Sir Alan does it again…
12 June 2008 @ 9:26
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Argh. How S’Alan managed to employ two people as competent as Margaret and Nick I will never know. I now fear that somewhere out there there are two even better Margaret and Nicks, who were turned down by the Sugar corporation… It was another Ruth Badger over again, as Lee ‘4 months at Thames Valley University, but I have a good dinosaur impression’ McQueen won The Apprentice. I was still celebrating Alex going - and enjoying him weeping in the taxi - when S’Alan hired Lee. I couldn’t believe it; ‘is the bearded loon serious?’, I thought. He was. He does it every year, much as I hated Christina Grimes, she was a better candidate that Simon, surely? Badger was obviously better, as well. Claire was and is a better business person than Lee. S’Alan likes to pick blokes, he may like ‘a lady’s view’ at times, but he always seems to go for the bloke when it is a one female, one male situation. He also seems to let lying pass, look at Michael and now Lee. It is fien to lie as long as you don’t say you can’t talk to people about football because you like culture. And was anyone surprised that Lee dropped in to the dinner conversation that he supported dirty Spurs? No, me neither… Elsewhere I love this article in today’s Guardian Woman. When I did my presentation on pornography and free speech at York the discussion mostly descended in to a debate about my statement that ‘Sex and the City has done far more damage to women and feminism than pornography in recent years’, so it is a subject close to my heart. And as for Pretty Woman. I had a big fight with a - decidedly weird, admittedly - house mate at University (Huddersfield this time) who’s favourite films were Dirty Dancing (the one film I hate more than Pretty Woman) and the said tale about a prostitute being saved from her life on the street by a rich man and some nice frocks. I said it gave a false impression of prostitution, of ‘punters’ to that profession, of how women should aspire to behave and be treated and she said ‘it is just a great film and Richard Gear is sexy, you think too much’. Strange how many times I’ve had that one thrown at me over the years ‘you think too much’… |
To quote the Wikipedia entry on Sir Alan; the late Sir John Harvey-Jones said “I never liked Alan. I always thought he was a bully. His values are in my view totally irrelevant to the needs of business. I watch his programme with horror. If I had behaved that way for one day at ICI, I’d have been hot-stuffed and rightly.”
I don’t think I could say any better than that.
As to your second part it shows how little the world changes, sadly or otherwise. I remember have equally heated debates in the eighties at college, but at least we seemed to be getting rid of such attitudes then; little did we realise. It almost makes one envy the previous century when the boot was on the other foot. The English aristocracy (and yes England was apparently the collective term for the UK in those days and may explain the tendency for other countries still to refer to our collection of nations as such) was pimping itself to American (hmm) heiresses to enable them to continue to live in the style to which they wanted to remain accustomed. And I guess to a certain extent they still are…
People will often make the most terrible compromises to get what they want, and perhaps after all, it may be a viable policy for many, given the society we live in, the discrepancies in wealth distribution etc. Not supportable, but understandable.