Photo by Jovike

It’s too easy to criticise The Apprentice. The show is pitched as the world’s toughest job interview, in which our brightest and best young business minds compete for a £100k job by demonstrating their superior managerial skills, financial acumen and commercial savvy. But despite the sombre music and dramatic shots of The City of London’s office blocks, the show isn’t really that much different from the benchmark of low-rent reality television, Big Brother.

Ultimately it’s a game-show in which a group of shrieking, self obsessed arses are thrown together and forced to compete for a cash prize; the rules of the game aren’t entirely clear and the criteria for victory is subjective, but it largely seems to involve the contestants shouting over each other and acting up in front of the cameras for most of the show. Only, in The Apprentice, they just happen to be wearing suits.

From the minute they open their shrill mouths, it’s clear that whatever strategic skills or management credentials they claim, every single one of them is the archetypal pushy salesman: “I deserve this, I’m ambitious, I’m driven, I don’t believe in failure, I always win.” They never talk about what they know, what they can do, what kind of expertise they have, just how motivated they are. And the depressing thing is that a generation of young people will grow up believing that this is what business is all about.

Very easy to criticise. But, ultimately, the show offers an ugly reflection of what Britain really is: a nation of salesmen, flogging empty promises with a sharp suit and a slick line in bullshit.

London’s financial district, which provides The Apprentice with so much of its imagery and character, is a perfect example. For decades we’ve been selling London as a centre of financial services expertise; The City’s reputation as a global banking powerhouse is one of the key pillars of both our national economy and our national identity.

But we now know that, just like an Apprentice contestant, The City was never had anything to offer other than its own wild sense of self-belief. For all the sharp suits and impressive sounding financial jargon, the UK’s proud banking industry was largely predicated on the ‘bigger sucker’ principle; all of those clever, complex investments relied on nothing more than an ability to sell them on to a bigger sucker who would believe they had increased in value for no reason other than confidence.

The minute that confidence started to wobble, the whole thing came crashing down. And now the real City is unmasked, a bunch of salesmen with nothing left to sell.

It’s easy to sneer at the bankers (fun, too) but are the rest of us really any better? A year of falling property prices seems to have plunged the nation into a fit of anxiety, because being able to make money out of property is our birthright and suddenly it’s been taken away from us. Just a couple of years ago it seemed like everybody was somehow trying to get rich quick in the housing market, passing themselves off as property developers, investors, entrepreneurs, when in reality they were all just playing their own little versions of the bigger sucker game.

The fact that there’s no longer easy money to be made from houses seems like an affront to our national character; We deserve this, we’re ambitious, we’re driven, we don’t believe in failure, we always win… Except when there are no more suckers and nothing left for us to sell them.

Lance Concannon edits The Pamphleteer. This is the third year in a row he’s lied to everybody about not watching The Apprentice.

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