Ordinary Gweilo

The Apprentice is back, and after designing toys in the first week the teams were asked to create a new ice cream flavour in week two. Perhaps in week three the challenge will be writing your name using joined up letters. I am not a fan of reality shows, but thankfully The Apprentice has generally managed to avoid many of the irritating aspects of that genre. Sure it’s artificial, but at least success or failure generally seems to be based on competence rather than popularity, and the mechanics of the show have been relatively unobtrustive. Up till now.

Also, slightly unexpectedly, Donald Trump has helped the show by making sensible choices, and where they have seemed questionable it was more a matter of having so many candidates who richly deserved to be fired that it was merely a matter of who should go first. Up till now. Sadly, all of that seemed to go out of the window in the second show of the second series (shown on Saturday on TVB Pearl). The problem was a bit of meddling by the producers, who decided that if ‘immunity’ was good enough for Survivor it must be good enough for The Apprentice. Last week, Bradford won immunity by being the Project Manager for the winning team, so when he was on the losing team this week he was safe and couldn’t be fired.

However, Bradford had other ideas, and felt that he could afford to waive his immunity because his good performance meant that he wouldn’t get fired. He rationalised this by saying that it would help him to win the respect of his team-mates, but I am not convinced that he had really thought it through – if he had done he might have remembered that this wasn’t Survivor, and popularity actually counts for nothing. Anyway, I rather doubt that his fellow competitors would have respected him any more for it.

Perhaps he hoped that Donald Trump would be impressed. Er, no – turns out he actually thought it was a very stupid decision. Even so, I was convinced that he was going to tell Bradford how stupid he had been but sack Ivana (good name, eh?) for being a hopeless Project Manager. In fact he told him how stupid he was, but also that he was the most impressive candidate of the four who were sitting in the boardroom – and then fired him anyway. All the team members were obviously shocked and surprised by this decision, understandably so. Had Donald Trump gone mad?

Not mad, perhaps, but he seemed to have made his decision on the basis of the rules of a reality show rather than the rules of business. In real life, a boss who faced the music and was willing to accept the consequences of his team’s mistake would indeed earn respect (from the team, from customers, maybe even from competitors). It’s the right thing to do, not a "life-threatening mistake" as Trump rather extravagantly described it.

I’d agree that it probably wasn’t the optimum strategy if you wanted to win the competition (which is presumably why they are all there), but it was a gamble that might have paid off. Plus, you’d have thought that Bradford must have watched the first series and would have figured out that keeping quiet offers the best chance of progressing to the next round, and that contestants who are noticed early on are not going to win – it’s the ones who keep their heads down and quietly get on with the job who survive and so have a chance of winning.

Apparently he hadn’t worked that one out, so he’d probably have got himself fired before too long, and his comments about immunity came across as boastful and arrogant.  Therefore my sympathy for him is therefore somewhat limited, not that he needs it – being fired in that way will probably make him into an instant celebrity!

I did wonder whether the producers had persuaded Trump to fire Bradford because he had messed with their immunity rule, but actually the idea of being able to waive immunity is a rather nice twist, so I assume Trump made the decision unprompted. Perhaps Trump himself had come up with the idea of immunity and felt insulted that Bradford had spurned it.

Bradford dug himself deeper into his hole by failing to justify his decision, instead agreeing with Trump that it was stupid (which makes it seem less likely that he had planned this in advance, as he seemed to be saying afterwards). If he’d tried to persuade Trump that the firing decision should be made on the basis of performance on the task he might have survived, but he didn’t even bother to try!

Or maybe it was a waste of time, because Trump clearly doesn’t like people who talk too much (in the same show he got annoyed with Jennifer, who just wouldn’t shut up even though she was not under any threat). If Bradford had kept quiet in the first place, Trump couldn’t have fired him.

I have complained before that the "boardroom" has become more important than performance on the task, and I fear that Trump likes it that way because it makes him more important. Yet, if people get fired just for saying one thing that Trump doesn’t like, the show becomes a lottery! It’s fair enough for Trump to challenge the contestants and judge them on what they say, and I can understand him seizing on any weakness (real or perceived). However, on that basis, it was Ivana deserved to be fired. For example, when offered the chance to bring 2 or 3 people with her to the boardroom she choose 3 and then admitted that Jennifer didn’t deserve to be there. So why didn’t she just pick two people? Come to that, what justification was there for picking Bradford? In the past, Trump has criticized Project Managers for picking people who performed well on the task, and rightly tried to stop them making tactical picks, but not this week!

The danger for the show is that Donald Trump has got too caught up in the alternate reality of The Apprentice. And who can blame him – on The Apprentice, Trump is a billionaire, a successful businessman with impecable taste, who always has the final word. As we know, the real world is not that simple. Anyway, someone please remind him that he is supposed to be choosing the best candidate (which is what happened in the first series), not punishing people who fail to play along with the show’s silly gimmicks.

Finally, I thought Carolyn was pushing her luck. She was very rude about Apex, describing the task as child’s play and strongly criticizing their failure. She had seemingly forgotten that the game is not about success or failure, but about winning or losing. Apex had successfully completed the task and made a profit, but unluckily for them Mosaic had made a bigger profit. Interestingly, Bradford picked up on this remark and seemed quite insightful, agreeing that the team had "over-thought" what was a relatively simple task. However, it seemed that nothing he could say would redeem his position in Trump’s eyes. Then, having been so rude about their performance and (correctly) said that Ivana should be fired, Carolyn cravenly agreed with Trump’s decision to fire Bradford for that one ill-advised remark. She clearly believed that Ivana deserved to be given the bullet for her poor leadership and yet she indulged Trump by agreeing with his crazy decision. Mind you, having seen what happened to poor old Bradford when he said something Trump didn’t like, perhaps it was wise to humour him!

All I can say is that if the show continues to be about Trump and his synchophatic side-kicks making autocratic decisions, I don’t think I’ll be bothering to watch anymore.