For some reason I still find myself watching The Apprentice. Don't ask me why. People have always laughed at it, of course, but in the early days and it is now ten years old there was the odd contestant who struck one as bright and even capable, possibly even employable. Not any longer.
"Once, The Apprentice was for people who wanted to do well in business," says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. "Now, The Apprentice is for people who want to do well in The Apprentice."
"Deluded wannabes, marketing managers, brand experts, hypnotherapists, retail experts, development strategists; hail the flotsam of the business world," saysJan Moir in the Daily Mail, "served up here in all its shiny suited, gimlet-eyed glory. And that's just the women the men are even worse."
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Perhaps some of them are included "purely for comedy value", observed one of the brighter former contestants, Saira Khan, also in the Daily Mail. Take Ella Jade Bitton, 23, who apparently has a degree in business management. Asked what skills she brings, she replied: "Really, I'm me. I'm me, that's who I am. I am who I am. I believe in who I am."
What's shocking, says Glenda Cooper in The Sunday Telegraph, is that of the 20 who make it to the screen from a potential cast list of thousands, we can still have ten who "appear to be so dim they don't know the meaning of the word decadence'".
The girls chose this for their team name, apparently underthe impression that it had something do with the word "decade" (this being the show's tenth anniversary). Not until Alan Sugar's sidekick, Nick Hewer, pointed out the name's real meaning did they change it to "tenacity" (not, we must hope, because it contains the word "ten").
The episode I watched last week featured the two teams trying to develop "wearable technology". The girls came up with the laughable idea of a jacket with solar panels on the shoulders that were largely covered by the lapels. ("Will they work under the material?" someone asked.)
The boys' idea was even worse: a spangly jumper with a camera embedded in it at bosom height. "The Apprentice is unmissable television," says Glenda Cooper, "even if it ends up putting more young people off going into business than encouraging them."
A few tweets have suggested that the programme was devised by Marxists as a way of discrediting capitalism. But perhaps the BBC and Lord Sugar are to be congratulated. At least, as Cooper suggests, the programme keeps "successive cohorts of numpties on television and away from the real business world".
The new Duke of Marlborough, said The Sunday Times, has plenty of ideas for rejuvenating Blenheim, including rock concerts and motor racing events. He has other, vaguer ideas too.
"What I'd like to do is put a huge fountain in the middle of the lake something that will shoot 400ft into the air something ginormous, like the ninth wonder of the world." We will watch with interest.
Tabloid money: the euro has been saved by Italian hookers
"Microsoft boss Satya Nadella reckons women shouldn't worry about asking for a pay rise and instead rely on karma," says Alison Phillips in the Daily Mirror: well, "with the pay gap between men and women now at 15 degrading per cent, I don't know what badness we've being doing, but our karma is pretty p*** poor."
"We are told that Ebola screening starts in airports of west Africa," says Tony Parsons in The Sun. "Those of us who have ever caught a flight in that part of the world will not be reassured. Catching a flight to London in Accra, Ghana, I had to bribe someone to check in my bag, give another backhander to pass through customs, then distribute more cash before I could board my flight. Total chaos. Complete corruption. It was more like a madhouse than an airport. Anyone expecting effective screening of Ebola carriers at the airports of west Africa has probably never been to west Africa."
"George Osborne confides privately to my source that he might now be prepared to give the Scottish Nationalist administration in Edinburgh full control of North Sea oil revenues," says Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail.
"SNP leader Alex Salmond valued them at £1.5trn, while the Office for National Statistics came up with £120bn. Yet Osborne thinks this might be a good deal... if it has the useful side-effect of wrecking Labour's already dire prospects among nationalist Scots."
We're told that crime doesn't pay, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sun. "But that's obviously not true in Italy, where figures just out show that a whopping 11% of the country's revenue comes from drugs, arms trafficking and prostitution. By including this tsunami of cash in its annual report, Italy is now back in the black."
As a result, the euro is less shaky. "Strange, though, isn't it, that a currency has to be saved by some swivel-eyed hooker on her back at a truck stop on the autostrada just outside Turin?"
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Should you invest in UK equities?The FTSE 100 hit a record high this week, but UK equities remain unloved and undervalued compared to their global and US peers. Should you snap them up at a discount?
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State pension errors: DWP urged to check for mistakes among divorced peopleFormer pensions minister Steve Webb says there are a high number of divorced women on low state pensions. Now MPs want the DWP to check if there were any errors in “potentially underpaying men and women who are divorced”.
