The Sceptic Blog

1. In today’s episode of The Apprentice, Alan Sugar chooses to hire the only contestant caught deliberately lying in his application form. Message to the nation: try lying – it’s worth it: even if you get caught, nobody will care very much. Perhaps that’s why the BBC showed The Apprentice after the Watershed – teaching children to lie is worse than teaching them to use bad language.

2. What chance is the United Kingdom today giving its youth, when the media celebrate and exalt those whose ideals, if they ever learned any, are constantly subjugated to their desire for transient success?

3. Even a child who aspires to succeed at a healthy, wholesome sport like running, sees one of the media’s greatest sporting heroes – Paula Radcliffe – so desperate to win a marathon that she thinks it worth debasing herself to urinate in the gutter, while being filmed, rather than lose with dignity.

4. Alan Sugar makes no secret of being a Jew. What a shame that he cannot also demonstrate even a little of what it is to be Jewish. I am not talking about observance of the ritual laws, but about observance of the fundamental characteristics of the founders of our religion.

5. Abraham based our religion on kindness. The Apprentice is about getting on by putting other people down. The contestants are encouraged to fight in the boardroom as brutally as they can, having set each other up to fail so far as possible. When two of the contestants tried to bribe a shop-owner to ruin the other team’s chances I thought they would have to go – how could Sugar be seen to countenance even the possibility of having such people in his business? One of them stayed.

6. Isaac developed the characteristic of strength. Strength in rabbinic understanding is the ability to control oneself. Single-minded determination to win at all costs is the opposite of strength: it is the weakness to allow ambition to prevail over principle. The contestants in The Apprentice seem to care only about winning: as one of them actually said, there is nothing he would not do to win: the extremity of weakness being portrayed as praiseworthy strength.

7. Jacob developed the characteristic of truth. Truth appears to count for little in Sugar’s world. The winning contestant is the one who lied to get in; while one of the interviewers, proclaimed as a successful man of business, made light of this on the grounds that he had done it himself.

8. Many of us believe passionately that Judaism is not about social exclusivity, but about contributing to and being part of the real world. But that is difficult or impossible to do if the real world does not allow even basic standards of decent humanity to operate as the common denominator of acceptable behaviour.