The Apprentice... (un)comfort watching....?

I felt the need for some real brain-dead T.V. a few days ago, and so I noticed the latest series of The Apprentice. It was enjoyable enough viewing and it helped switch the brain off for an hour, job done!

I had mixed feelings about the experience though. Having not watched this since before Covid, so that's four years ago... the format is exactly the same - the characters may be changed slightly, but the format is the same:

• the usual tasks are still there: buy 10 objects as cheap as you can, make cakes and sell them, produce a marketing campaign, do a tour, etc. etc.
• the mix of contestants is the same - about 4 really whacky ones, 4 complete nut-job ego-maniacs, a couple of absolute nobodies and then the rest actual contenders.
• the house, the music, the edits, all of that, the same!

I'm guessing this is still a big win for Alan Sugar, I mean he can't lose - it's free advertising, he gets at the end of the day a decent investment (I mean you'd hope so after all the effort) and he probably gets paid for show a small fortune, not that he needs it. It's about air-time for him I'm sure.

And what do the rest of us get... we get to gaup at a mix of people from the average to the super-talented do the same old tasks a similar group of people have done for the last 17 series, YES, it's in series 18 already! 20 years if you add on the 2 years it was off air due to Covid.

So it's still mildly entertaining, but more than that it's almost become comforting... you get to see that London skyline and these young (for the most part) Brits in action around the UK (for the most part) and Lord Sugar, it's a very British thing, almost nostalgic with a modern, forward looking twist.

It somehow makes you feel good about yourself too - I mean a lot of the time it's uncomfortable watching some of the candidates mess up what should be relatively simply things and wondering how they can get it so wrong, knowing you'd be able to do better.

(Although in fairness these guys aren't given enough time to do a decent job on anything most of the time, that's part of the show.)

And I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old but it was kind of nice going back to it after all these years and seeing that the format hadn't changed.

It's odd that it's come to this... when so much is changing so fast around the world (and not for the better), something like The Apprentice makes one feel that there's something, I don't know, immutable about British culture.

But of course it's all an illusion, a media-creation... But I wonder if this 'keep it EXACTLY the same' decision was deliberate, or just lazy editing.

I don't know.

Whatever, the show, like everything else, won't last forever, for now I'm happy to indulge in a bit of artifact-nostalgia and watch it through to the end of the series, after a break of several years it's enjoyable enough!

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