I had that sinking feeling of deja-vu watching The Apprentice last night, when I realised I was ashamed of my sex for the second series running. What is it about the girl's group in the first few weeks of this programme? Why can't they just get along? Why do they have to snipe and whinge and compete against each other? Compared to the "'A'-Team", who managed somehow to band together behind the obnoxious Syed as leader in last night's task, the girls' behaved absolutely disgracefully. This was mainly due to the fact that they never accepted Jo as their project manager. Not that the deranged ginger made it easy for them to do so, nominating herself and then wasting ten minutes bombarding them with reasons why they shoudn't mess her about. Of course the other way of leading a team is to assume that your underlings accept your authority, and pull rank only when you've found evidence to the contrary. Anyway, it got me thinking about why, in The Apprentice, it seems difficult for a larger group of women to work as a team. Is it to do with women's continued comparative disadvantage in business? Are women in this sphere of work a bit like asylum seekers in the police force? - you presume that they would do everything to help their fellow asylum seekers, but they'd probably just emulate their superiors and toe the institutionally racist line in order to keep their job. While women continue to be subordinate to men in business - evident in the vast discrepancies between their vast salaries and the cultural fact of the 'glass ceiling' - the notion of team-work among and even the sisterhood (gasp! That obsolete 70s concept) of a larger group of females is a distant hope, or maybe a pre-capitalist memory. Anyway, enough feminist diatribe for the moment. Karen, the corporate lawyer, got fired from the show, much to everyone's surprise. I'd just like to remind people that this is the woman who suggested to her teammates, "We're all sexy women, why not use it?" in the first task. And I detected more than a little use of decolletage to close deals in last night's task too. Fuck her, is what I say. This isn't an episode of Ally McBeal you know. Once Jo gets locked up in a padded cell, my hope is that the Brummy bull mastiff woman will rise to the top. At least she'll get there through hard-headedness rather than cute looks. Good riddance, Karen.
OMG, DEAL OR NO DEAL FANS!! Can you belive how many times the £250,000 has been in the contestant's box recently? First there was that girl with the nice teeth last week, then the adopted woman on Saturday (possibly my favourite contestant so far, barring Oak), and yesterday Germaine dealt at £75,000 and had the quarter of a million ALL THE TIME! When is someone going to have enough guts to see it through? It has got to happen one day. The favourite future contestant for me at the moment is Marcus, whose long blonde hair and carefully plucked eyebrows lead me to speculate that he may be a drag queen by profession. Can't wait to find out what his deal is. In a sexual sense I mean, rather than financial.
2 comments:
You got your wish TE, but did Marcus live up to expectations? I especially enjoyed his fondling of the two boys in the front row and I hope he "treated" them with some of his "winnings". Funny how, when talking about the gays, you can put anything in quotation marks and it becomes amusing. Viva La Gayers and their punctuational humour!
Yes I did overall, DK. I thought he showed the audience a really "good time" with all his "enthusiasm". I also discovered he had a finely tuned ear for rhyme - being the only person outside of Pauline in the League of Gentleman to say, "hokey cokey pig in a pokey", and asking Sam (one of your aforementioned "front row" boys), whether he liked "eggs and ham". The man was clearly a "font" of "creativity".
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