Ordinary Gweilo

My comments on Friday about the UK version of The Apprentice elicited a couple of responses from people who obviously hate the whole concept of the show.

Well, yes, I have to admit that there is plenty to dislike about the show, and if I didn’t love it I could quite easily hate it.  Trump himself is easy to dislike, and many of the contestants behave very badly in an effort to win.  However, being underhand and devious doesn’t really work, and if you look at the outcome, it really does seem that it is always one of the good guys who win.  Clearly this is showbiz rather a serious recruitment exercise, but it’s nowhere near as shallow as Big Brother or Survivor. 

The move to Los Angeles does seem to have been made to help the ratings, and by a lucky coincidence they have a "mansion" complete with a pool and plenty of young and attractive contestants ready to dive in.  And, hey, here’s a task that involves designing swimwear.

The gimmick this time round is that the winning team get the mansion and the pool whilst the losers are in the "back yard".  It’s close enough that they are able to look over a fence at the winning team frolicking in the pool (and, yes, there does seem to be quite a lot of frolicking) but they have to live in tents and use outdoor showers and cooking facilities. 

The odd thing is that whereas it is hot and sunny by the pool, a few yards away it appears to be windy and cold.  How strange – could it possibly be that they are trying to make the back yard look much worse than it really is, for dramatic effect.  Surely not…

In other news, We have lost Carolyn, fired from the Trump Organization for being so annoying (or something like that), and elderly retainer George, who seems to have been dropped from the show to make way for Master and Miss Trump.  The oddly-named Ivanka does bring something to the show, but what is the point of Donald Junior?  Maybe he’s there to make the contestants look good. 

As per usual, we have a few "improvements" to the format.  The main one is that the winning project manager goes into the boardroom to help Trump decide who should be fired from the losing team, and keeps the job until the team loses.  Neither is quite as advantageous as it might first appear – in the boardroom you have to express an opinion without upsetting Trump, and continuing as PM means that before long all the other team members hate you.

It’s also hard to escape the conclusion that they deliberately pick some contestants who have no chance of winning, so the early weeks involve them getting fired, and then whingeing about how terribly unfair it all is.  As luck would have it, many of these losers are lawyers, such as the bozo who made a promising start in the very first episode by standing around "supervising" whilst everyone else was hard at work putting up the tents. 

Then in week 3 they came up with another innovation.  Arrow (who had won the first two tasks) were given the week off, and Kinetic were split into two groups to fight against each other.  Then after the results were announced, Michelle quit, citing the "hardship" of living in tents as one reason.   Only one contestant had done this before (though I do recall one coming close by telling Trump that he should be fired), and on that occasion both Carolyn and Trump were very sympathetic.  Not this time, he wasn’t, and we got a long diatribe about Trump not liking ‘quitters’.  In a later boardroom, he fired another contestant for admitting to being "white trash".

Then they managed to engineer some conflict by forcing one team member to move from Kinetic to Arrow, and project manager James chose to get rid of Nicole, who (1) had just been saying how happy she was in this team, and (2) is in a relationship with fellow team member Tim.  She was not happy.

OK, on reflection there’s plenty not to like.  But I fear I am still addicted.