Connect: Prepare yourself for the sentence after next. Ready? "I'm shittin' meself," said 26-year-old Michelle Dewberry after winning BBC2's The Apprentice this week. Blonde, willowy and cold as a freezer, Michelle from Hull used characteristically lavatorial language to indicate - presumably metaphorically - her condition. She had (despite editing) sworn 28 times on her way to victory.
The Apprentice has been BBC2's hit of the season, regularly attracting more than five million viewers. The idea is that 14 people compete for a job working for Alan Sugar at £100,000 (€146,706) a year.
Each week the candidates were split into teams and charged with a money-making task: buy and sell fruit; rent out flats; take over part of Topshop; whatever. Whoever made the most money won.
In Wednesday's all-female final, frosty Dewberry, a former supermarket checkout girl, faced Ruth Badger, a maniacally bubbly 28-year-old sales manager from Wolverhampton. The programme format was created for US television by paratrooper Mark Burnett in 2004. The American version had Donald Trump playing the role of Sugar.
The format has now been licensed to 11 countries.
It's more "reality TV", of course, yet despite the show's competitive nature, aggressive language and generally fraught flavour, it all seemed unreal. Were the 14 chosen because they are representative of young, dynamic, progressive business types? If so, British business is even more coarse than we realised. It's not just the incessant swearing - that's merely tiresome - it's the attitude.
The dominant attitude of most contestants was that they thought they were God's gift. Sugar simply thinks he's God. The resulting interplay was depressing because the only goal that really mattered was profit. This is an ideological assumption underpinning politics in Britain and the US since the 1980s. It arrived here in virulent form in the 1990s.
Critics of The Apprentice have suggested that it's mere entertainment, not business. Perhaps this is true but the BBC is, at least partly, in the business of making money from entertainment. In that sense, the show is business all right . . . profitable business too. At the conclusion of each episode, Sugar called the losing team into his boardroom to bark at one of them: "You're fired". Sure, this kind of behaviour - like insufferable Anne Robinson's insults on The Weakest Link - has a certain television appeal.
It is car-crash telly though: you can't look, yet you can't look away either. But it's thoroughgoing bullying and for all their egomania, determination and sassiness, the candidates invariably accept the Sugar God's bark with a worrying deference.
All that's happened really is that Britain has created a new class to defer to - an aristocracy based on wealth and not one based on class and wealth. It's predictable "new versus old money" (what's the difference?) nonsense and it's notable that all candidates pepper their responses to Sugar by calling him "Sir Alan" more often than appears decent.
In fact, "Sir Alan" has morphed into "Surallan". "Yes, Surallan"; "no, Surallan"; "three bags full, Surallan". It's embarrassing. Why doesn't somebody say something like "up the yard, Surallan" or "don't ever talk to me like that again, you prat". You'd have to think that, far from being free, independent-minded, entrepreneurial spirits, the contestants are wimps prepared to endure repeated insults just to work for Surallan.
Fair enough . . . if you give guff to Sugar, you're unlikely to be his choice. But what the hell? When a bully tells you "Never, ever, ever underestimate me! I don't like liars. I don't like cheats. I don't like bullshitters. I don't like schmoozers. I don't like arse-lickers. On yer bikes", why should you take him seriously? Because he's offering a job that pays £100,000 a year? Seems so.
Candidates are prepared to endure what Digby Jones, the director general of Britain's Confederation of British Industry (CBI), called a "horrible fat old rich bloke" shouting at them. "It is not a business programme," he added. "It is entertainment, although I don't think it is very entertaining either. Businessmen do not turn up in a Bentley and scream 'you're fired' at people."
The impression created by The Apprentice of British business is not so much one of a meritocracy but of snivelling wannabes prepared to debase themselves for money. Surallan certainly gives no marks for being nice. Indeed, 34-year-old Ansell Henry, who joined Millwall at 16 but didn't make it as a professional footballer, was fired for being too nice! Niceness, responsibility, altruism - none of these traits count. All that matter are pounds, shillings and pence. Only money talks in the world of Surallan and it's clear that ambition is being exploited in order to grab ratings for a TV channel.
Anyway, Dewberry has made four-letter swearing utterly routine. The show features an hour of it on BBC television without a beep to be heard. It may be that such language is mirrored in workplaces throughout Britain but such coarseness rather sums up the whole debasing exercise. The Apprentice may be good for BBC business, but surely bad for business overall.