You’re hired — so long as you swear like they do on telly, and you don’t smoke

Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice

Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice — even our usually infallible television critic James Delingpole, who told me that he loved it ‘because it’s so awful’. Perhaps I should make more effort to master postmodern irony, but I’m afraid I found Sir Alan Sugar and his contestants just too irritating to watch for more than five minutes at a time. I’m with Sir Digby Jones on this one: the about-to-retire chief of the CBI accused the programme’s makers of chasing ratings by presenting a caricature of business as a brutal pursuit of the bottom line, thereby reinforcing negative stereotypes rather than doing what Sugar presumably thought he was doing, which was to encourage young people to want to become successful entrepreneurs like himself.

Still, I suppose The Apprentice does have something to teach us about modern business manners — on which some interesting research has come to hand from the Aziz Corporation, which describes itself as Britain’s ‘leading independent executive communications consultancy’.