© Copyrighted Material Chapter 8 m o .c te a g h s The Apprentice: Realities and Fictions.a w w w m o for the London Skyline .c te a g h s .a Iain Macrury w w w m o .c te a g h A concrete metropolis of unparalleled strength and purpose. s .a w 1 Introduction, Donald Trump (2004) The US Apprenticew , Season 1 episode 1 w m o .c te a g h s The human economy, then, is embedded and enmeshed .ain institutions, economic w w and non-economic. The inclusion of the non-economic wis vital. m o Karl Polanyi (1957), The Economy.c as Instituted Process, 146 te a g h s .a w w w Playing and Reality: The Apprentice’s Fictitiousm Capital o .c te a g h In a book about ‘fictitious capitals’ this chapters explores London from perspectives .a w 2 afforded by looking at a highly popularw reality television-based presentation w m 3 of the city. In its production, staging ando narration, the BBC’s The Apprentice, .c te a broadcast in the UK since 2005, incidentallyg but forcibly, serially foregrounds h s London-as-cityscape (Figure 8.1). .aIn particular both signature imagery and the w w w show’s unfolding events stage and are staged by London; presented in its guise as m o a hyper-modern global metropolis,.c signalled especially by mock up Canary Wharf te a 4 g offices and framed and reframedh throughout each episode by wide-angle panning s .a w shots of the city’s iconic skyscrapers;w the Swiss Re building (colloquially ‘the w Gherkin’), Tower42 (oncem the NatWest Tower) and with One Canada Square at o .c te a g h s .a w w 1 Trump is speakingw against a backdrop of footage showing skyscrapers and the New m York stock exchangeo – and in the relatively recent context of the September 11th terrorist .c te a attacks on New York’sg Twin Towers. h s 2 The Apprentice.a has been successful in growing a large prime time audience w w – topping 9 millionw in series 7, and with critical acclaim expressed in awards from the m o Royal television.c society and BAFTA. It has developed a range of subsidiary spin off shows te a including celebrity-basedg competitions and a Junior Apprentice programme aimed at young h s audiences..a w w w 3 The show is developed from a 2004 format launched in the USA with Donald m o Trump.c standing as the ‘master’/’employer’. te a g4 (Fictive) location of the show’s famous boardroom – and vantage point from which h s Sir.a Alan is imagined to survey the competition – alongside his trusty aides – Nick Hewer and w w Karenw Brady (with former assistant judge Margaret less prominently involved in recent series. © Copyrighted Material 128 London After Recession © Copyrighted Material 5 Canary Wharf coded as the show’s Head Quarters set against London’s growing m o clusters of surrounding financial-industry edifices. As Jonathan Freedland puts.c it te a g h in a 2006 review of the second series: ‘London never looked so good’ (Freedland:s .a w 2006). This is Marion Boyer’s (1995) ‘figured city’ for the small screen. w w The Apprentice’s London is also a site of everyday commerce and m business o .c te culture, ersatz arenas springing up in shopping malls and commercial officesa with g h s major parts of each episode requiring contestants to pit their wits on.a location, to w w ‘get their hands dirty’ in the reality show’s business simulation tasks.w Each episode m o samples an industry-based ‘task’ staging problems themed to refer.c to an array of te a commercial and professional areas of work; from selling rag-and-boneg ‘junk’, to h s .a used car sales, to restaurant management, to market trading, wto food manufacture w w and retail, to advertising and branding. These simulations are certainly in the m o .c register of ‘game’, serious as competitors become in pursuitte of their goals. In genre a g 6 h terms the show has been cast as reality TV (McGuigans 2008). Of course there .a w 7 appears to be little intention on the part of producersw towards realism as such. w m Instead a general understanding prevails in accord witho genre convention, so that, .c te telling and high pressured as the representative ‘work’a situations performed by the g h s candidates might well be, the show is largely unconcerned.a with verisimilitude in w w 8 w relation to depictions of its work-themed scenarios. In particular, while the show m o gives emphasis to ‘city’ locations there is no.c real engagement, no dramatisation te a g of the major kinds of work undertaken in London’sh financial districts. Candidates s .a might design a funny ‘app’ for an iPhone wor seek to bake a better biscuit, but they w w are not tasked with derivatives tradingm or hedge fund management. This simple o .c trompe-l’œil substitution – placing fictivete concrete work in the spaces and places a g h of actual abstract work – the real works undertaken beneath the city vistas on show .a w w can be examined as part of the showsw appeal. m In the ‘balloon debate’ formato typical of such shows, one by one and episode .c te a by episode the wannabe apprenticesg are removed from the game with Alan Sugar h s .a leading a panel and making aw final evaluation before firing a candidate – that week’s w w m o .c 5 One well known fictionte in relation to the show’s presentation is that the boardroom a g h is in fact not located at sCanary Wharf and that Lord Sugar’s Amstrad offices are based .a w in unglamorous Brentwood,w an Essex-based suburb some distance from London’s city- w metropolis. m o .c 6 The show waste invented by a producer who also made a US format called Survivor. a g h The ‘balloon debate’s style pattern of competition and weekly ejection by some process of .a w voting and/pr judgementw is standard to the ‘reality’ format. w m 7 Othero reality-style shows emphasise the fly-on-the-wall-exploration of working .c te sites, notablya airports and hotels. However, the surveillance aspect of The Apprentice’s g h reality-TVs commitments are fulfilled more fully in relation to emotional expose, framing .a w the contestantsw ‘seemingly real pain of failure and rejection for instance skilful editing w m juxtaposingo hubris and incompetence, arrogance, tears, shame and shamelessness in .c te contestants’a self-presentations. g h s 8 There is an extended debate about the accuracy and usefulness of the show’s .a w w wmaterial as a resource in business education (Lair 2011; Wice 2006; Huber 2008). © Copyrighted Material The Apprentice: Realities and Fictions for the London Skyline 129 © Copyrighted Material ‘victim’ is denied the winner’s opportunity to become the master’s apprentice and,m o .c te formerly, to earn a ‘six figure salary’ or lately, to receive a £250,000 investment,a g h s a detailed format change reflecting a shift, post-crunch, as the show soughta to . w w endorse a more substantively entrepreneurial spirit for London and for Sirw Alan m – appointed entrepreneurship Czar in 2009. At the end of the series, oneo winner .c te a remains. He or she will be the apprentice. g h s .a Each episode is fronted by Sir Alan Sugar, presented partly as a wquintessential w w London wheeler-dealer entrepreneur and partly as shrewd experienced business m o .c sage. Sugar is assertively not an establishment city figure, nor teis there anything a g h abstract about Sir Alan’s to-the-point argot. Sugar’s Hackney background,s starting .a 9 w as a by-the-bootstraps electrical goods trader is frequently mentionedw in the show. w m His past stands as illustration and resource to warrant assertionso and judgements .c te about the rights and wrongs of business practice. Partlya connected to the fame g h s accruing to Sir Alan Sugar via The Apprentice (he had.a already been knighted w w w in 2000) Sugar was offered his role of ‘Enterprise Czar’ by the New Labour m o administration in 2009 with an accompanying place .cin the House of Lords (Murray te a g 2010). Couldry and Littler (2011) rightly point hout the show’s endorsement of s .a neoliberal notions of ‘charismatic’ workplace w leadership – embodied in Alan w w Sugar. This complementary reading of The Apprenticem further asserts place as a o .c key preoccupation – with London figured andte refigured on screen accruing and a g h evoking identifications and value in the process.s .a w The Apprentice offers a particular andw popular framing for London presented w m as a working capital. In terms made popularo by Roland Barthes (1972), the show .c 10 te a might be called ‘mythic’. Each episodeg offers up a fictive and poignant version h s of London-as-work-place – in the.a guise of light entertainment but with the w w w underpinning structures of morality tale and moral trial. As such The Apprentice m o serves as an everyday media object,.c as a set of ritual (Couldry 2008; Couldry te a g and Littler 2011) narrations hand dramas which engage across media, and with s .a w the prime time TV show supplementedw by subsidiary shows, a web site, a twitter w 11 feed and extensive cross mediam coverage.