Well thank goodness that's over...

The nation can at last relax.  Sir Alan has got his latest Apprentice, in the form of the arch-blagger, Lee McQueen.  The contrast with Lucinda, the poshly-spoken, sartorially-unique consultant could not be more stark, and no doubt most of us held our breath, averted our gaze or just hid behind the sofa when Lee's CV inventiveness did somewhat undermine his position on the show.  Not that a little thing like that mattered, in the end.

It has been 'that kind' of series, this one, and I have been left wondering at intervals what exactly we are expected to conclude about human nature in general, or 'business' in particular, from watching this sort of TV.  No doubt most of us have valued the incisive, intelligent input from Sir Alan's two sidekicks, Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer, as much as we have despaired at the brainless contributions from a bunch of characters who have, at times, appeared bereft of even the rudimentary business-sense of, say, a flatworm.

Who can forget the brilliant concept of sending a greetings card in order to encourage people to 'save resources'?  Or the insightful strategy of parking a Ferrari next to a pile of rubbish in Portobello Road, in order to encourage punters to hire it?  Truly inspired stuff, this.

And yet...I found one or two themes repeating themselves throughout the series.  The first was the clear, unambiguous and almost universally held belief that, in business, "anything goes".  Whilst we did at least see Sir Alan draw the line when Jenny Celerier tried to sabotage her competitors' business deals, neverless we saw repeated examples of the idea that, in business, there are (virtually) no depths too deep when it comes to 'winning' (they were big on 'winning').  Inevitably, this led to those painful boardroom episodes when friends who, minutes before, had been hugging and applauding each other, were now whipping the knives out with alacrity.  I am not sure where it is a written down rule that business has to be conducted in that way, but clearly the contestants had read this somewhere and believed it to be an absolute truth.

Another popularly-held belief appeared to be that 'sales' and 'ethics' live in entirely separate compartments, and have nothing to do with each other.  The doe-eyed Michael Sophocles (he of Kosher Chicken fame) held firmly to this belief - say anything, do anything, provided that it gets results.  Whatever the customer wants to hear, you tell them in order to 'get the sale'.

At times, series like 'The Apprentice' tempt one to lose faith in the human race.  Presented with moral vacuums on this kind of monumental scale, combined with the commonsense of your average housebrick, the only thoughtful response is despair.  "Thank goodness", I thought, as I switched off the TV after the final episode, "at least we've got TCF".