Alan Sugar, now affectionately known as Suralan – or, alternatively, a grimacing Wooly Willy toy with a haunted look in its eye stuck crudely onto a child’s wrinkled body in a mortician’s suit – sits in the high chair grumbling at moronic, vapid shills.

It almost sounds like the perfect job doesn’t it? Imagine being paid by the BBC to sit at a desk and break idiot’s hearts for the entertainment of the braying public. It’s one of the easiest jobs in the world.

However, the catch is, he has to continually meet these dunderheads without pulling out a carpet stapler and filling their faces full of excruciating tiny wounds.

For a moment on last night’s The Apprentice, it looked like Britain was going to view the most horrifying episode of any show ever aired. The show, from the off pretty much said “tonight is all about babies”. A grim vision passed in my mind – Sir Sugartits demanding that the challenge would be for the would-be richdicks to create a baby before the day was out.

The thought of Ben yelling “SHOUT SANDHURST! SHOUT SANDHURST, SLUT!” at McQuillan in the futile attempt to roughly and brutally make his arse pregnant, or dish-faced Noel Fielding lookalike Debra riding atop a weeping Howard, punching him in the face with huge cement-mixer hands, grunting like deaf pigs in throes of an ejaculation that can only be likened to the death rattle of a cockroach, spilling eggs from its guts.

Of course, that wasn’t the deal at all. Rather, the assembled vampires were being asked to shag the public in the quids. Weirdly, these sharked-eyed poindexters were dealing with products for children. A bunch of people with less life-skills than a lepton looking at a bunch of stuff and trying to decide what The Nation’s Parents would want to buy for their puking little offspring.

The natural thing to choose was a foam hat, especially designed to make your child look like it had Down’s Syndrome. As an aside, you don’t see *those* helmets these days do you? Unless you tune in to The Apprentice of course. One of the clunges on the show basically implied that they’d sell the dubious products via ‘guilt’. Presumably they hadn’t considered the secondary guilt of their child getting mercilessly bullied at playschool, which is ironic for a bunch of people who probably spent their time getting spat at in school corridors.

Our James needed to impart his unique take on the world too. Watching him squat and talk to women about their ‘lid’ being flipped open so the baby can ‘pop out’ was worth the entrance fee alone. As he mimicked the pressing of a pubic bone and a monkey stump to some clearly puzzled preggos, internet searches for Entire Skeleton Removal spiked.

Anyway, one team of morons beat another gaggle of goons and that treated us to the familiar spectacle of The End Of Programme Showdown. This of course, is television that could curdle milk. It captures that awkward bullshit that we all go through in every excruciating job-interview we’ve ever had. In effect, each person is asked to talk about their strengths. The appalling feeling of pre-sick water rising through the throat while you try to convince a twat in a suit that you’re a reliable so-and-so and good at taking one for the team.

However, this job-interview is dragged out over weeks while everyone laughs at you and hates you. Even Alan Sugar hates you. You talk and talk about how wonderful you are, hoping that no-one chips in… but the whole world offers abuse like it’s some gift. No. You keep that. You shallow, irritating git. It’s all yours. The reward is either further humiliation on national TV or you get a tiny, withered hand pointed your way – like a dried-out monkey paw on a stick – and that timeless line: “You’re fired.”

Sandhurt Snow Patrol Ben got the chop, which saw him near-blubbing on telly like a mardy-arse. Off in a black taxi he’s taken to a life of also-runnery. Regardless of what he acheives in life, there’ll be someone, somewhere, ready to lay into him and snort uproariously about the time he showed everyone what a prick he was on our idiot lanterns. The long trudge to the cab compounds the bleakest fears. The niggle becomes a load klaxon. “You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.”

And how we all laugh. Laugh like the mean-spirited shitehawks that we are. We watch, we sneer, we predict a winner, we go to bed. We don’t care. These people are just moving meat factories, shunted on screen and shunted back off again. They’re as human to us as Nookie Bear. Possibly less so. And that’s what TV is. A writhing pie full of shit and sinew. Yet somehow, we gobble it up every night.

So who is the real fool?

This was a guest blog by Mof Gimmers out of that Electric Roulette. Go visit now!

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