Fresh meat - The Junior Apprentice (From The Argus)
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Fresh meat - The Junior Apprentice
2:47pm Wednesday 9th November 2011 in Blogs
Class 3B
'I am not young enough to know everything' - Oscar Wilde.
It’s easy to dismiss teenagers as slack-jawed, sofa huggers. Congregating in shopping centres, clogging up A&E on Saturday nights. Those August riots didn’t do a whole lot for their reputations and a study published by Barnardos last week concluded that 44% of Britons think young people are ‘feral’. Yowser.
So, not only does The Junior Apprentice do us all a favour and help buck up Monday nights, it also serves as a timely reminder that the youth of today are capable of far more than sulking and shoplifting.
One minute you cannot help but marvel at the polished, pushy delivery of a cohesive business strategy by a 16 year old. The next you are biting down hard on the arm of your sofa as a privately educated schoolboy barks ridiculous instructions via the tinny medium of speaker phone to the rest of his team, all of whom know they will be apportioned unfair amounts of blame when they fail the task. Which they will. And then you find yourself feel genuinely sorry for that same schoolboy, who is fighting to keep his bottom lip from trembling as he sits, dejected and world weary, in a shiny suit three sizes too big for him.
The show also appears to have given Alan Sugar a new lease of life. By episode 3 of any regular series, he’s acting like a rabid badger that’s been repeatedly poked with a big pointy stick. However, in this PG version he comes across as a kind of benevolent uncle, gazing fondly across the boardroom at his bickering protégés, rummaging in his pocket for Smarties. He never loses his patience, and he’s never shy of making a watery joke or three. He’s either had his faith in human potential renewed, or he’s been over-doing it on the ginseng.
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anubis says...
7:14pm Wed 9 Nov 11
The couple of shorts (just 15 minutes) slots I've been involved in (for channel 4) were each the outcome of the best part of two days of filming .... my guess is likewise, in 'the Apprentice', we are similarly shown only a VERY tiny fraction of what was actually filmed. How AS appears -- yes, more empathetic, more 'gentle' -- rather than reflect a change in 'judge' assessing the youngsters ... most probably, to a greater degree, was the product of script writers, planners and editors, who determined IN ADVANCE how the inquisitor(s) would be presented to the public.
However, be that as it may, I agree with you -- the 'change' comes over rather well and perhaps your detailing of it will help increase the size of the local audience -- for the episodes yet to come?! Thank you!