Work in progress from me and Mr P.
What gets me about these 'real' reality shows such as The Apprentice and Masterchef, is yes, they're full of bright youngish folk actually learning a craft or how to sell frozen water to Inuits; and no, it isn't just about scratching your arse with a bunch of other misfits while teeny txters send shout outs to their mates along the bottom of the TV screen. But let's face it, why are they really doing it?
If you've always wanted to run a restaurant, then why did you train as an opera singer/marketing executive/graphic designer/merchant banker/lawyer, exactly? There are any number of catering colleges dotted up and down the country that will gladly show you the correct way to hollandaise. You can even do degrees in hotel management and catering. You might have to start the hard way, the same way as Jamie and Gordon and even Ainsley did: washing dishes and burning your fingers on the breakfast service grill. But, you know, give it a few years and a lot of hard work, and you'd probably make a really good chef de partie, or even an exec.
But no...let's be honest...you're not very good at what you do now, you can cook a bit, and you want to be on telly. Why not spend a few weeks getting humiliated by Turner and the Torode, and then start up a home catering company for those who want their canapes prepared by Him/Her Off The Telly. If you do actually win and get the year of washing dishes in a Top Restaurant, then good luck to you, but I'll be surprised and impressed if a) the chefs will have anything to do with you, and b) if you last six months.
The same with The Apprentice. If you've sat in your marketing office, or salesroom, or looked around your lab and said: "Sod this, I've always wanted to sub-contract the manufacture of cheap electrical goods to a Hong Kong factory and sell dodgy home electrolysis kits to Daily Mail readers," then good luck to you. But face it love, you wanted to live in a nice London pad for a week or three, get driven around (you never see Apprentices use public transport - too many youths going "brap" and making rude comments about crappy loudspeaker phones?), and more importantly, it's Telly. After a couple of months of tabloid hounding, you'll be able to set up your own motivational "consultancy", get a cable TV show - or even do a column on the next series...
Take it from a corporate slave of sorts. The reason why the Apprentices are so crap is that anybody who's any good at what they do applies for a job, works steadily and well for a year or two, gets promoted, or moves on to another, better position in another company. Or they start small, grow slowly, and get rich trying. Bit like Siralan. But that's boring TV, so let's get these fame hungry bozos to flog coffee on the streets and sell kisses to dirty old men in pubs, because that's all that they deserve. And we know it.
Anyway, this is what the Apprentice has taught us about Young Thrusting Businessfolk Of Today (YTBOT).
