Lord Sir Alan's dilemma...to spell or not to spell?

I used to be a fan of ‘The Apprentice’.  The contestants used to be a bit bumptiously driven and a tad too eager to give everything "one hundred and ten per cent"...but they were on the whole quite endearing, and usually you could detect something resembling a ‘head for business’ (whatever the hell that actually means) lurking around somewhere in their collective psyche.

These days the calibre of the contestants has dropped so much I can only assume news has travelled rather speedily about how soul-destroying it must be, working in close proximity to ‘business stegosaurus’ Lord Sir Alan Sugar.  Which - let’s face it - it REALLY must be…previous winners of the show have been plonked in charge of his ‘health and beauty division’ (on which they were destined to fail, on the obvious basis that Lord Sir Alan Sugar, business success he may be, aint no bladdy oil painting, son), not to mention heading the division ‘in charge of the disposal of unwanted computer equipment’.   That’s the reality, folks.  That deadly interview, all those glamorous tasks; you've been on telly and everything...but deep down you must have known you were unlikely to end up as the next JR Ewing by kicking a few hundred thousand Amstrad computers off the end of the nearest pier.

But back to last night’s episode, which really did make me want to turn my eyes inside-out, even more than usual.  Where should I start?  Calling a Mexican restaurant ‘Caraca’s’ (complete with apostrophe!) might be a good place (“because it sounds like maracas and that’s Mexican, right?”)  Watching Susan and Natasha with their rumpled brows talking about how “Mexicans say ‘el’ a lot, don’t they?  Oh yes, they do...all the time.  Do you know what it actually means?  Errr…no…”  made my insides cry with despair.  Ditto lovely Tom deciding that Christopher Columbus was a symbol of Britishness, and that “Walter Drake discovered the potato in America”. 

Now I know that to be a success in business you need ‘spark’, and ‘guts’ and ‘instinct’.  That’s all everybody talks about on ‘The Apprentice’, and how many times have we heard all about how Lord Sir Alan started from nothing, before the internet and before modern telephony services and before the abacus was discovered to be a useful calculating tool?  But surely, surely, to be any sort of success you might find a bit of ‘general awareness of things that go on outside your own head’ or  ‘a basic grasp of the English language’ useful as well? 

In the very first episode of this series, Ellie wrote on a chalk board to sell soup for the girls’ team. ‘VEGATABLE SOUP’ she scratched out carefully…before hesitating, staring at it and muttering “have I got that right? Oh, it doesn't matter”  And for me, that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the series.  A bunch of people who have earned business degrees and can spout endless vaguely-business-related clichés until everybody’s ears have shrivelled up and turned black before finally crumbling off like ash from an abandoned cigarette.  But they’re not very bright; they’re not very aware, and they can’t even spell ‘vegetable’.   Next time Lord Sir Alan might be better off wandering down to the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ studio and picking his latest bright business mind from the guests on there.  I'm sick of all that bloody pinstripe anyway...a Burberry cap might be a nice change in the boardroom.

I realise that I sound a bit harsh, and that anybody who might care to watch me try to calculate a basic ‘profit and loss’ sheet or even work out a simple sum in my head might feel bubbling levels of frustration and despair that had previously gone un-experienced.  But the difference, you see, is that I’m not presenting myself as one of this country’s most promising business minds.  Far from it.  One: I know where Caracas is, and two: I can spell “vegetable”.  So I am, quite simply, stuffed.