I have tried to give the protagonists on The Apprentice a chance, I’ve tried to like them but alas I appear to be fighting a losing battle with my better self. I can’t help but hate them all. And seemingly this is my default setting with so much of this reality based programming. I hate them all and I love Bill because Bill gives them all such a hard time. He abuses them unrelentingly and he seems to enjoy it. He takes pride in attempting to systematically dismantle their character from every conceivable perspective. I would enjoy it too. I love Bill.
They annoy us instantaneously; so self involved, so shallow and manipulative. And we know that the person or thing who devised the concept of humanity had the direct opposite of people like this in mind when he was coming up with his first sketches. And we wonder how people who are mostly in their mid twenties could be so numbingly dull.
It’s not of course that they are bad people but probably because they tend to take things a bit too seriously. And have a tendency to try to rationalize the most damning of situations into their favour. In blatant contradiction of the evidence. So their problems could be summed up by saying that they do not know when to let it lie. And in this regard they are probably no different to anyone born in this country after 1980. So it might not even be their fault per se. But that does not make them any more palatable.
This is why we get the likes of Brendan seeking to explain that his refusal to take responsibility for the management of a task in which he had a lot of experience reflected more poorly on his team mates than it did on himself. He did not know when to let it lie. And Bill came very close to cutting him loose as a result. But he won’t learn. They never do.
You don’t want to do it but it happens involuntarily; your mind casts back to your college days and you try to imagine sharing the same airspace with people of this ilk. Clean cut super heroes, learnt everything they know from long running American network sitcoms. Nobody comes out of that mental exercise smelling of roses let me tell you.
We will never embrace this medium, we knew that before we started. This medium with these young people in this young country in this unprecedented funk. And if we can’t embrace something like The Apprentice which within its genre is pretty mild, well what’s left, what slivers of modern pop culture are left for us. In America they seem to have got it figured out, like a lot of things that will eventually dawn on us over here. They have had their flirtation with reality but also had the decency to remember to make a few good TV shows while they were at it. They have something to fall back on. We have The Byrne Ultimatum.
We can at least give ourselves credit for starting the whole thing off in the first place all those years ago. Remember Superstars with Gerry Loftus and Declan Burns. They even had the odd celebrity like Pat Spillane and Jack O’Shea to add a touch of glamour. Reality TV ground zero right there baby. Don’t know if it’s any consolation, but it is the truth.
