I gather this programme/event (provided you can get to the BBC studios of course, it's not a nationwide thing) runs every night on BBC 3 until Thursday. Here are some notes I made watching last night. I will do the same tonight.
Guests include Katie fucking Hopkins, apprentice loser and famed for being duplicitous and manipulative. A failed electoral candidate as well. Great role model. Somehow she stood as a local candidate in either the last election or last local election. The delightful Miss Hopkins didn't do well. But sadly that hasn't stopped her turning up like a bad penny on talking head panels to air her ridiculous Thatcherite generalisations as she did last night. At one point she even sprang to her feet as if possessed by the Iron Lady herself to hector the audience. But the question is: what does she do? I don't even remember her saying what she did while on the Apprentice except to say she had a gold card or some such useless bollocks.
Richard Bacon propagates the usual stereotypes regarding views on students. One of the evening's themes was the apparent uselessness of degrees. Now certainly there are many, myself included, that have had bad experience on courses that led nowhere. But that isn't the fault of the subject or even the course; it's the fault of a university that doesn't give a shit about supporting students and graduates that have paid them for the privilege. The usual suspects are trotted out under the banner of 'mickey mouse' degrees, with Katie Hopkins shouting the loudest. Here's what a sensible man says about it all.
A shot of one of the students in the reality part of the show concentrates on said student playing a video game in his house. Typical stereotyping: lazy kids playing video games. This was during the intro to the four subjects, the students partaking in the reality tv aspect of this show.
Tonight the reality section involves the four students running a shop each, completely out of the blue, untrained and unprepared. Oh noes, they have made mistakes and surprise surprise running a busy shop isn’t easy. Well fuck me! I don't get what I'm meant to learn from this? Who believes that running a business is something an inexperienced stranger can step into and do? The whole thing smacked of the Apprentice: a time limit and their performance judged on the profit margin attained within. That's it.
Katie Hopkins is now blathering and generalising. Fortunately her point, that people are mollycoddled, is refuted. Typical right wing claptrap. We have a government run by cosseted millionaires inheriting daddy’s dollar and they perpetuate this kind of bollocks.
Now on the chopping block: mickey mouse degrees again. Specifically, media courses…criticised on media presentation broadcast through a media outlet. Hmmmn.
Good god, it’s back to Katie Hopkins. I can’t keep up with this. More spurious cheap headlinery from the modern voice of Maggie Thatcher. Never mind education for the sake of knowledge.
Lots of anecdotes that are not representative of the whole picture. This is the audience participation factor. Now I find it odd because the audience, comprised of 'young people' (or people that have clearly bathed in the blood of virgins), all seem to be people that ended up doing nothing remotely linked to their studies (hence the mickey mouse degree discussion) and now are all entrepreneurs with a lot of people under them. All without exception; not just the guests (those guests that aren't media figures and rentagobs). All of them espousing a degree in the university of life. Well that's great if you have the nous, the ideas and more importantly the capital to start a business that will succeed. Don't seem to be hearing from those that haven't.
Reed and Next Step are agencies on hand providing a workshop. Next Step I have encountered before; they were quite happy for me to fill in a form for the referral to get their payment but offered nothing at all. Money for old rope.
Now the students are back running their shops. It feels like an Apprentice exercise. The experience is not representative of real life, day to day, in a shop; it’s just time restricted money making gimmickery.
Finally the show has ‘teamed up’ with some employers who are offering paid jobs to apply for. Just in time for Christmas, or is that too cynical? I saw none of these advertised locally so these are jobs only based in, presumably, London or Manchester or Birmingham (wherever the show is filmed). And oddly all the applicants were young people; so the implication is that these jobs were engineered for this programme in much the same way the jobs in Fairy Jobmother were. I didn't say anyone of my age, or older, applying (I'm 38).
More tonight, will make notes again.
No comments:
Post a Comment