Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

THE APPRENTICE

WEEK 6 - THE SEMI-FINAL




Voiceover : Lord Sugar is looking for a historical novelist to invest in. He scoured the country for the very best. Twelve were selected to begin the process. After six weeks of hard battling, only three are left.* It's the Apprentice Week Six!

(We see a montage of the three remaining contestants, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters frantically typing away on laptops).

This week's task : to write a complete historical novel in only seven days. All the sleepless nights, wrecked marriages and substance addictions have come down to this. The novels are written, and Lord Sugar's verdict is in.

He has sat through all three power-point presentations.
He has cross-checked certain details with Wikipedia.
He has read all three books.
Hilary, Sarah and David are back in the boardroom.
One of them will be fired tonight.

Lord Sugar speaks

I've had a chance to look through your novels and I gotta say I got a few problems. I'd say there's a fair amount of waffle going on. I'm a businessman and I can tell you you can't build a business empire on waffle. I like things to be plain and simple. That's the way I am. All this fancy pants stuff is not where I'm coming from. This one here, Hilary, this is yours isn't it, A Place of Greater Safety. I mean… with the best will in the world it's very long, there's a lot of words in it. I got that it's about the French revolution, I did get that far, you'll be relieved to know. But all that yapping. I had problems with that.



Sarah, yours I thought was okay – Fingersmith, good title. The story zipped along, I liked that. But you seem to have to drag lesbians into everything and I'm not sure the public particularly wants lesbians all over. You don't see market stalls piled high with lesbians do you.



(Sarah shakes head & looks abashed.)



So I had a few problems there. David, yours was very smart, all those ten dollar words, I could feel your brains throbbin away when I read it but… it didn't have much energy. You might think that of the three this thousand Autumns of whats his name would appeal to me, because the first part is about business, and it must have been very interestin to be the first lot of businessmen who made contact with Japan and got a monopoly on all of the import export of a whole country… Very interesting. That appealed to me. I could see the frustrations of having poor auditing and no phones. But this thing about that midwife? Nah. It was old hat. I seen it before a million times. It was in South pacific, same thing. Did you see that musical? (David shakes head.) Well you shoulda seen it before you put pen to paper. So that went nowhere fast. I must say I came up the hard way and I haven't had the luxury of yearning for Japanese midwives.

So this was a difficult decision, as you know one of you will be leaving the process tonight. You've done well to get through to the semi-final. Don't let anyone take that away from you. So hmm. Er… I have come to a decision. You may think you are creatin … what do they call it – literature but you still need to get bums on pages, to coin a phrase. You have to sell to Joe Public and not just to Miss Josephine Public. If you get my drift. So, with regret, David Mitchell, you're fired.









* Previous rounds split the historical novelists into two teams, who would compete on a particular task. Previous tasks included
- describe a day in the life of Genghiz Khan
- write a mini-series for television starting from the premise that when the two maries visited the tomb they discovered the Jesus was a robot
- run a bookshop for a week using gibbons as shop assistants
Week six is the semi-final