he was born scentless and senseless....

I love watching The Apprentice.

I think we're supposed to see it as reality TV, where some of the brightest young business brains in the country go toe-to-toe for a prestigious job working with Sir Alan Sugar. It's "the job interview from hell", apparently.

Well, clearly it's not that. For starters, I think it's stretching the truth beyond breaking point to call this bunch of arrogant, puffed up salesmen the cream of young British business talent (or if they are, then we really are screwed). Claiming, as they all seem to do, that you're going to throw yourself into every task "one thousand percent" in an effort to get a job with SIRALAN (as everyone must call him) is just silly, and everyone who actually does have a brain can see that quite clearly. Besides, would "the best salesman in Europe", as one of them keeps referring to herself, really going to take a "six-figure salary" working in the arse-end of London knocking out crappy telephones, or whatever it is SIRALAN now does since he flogged off his sky box business? Wouldn't you expect to be earning a shitheap more than that already?

No, it's just entertainment. The way I look at it, these clowns have volunteered to make monkeys out of themselves over and over again for several weeks purely for my enjoyment on a Wednesday evening.

They have me screaming at the TV every week. They're all self-important, over-confident and utterly without any kind of substance. They spout every kind of business jargon that they have ever heard, and yet they are revealed time and time again to be braggarts and empty vessels. It's brilliant. Actually, it's better than brilliant, I actually believe that this programme is therapeutic. There's something incredibly soothing about watching a TV programme that is basically a version of my own office environment taken to its most ludicrous extreme.... except that in this world, the biggest muppet of the week gets fired and has to take their little wheelie bag out of the "boardroom" and into a waiting taxi. If only real life were more like that.

No one ever really gets fired anymore do they? In my experience, the most incompetent people are usually promoted somewhere they'll be someone else's problem. To paraphrase Jarvis, they say that the cream cannot help but rise to the top, but I say....shit floats.

Dance monkeys! Dance!

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* Excellent minute-by-minute coverage of the show, often by Anna, available here

** Excellent after-the-event analysis here