Articles From the Team

The Apprentice Week 1: On the Buses, West Ham and Radical Feminism

OK, my objective when blogging is to take a current topic, pile in a few keywords, force in some tenuous link to recruitment and hopefully raise a few laughs along the way. So, if that works for you, read on, if not keep flicking trough LinkedIn for something on Ten Great CV Tips.

So, The Apprentice. I always think the first week is a bit like the start of the Grand National – all a bit of a muddle until some hapless horses decide to sprint off and take the early lead. Enter Danny and Sarah as week one Team Leaders. Sarah, eyes shining like a husky’s, did pretty well, despite her sub team’s unique approach to negotiating (“No, no – I know, what we’ll do is offer him a price which is about half of what he might be willing to pay so that we can flog most of our stock at a pitifully thin margin”).

Danny alas, despite all his high fives and laddish camaraderie was out of his depth, like the early leader in the Grand National found that he had to jump too many fences at their highest point, too early in the race. He was, of course, undone by Charles. Charles is a man whose tailoring, beard and specs could lead to him being viewed as some kind of Bond villain, but he reminded me more of someone from a Buggles tribute act (google it, kids) who struggled with the definition of organic. But we will watch his Machiavellian progress with interest.

Of the women, I quite like Elizabeth because she is a little odd, a little bit older and she reminds me of Olive from On the Buses (again, google it). She also inspired Siobhan to use the word “faffle”. I have never heard this word. I’m guessing it is a cross between “faff” and “kerfuffle”, so we kind of know what she means.

Siobhan strikes me as the kind of northerner who uses the phrase “I’m northern, me” quite a lot and she soon landed herself in hot water with Karren for implying that it helps if you are, well, a bit fit in order to sell burgers to blokes. We’re like that, us blokes: the market for gourmet burgers has become so saturated that we differentiate not by price, taste or ambience but by how attractive the staff are. Many are the lunchtime I have wandered from burger bar to burger bar unable to find anyone attractive enough to take my order despite the hunger gnawing away at me.

Karren, however, was having none of it. Metaphorically speaking, she rolled up the sleeves of her Spare Rib boiler suit and threw her copy of The Female Eunuch to the floor and challenged Siobhan. I can now reveal that Karren is a member of the revolutionary feminist cell WHUFC (also known as West Ham United FC), a group so radical they make Pussyriot look like the Tunbridge Wells branch of the WI. At WHUFC, she works with fellow feminists David Gold and David Sullivan to push their strident agenda. The Davids, whose early feminist publications and films can be looked up on Wikipedia, hit mainstream consciousness with that popular beacon of feminism, The Sunday Sport. Many is the day when Karren, Gold and Sullivan sit In the WHUFC boardroom with Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, discussing Reproductive Rights, Intersectionality and whether or not Andy Carroll will last 90 minutes on Saturday, whilst dreaming up headlines like “Hubby Made Love to Toaster So I Could Bridge The Gender Pay Gap”.

But good on them and good on Karren – Siobhan, your cards have been marked.

So, on to the tenuous recruitment link. Easy. James works in recruitment and told us that he made £200K a year with a cheeky look that implied the rest of us were the kind of people who really believed The Sunday Sport was a feminist periodical. Another male contestant told us he earned £175K and I hope this trend extends over the coming week to the lads measuring parts of their anatomy and seeing how far and for how long they can perform certain bodily functions. Anyway, back to James. I am happy to reveal that whilst he does indeed earn £200K, he can only achieve this by also having a Saturday job as AJ on Strictly (surely you don’t need to google that one) and as such you don’t have to hate him. Well, at least not yet.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot - you can earn a lot of money in recruitment and if you’d like to have an informal exploratory conversation about careers at BCL Legal, please email me at robbarklamb@bcllegal.com of call me on 0845 241 0933.