Dani Garavelli: No harm in Sugar-coated lesson if it inspires kids

HERE they come again, right on cue. Every year, around this time, the po-faced killjoys are out in force, moaning about The Apprentice, laying into everything from the candidates’ lack of grammar to the vulgarity of the AMS1 personal number plate on Lord Sugar’s Rolls-Royce Phantom, as if the programme were a cutting-edge documentary on an issue of international importance as opposed to a light entertainment show whose principal function is to relieve the tedium of a Wednesday night spent in front of the telly.

The complaints go on and on: Lord Sugar is a bully, the contestants are bumptious upstarts who play up for the cameras; the tasks are facile, Nick Hewer is too straight, Karren Brady not a patch on her predecessor Margaret Mountford, etc, ad infinitum.

So loftily contemptuous are the critics, they don’t hang around long enough to find out that the most talented, least pushy characters almost always make it to the final, or to discover that, by the last task, some of them are displaying flashes of real business acumen.

When they’re not banging on about Lord Sugar’s surliness, they are obsessing over the long-term fortunes of previous winners, as if it matters to viewers that Stella English – the victor of series six – resigned her “non-job” after falling out with her erstwhile mentor, or that having seen off favourite Kate Walsh in series five, Yasmina Siadatan went on to have a baby with a work colleague. Surely no-one thought they were all going to end up on Viglen’s board of directors?

For what it’s worth, my take on The Apprentice is that for all its manifest flaws it has not only provided some of the funniest televisual moments of recent years (think Simon Ambrose inadvertently screwing in the legs of a trampoline at crotch level, oblivious to what it looked like to the viewer) but nurtured the potential entrepreneurs hiding inside a generation of schoolchildren.

My own kids may spend most of the programme making up nicknames for the most obnoxious contestants, or mocking the way they stab each other in the back in the boardroom, but they’re also genuinely interested in the tasks, and after several series are quite capable of chipping in with their own opinions on how to boost sales or maximise profits.

When the teams are sent out to source a list of obscure items at rock-bottom prices, or choose the best products to sell at a baby/bridal/new homes fayre, they will argue amongst themselves about who has made the most perspicacious choices, delivered the most impressive pitch or haggled most effectively.

Of course, if you were to take The Apprentice at face value, you would have a very distorted view of the business world. Lord Sugar is no-one’s idea of a 21st-century visionary, and there are many occasions on which a decision that brings a quick profit (and so wins a task) would be detrimental to building a sustainable business.

But whatever its limitations, The Apprentice is more likely to inspire young people to strike out on their own than their business management textbooks, which seem to focus not on the practicalities of starting a new enterprise or getting a product to market but on learning by rote the difference between a private limited company and a public limited company and the rights and responsibilities of shareholders.

And it does provide some real insight. Take last week’s episode. Yes it was peopled by caricatures such as Katie Wright, who calls herself the blonde assassin, and Ricky “I’m the reflection of perfection” Martin. Yes, it was chock-full of Lord Sugar’s cringeworthy soundbites (“I’m looking for the Marks to my Spencer, the Lennon to my McCartney”). But the task – to buy merchandise such as T-shirts, bags or teddy bears, add a design and sell them on at a profit – was a perfectly legitimate business challenge. The fact that the team with the poorer-quality goods won the task demonstrated that it’s not enough to have a good product, you need to have thought about pricing and how and where to sell it, while the embarrassing incident where the girls’ team surrounded a shopkeeper like a pack of hyenas proved there is a point at which the hard sell becomes harassment.

Nick Hewer – he of the permanently raised eyebrow – has said that when he goes into schools to give talks, he sees many examples of fledgling entrepreneurship and that it’s the tasks, not the personalities, most children ask about, and I don’t doubt him for a second.

It was The Apprentice and perhaps Dragons’ Den – but certainly not his business course – that inspired my eldest to go door-to-door during Hurricane Bawbag to rustle up enough customers for a newspaper round. It was The Apprentice that encouraged him to buy cookies on the way to school and sell them with a mark-up so obscene it offends my Calvinist spirit. It was The Apprentice that taught him to reinvest his profits in more stock.

Where shows such as Big Brother and The X Factor glorify fame and celebrity, The Apprentice at least doffs its cap to the notion that creativity and hard work are of value.

Lord Sugar may indeed be a jumped-up oik with a limited grasp of the English language, but so long as following his example means my son has enough money to stop him scrounging from his parents, then he’s all right by me. «