BBC1's The Apprentice is a busted flush. Whether it's the monosyllabic abuse from Alan Sugar, the pantomime eyebrows of his two sidekicks, the ludicrous tasks, the predictability of the rows between the viciously competitive participants or the uniformly bizarre marketing-speak that they adopt—we've seen and heard it all before. Or that was what I was thinking, until I saw the seventh episode of the current series, the fourth, in mid-May. Now it's the best thing on telly, isn't it?
The week of episode seven turned out to be seven days of triumph for the series. It wasn't Alan Sugar's appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC1) to discuss his colonoscopy, although that had a certain grim fascination. Nor the fact that Margaret Mountford, the retired solicitor who spies on the teams for "Suralan," was accorded a full page in the Guardian celebrating her as "Headmistress to the Nation." No, we knew there'd been a turning point when the semi-detached house of Harrow resident Mike Leahy blew up in a gas explosion. Mike survived, the tabloids told us, only thanks to The Apprentice. He had chosen to go and watch episode seven at his ex-wife's house. This particular episode was clearly blessed.
As his surname denotes, Michael is something of a drama queen: "There wouldn't be anyone I wouldn't screw to get the prize"; "If people say to me, you're arrogant, I'd say, you're 100 per cent right"; "I'm quite happy to cut people out of my life if I think it's going to help me be a success." Michael was on team Renaissance. The other team, Alpha, found a Jewish kosher butcher in Marrakesh from whom to buy a chicken. But Renaissance had failed to do their homework. Late in the day, with a deadline approaching, Michael and two of his teammates resorted to a halal butcher. They got the proprietor to slaughter a chicken and mumble an Islamic prayer over its corpse. This they presented as a kosher chicken.
I don't need to tell you that Renaissance was the losing team. Back in England, at the inevitable inquest with Sugar, Michael was asked how he, of all people, could make this mistake. "I'm only half-Jewish, Sir Alan" was his defence. After he had left the room, Sugar and his two stooges debated whom they should throw out. Nick Hewer was incredulous that Michael, with a classics degree from Edinburgh University, could be so ignorant. "Edinburgh is not what it was," retorted Mountford. But Michael's crowning moment was still to come. On the way back into the boardroom for the verdict, the camera caught him crossing himself in the Catholic manner. With a kosher chicken from a Muslim butcher, followed by a sign of the cross, Sophocles had done more for ecumenism than anyone in living memory.
The extraordinary thing about reality series is that time after time, just when they are looking stale, they reward us with some gloriously unexpected drama. The creator of The Apprentice is Mark Burnett, a Briton who lives in Los Angeles. He produced the first US series of the reality television show Survivor. From this he learned how effective the two basic constituents of the genre are: first, stick a bunch of extroverts together and second, subject them to a pressured "balloon debate" competition where they get ejected one by one. These he cleverly replicated in the original US version of The Apprentice, selecting as his host the man with the most unfeasible hairdo in the western world—Donald Trump. The format has not prospered around the world because of the difficulty of casting this pivotal figure. Luckily for the producers, Britain had Alan Sugar.
The Apprentice is a very good example of how the traditional broadcasters, now with multiple channels, can extract maximum value out of hit shows. It was first established in a lower-risk slot on BBC2, became a hit and then successfully transferred to BBC1. Meanwhile, a spinoff show, The Apprentice: You're Fired!, was established on BBC2, interviewing each week's losers in front of the reality commentariat (founder member: Vanessa Feltz). You're Fired! starts at 10pm, when The Apprentice finishes, thus handing some of the latter's audience over from BBC1 to BBC2. The BBC has been more adroit than its competitors at developing these shrewd, multichannel strategies.
The Apprentice is a godsend for the BBC, which often has to pretend it would not stoop so low as to make vulgar reality shows. The truth is that any entertainment channel has to make such shows— reality is now part of the vernacular of television. The genre takes the old documentary approach but formats it so that a strong story is reliably delivered every time. With The Apprentice, the BBC can purport to occupy the higher ground by asserting it is part of their public service coverage of business. Of course, it's as close to business as bullfighting is to animal husbandry. But if that is the sort of dissembling necessary to broadcast television as good as this, I'm all for it.
