I caught the final episode of The Apprentice last night, not having seen any previous episodes. It was won by a chap called Simon who seemed rather bland to me, but then what do I know about recruiting managers for third-rate computer companies? The show itself is one of a handful of successful TV programmes that take contemporary business practices and convert them into entertainment (the other notables being The Office and Dragons Den), but in Goffmanesque terms, it is the most interesting of the lot. Why?
'Sir Alan' himself is obviously great entertainment, and I rather enjoy the way his knighthood is constantly referred to as if he's a character in a hammer horror film. I mean - if that's how scary 'Sir Alan' is, imagine how repulsive the witch who awarded him the title must be! There is also a touch of genius about the way the everyday situation of an office reception is represented as a futuristic purgatory. The receptionist plays the role of the deformed assistant to the evil genius, with the words 'Sir Alan will see you now' uttered as if they were an invitation to be tortured. Ricky Gervais rubbed the banality of office life in our faces; but this suggests that managers are akin to serial killers. In series four, I recommend that the office be lit in red rather than blue, that the receptionist is literally chained to her desk, and Sir Alan is played by Christopher Walken. Lets see how the CBI like that...
But all this is a side-show. What lifts it above the purely macabre and transforms it into something compelling is the complicated sympathies that we have for the contestants. Unlike Big Brother, which is surrealist spectacle, the world inside the frame of The Apprentice is very similar to the world outside the frame. Where Big Brother attempts to use its frame to produce absurd behaviour, the Apprentice performs the far more sophisticated trick of framing normal life and revealing it as absurd behaviour.
Last night's episode was the climax of the series in which the two remaining contestants had to pitch an idea to regenerate London's South Bank to a room full of business and architectural experts. In the manner of Greek theatre, this gave the audience (us viewers) the privileged position of watching the actors interact with the chorus (the on-set audience). And from that privileged position, the absurdity of business rhetoric and ambition becomes blissfully clear.
What stood out from the presentations, and then from the discussions with 'Sir Alan' that followed, was the awful mis-placed sincerity of the contestants. The buildings that they had designed to stand next to the National Theatre were hysterically but plausibly awful. One looked like a ghastly Dubai hotel and the other was shaped like a bendy witch's hat, with both intending to become focal points on the London skyline, thanks to the predictable trick of being bloody massive. The contestants advertised these monstrosities as 'icons' to 'put London on the map' (for those who have trouble locating this humble village) which would attract investment and turn round the South Bank's fledgling economy. Imagine Frank Gehry being parodied by Chris Morris. Absurd? Yes. Plausible? Entirely. One architect in the audience later cooed that he had spent 7 years training and 30 years working to learn how to make buildings as impressive as those; but he failed to notice that there are two conclusions you can draw from that...
Then later, in 'Sir Alan's' evil lair, the contestants sat in front of their master to defend their works and their own characters. They were each given a final chance to explain why they should be hired, which manifested itself as a competition to see who could use the word 'leadership' the most times in a minute. Watching people suffer like this would be a dark pleasure... if it weren't for the fact that this humourlessness is being performed in offices up and down the country. The only difference in this instance is that it is safely bracketed from the outside world: their painful sincerity is insulated from ours, leaving us free to view it as a spectacle.
Bataille would have classed young Simon as 'the accursed share' - the excess which society carves off and sacrifices, such that the pressure doesn't build up so much that the rest of us are annihilated. In this respect Simon is a miniature Christ-figure for the managers of the world, a man who promises to 'lead from the front for maximum bottom line impact', so that we might not have to. Which I guess makes 'Sir Alan' Pontius Pilate.
third-rate computer companies
That'd be property investment companies, apparently.
You should have watched the rest of the series - the final programme was quite atypical (no real assessment of the 'task', not much backstabbing and no Evil Katie) - although most weeks the absurdity of the 'real' business tasks was put in the shade by the sheer incompetence of the contestants. But I'm sure Goffman would have loved it.
Posted by: Phil | June 15, 2007 at 10:36 AM