In The Firing Line

As a rule I don’t do reality TV shows.

As a rule I don’t – if I have any choice about it – do reality though being a hyper-cautious moral wuss my flights of escapism are normally fuelled by books and cinema rather than Charlie or H. My highs might only be literary or cinematic but at least they don’t involve kidney failure or brain damage. That said I have got the Withnail & I boxed set on order and there’s always the possibility of playing the traditional 'Withnail & I drinking game' whilst watching it.

The only reality show I do do is The Apprentice. And paradoxically it probably appeals so much because it is so not real.

The premise is real. The tasks are real(ish). The prize is real (though I imagine it to be something of a poisoned chalice).

The applicants are not. They are without fail the biggest bunch of fakers and self-deluded charlatans ever to dissemble across the face of the earth. And they get more fake each year.

Overblown. Pompous. Constantly self-centredly orgasming over their own self-directed, egocentric hyperbole. Totally blind to the way they willingly sacrifice what little shred of dignity they may possess on the televised altar of their own mistaken self-belief that they are “the one”. I utterly loathe them.

But I utterly love loathing them.

And that’s why I watch.

In a real sense The Apprentice is educational. This is how you do not do business. This is how you do not succeed. The dinosaurs and the outmoded concepts that still abound in this grubby little mercantile world are both amazing and appalling. In the first week the leader of the girl’s team urged her female associates to wear heels and a short skirt as it would help them all sell more product. A woman. A woman said this to other women. And could not understand why they objected. I would have loved her to suggest a shorter skirt to Karen Brady. Actually, sod that, I would have loved her to suggest it to Nick Hewer.

Nick is great. His expression couldn't look more sour if he was sucking a Haribo’s Tangfastic that had been soaked in vinegar from Craig Revel Horwood’s left armpit.

Ultimately though the true draw of the show is Sir Alan Sugar. I won’t pretend to like him. But compared to the applicants he’s the lesser of two evils. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, etc. And Sir Alan is certainly no friend to the contestants.

They’ve introduced a new schtick into this current series. Nearly twice the number of combatants but the potential for multiple firings in each show. It sounds like something out of a hard-core porn movie - e.g. last week Sir Alan dispatched 2 twats in one go. One before he'd even made it to the final boardroom stand-off. It’s beautiful; seeing all these plastically confident god-complexes crumble with the sudden realization that Sir Alan could finger them all out of the running at any possible moment.

And it’s good for them too. It humanises them. It strips away their self-erected façade of impervious eternally-ensured victory. Seeing them tramp away dejectedly with their Gucci luggage trolleys we finally get to see the disappointed (and disappointing) little children at heart that, without fail, they all secretly are.

But Sir Alan doesn’t go far enough. I want to see them tortured mercilessly with a constant weight of stress... I want to see them weeping snottily beneath a tonne-heavy sword of Damoclesiastic anxiety suspended by the merest spider’s web of Sir Alan's diminutive mercy... Psychologically waterboarded with the spectre of Sir Alan suddenly appearing at any given moment to kick them off the show with his career-ending fingerpoint of shame. When the telephone rings at the delegate's house at the start of the show to tell them where the next task is to take place I want Sir Alan to suddenly come onto the line and randomly fire whatever pole-greaser has got to the phone first to answer it. When they’re in the middle of Camden Town selling moody spuds from an Amstrad owned market stall I want Sir Alan to appear in the queue in a cloth cap and a Frank Spencer overcoat to hurl their Maris Piper’s back into their faces and tell them they’ve had their chips and the taxi is waiting in the gutter to take them back home to Crapchester. And most delicious of all, I want the boardroom showdown survivors to stagger back to the house at the end of the show, full of anecdotal PTSD and the lone survivor’s raconteur spirit only to have Sir Alan leap out of the wardrobe before they can get their hands on a conciliatory glass of Prosecco and say, ”Ha! Fooled you, worm! You have no right to your smarmy sense of relief! Get out – you’re fired! Fired just because I can do it and the all-sucking vacuum at the heart of my demonic and blackened soul is bigger and far mightier than yours!”

Boom. The ghost in the machine morphs into Frankenstein’s monster. Or a smaller, hairier, coconut headed Godzilla.

Now that, my friends, would be a show.

And true reality.

Because as we all know, that is how real life works.

It tests whether you’ve got balls. And then it kicks you in them.

Welcome to my world.

Now get out. You’re fired.

Trumpety-Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump

I don’t consider my childhood to have been deprived but I’ve always been aware that there were some things that other people did, experiences other people had, that I missed out on.

I never had a birthday party. I never had a sleep over. And I never went to the circus.

Sure, back in the day, circus shows used to be shown on television, so I knew what a circus was and could extrapolate an imaginary experience from the visual I saw on the TV screen: people sitting in a ring beneath the humungous big top; the caged magnificence of the elephants and lions; the dazzling troupes of garishly dressed trapeze artists and the rowdy explosion of clowns with their falling apart car. But watching the spectacle from the familiar comfort of one’s own living room is not the same as being there in the flesh and feeling the crack of the Circus Master’s whip igniting the air in front of your face.

So when Billy Smart’s circus advertised their latest appearance in the nearby town of Warwick Karen and I decided we’d take our boys; effectively give them the experience I’d never had as well as right a wrong on my behalf.

And what can I say?

Circuses have plainly changed from those that I used to watch on the telly. The elephants and lions were gone. We didn’t even have poodles dancing on spinning balls. This is probably a good thing as the last thing one wants when going to a circus is a moral dilemma. The clowns and their custard pies and their ever-collapsing car had also bitten the dust. I daresay the pincer movement of Stephen King’s It and The Simpson’s Krusty had hastened the end of the traditional clown. Instead we had a physical comedian who, like a Mr Bean or a regular mime artist, “filled in” with pratfalls and childish sign language while the backroom boys hefted the safety nets and the props around between acts.

And despite the Circus Mistress – Miss Yasmin Smart no less – proclaiming the circus’s credentials from the heart of the big top and tracing her own lineage back to a Stetson wearing Billy Smart, I couldn’t help but notice the proliferation of Eastern European circus workers who filled every nook and cranny and made me think I was about to run into Roger Moore’s creepy 007 playing a dodgy version of snap with a simpering Jane Seymour. But hey, the circus performers themselves were an international lot – an Argentinian bolas wielder who looked like a long lost member of Kiss, a French foot juggler with the most amazing thighs I have ever seen (I swear to God she could have rolled a cigarette between her thighs and inserted the roach without using her fingers), a haughty looking trapeze artist troupe who looked like they’d rather be throwing knives around rather than each other and the “Xtreme Brothers” who proved their strongman credentials by hefting each other around in borderline-obscene three-man pyramids, the configuration of which often made the eyes goggle and one’s goolies water.

But I have to say I loved it.

I was actually at a real life circus and felt like a kid again.

And my boys? They took it all in their stride. In fact my youngest was more enamoured with the light up spinning windmill toy we bought him during the intermission rather than the trapeze artists who deliberately (in my opinion) missed a few catches in the hope that the resultant “ooohs” and “aaahs” would encourage him to break away from the hypnotic lure of his toy.

Not so*.

When he’s old enough to start benchmarking the tensile strength of the performers’ thighs by visual inspection alone, then they might stand a better chance of holding his attention.

Until then I can see why my own parents never bothered getting me tickets to the circus as a child…

*Though he did say afterwards that he thought [and I quote] "Billy Smarties' circus was the best circus in the world..." so something of the occasion must have made it through the windmill filter.

When I Grow Up I Want To Be

I’ve been looking at my youngest boy lately and trying to discern what he might do with himself later in life. Career-wise, I mean (I have no doubt that, socially, he will be a party animal).

He is naturally green-fingered, shows an interest in cooking and likes fire engines.

I expect at 4 years old he is still too young to have had the thought “when I’m all growed up I want to be a...” occur to him.

I think I was 7 or 8 before I had a firm idea of what it is I wanted to be.

I wanted to be a crime-fighter. But no ordinary crime-fighter. I was going to be a crime-fighter with a kick-ass gang of celeb crime-fighters. This kick-ass gang comprised of the good guys from Star Wars, Charlie’s Angels and, for some ridiculous reason, Abba. Yeah. Like they’d ever get their gold lame dirty bringing some filthy crim to heel.

And we’d patrol the mean streets of Leamington armed with Star Wars blasters and light sabres in vehicles which I wanted to patent as “supercars”.

I put considerable thought into these wonder-vehicles. I mean, I had to fit the entire gang in there ‘cos, like, we were going to go everywhere together and do everything with each other. We’re talking a bond of brothers here. And sisters.

My ingenious plan was to have cars pulling caravans, but fused together with great sheets of bulletproof metal so that both vehicles were one, sealed whole. My thought processes even considered machine guns installed behind the headlamps and a rotating gun turret cut into the roof of the caravan. I drew plans and everything.

The design was a goer, I’m telling you. The crims of Leamington Spa would never know what hit them and the police would look upon us with pure envy in their eyes.

That I never considered how these metallic behemoths would be able to turn around corners or fit under low bridges or not blow over on the motorway in a decent gust of wind is testament to my youth and (at the time) unquenchable optimism.

I can remember feeling absolutely sure that I was going to do this. I just had to get the money; buy the metal and get welding. I mean, how difficult could it be? I’d even drawn the plans in biro and coloured them in with felt-tip. This was a commitment.

And then I remember quite clearly that moment in my early teens, not long after I’d started secondary school and the real world had begun to impinge on my mental flights of fancy – that soul-excoriating moment when you realize for yourself without someone forcing it on you – that you are talking absolute bollocks, the idea is completely stupid and childish and it’s never, ever, EVER going to happen.

Not in a million frigging years.

Welcome to the joyless world of adulthood.

I look at my little boy and I feel envy and sadness all mixed together. I smile at him carefully and keep what I am thinking to myself.

If you can accept this unforgiving minute then you’ll be a man, my son.

But if you refuse to accept it and live your dreams to the full then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be something more.