two whilst waiting for the train to head home to my normal life of not being shouted at by strangers. I think it probably worked out for the best. I’m not keen on being shouted at.
As a footnote to my experience, this was the second year that you had to come up with a business plan rather than simply getting a job working for Sralan. One of the losing finalists stole my idea. I remember chatting about our ideas with some other contestants, although I can’t remember if the fluffy haired one who had the same idea was one of the people I talked to. If he was, I feel his uppance came when he was booted off first out of all the finalists. Especially as it was a crap idea anyway. At least if you’re going to steal something, try to steal a good idea.