I have to confess I have only ever seen one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. I say this not out of snobbery, but in admission of what a poorly researched knee-jerk rant this post is going to be. The only reason I made the effort to endure an hour of this insanely popular shitefest was Chris TT’s awesome appraisal in his Morning Star column, which gets right to the nub of what the program is about; power games and homogenising public opinion.

“It is a parallel to the corporatist vision of the owner not just possessing everything but possessing everyone’s values too and overseeing what is regarded as acceptable.”

While BGT may appear to be new nadir of prole patronisation as entertainment, I have to say I have seen worse. Probably the ugliest example I can recall was ITVs Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, (”a cross between Jim’ll Fix It and Dragons Den“) where worthy causes juggled, danced, or gurned for our entertainment, then held out cloth caps to a panel of millionaires, in the hope they would toss them a few scraps. It was truly appalling, and not just because the panel included loathsome twat Lord Archer (I struggle to find a kinder adjective).

But I have to take issue with Chris on one point, or more accurately two words, in his article – “The Apprentice“. This programme cannot be dumped in the same shitbox as Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, 10 Years Younger and American Idol. Chris has questioned how so many of his seemingly intelligent friends are devoted to this crass reality show. I am one of this faithful, so allow me to stage a defence.

The crucial difference is context. The candidates on The Apprentice are not dreamers with a desire to find an audience for their meagre talents. They are comically extreme devotees of the Capitalist dream. These people are whoring themselves for the ‘prize’ of commuting to Essex for the rest of their lives. The ‘winner’ gets a nine to five job where they can continue to kiss their hairy master’s arse FOREVER.

The contestants on Britain’s Got Talent are victims. It is truly tragic that the only platform they have found that will allow their decidedly average faces on the gogglebox is one where they are manipulated and abused in some kind of emotional pornography.

Whereas the comedy we get from the candidates on The Apprentice is purely down to their own warped ambition, misguided self-belief and unshakable faith in a capitalist road to happiness. These people are exactly the kind of freaks our society SHOULD be ostracising. They should be in the stocks to be ridiculed, as to mock them is to make their shallow capitalist ambitions less socially acceptable.

The Apprentice is a capitalist comedy, it one of the few antibodies in the face of our biggest cultural disease. It is also bloody good telly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 5:42 am and is filed under culture, wtf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.