The Apprentice: Team Decadent should have been forced to keep their name

Sometimes something so bad happens that I just want to give up thinking about word meanings, spellings, grammar and punctuation and go build a hut from driftwood on the beach, live on a diet of whelks and change my job title to ‘Watcher Of The Skies’.

It would be idyllic. I could lie back and lazily cast my eye over cloud formations and note down one or two interesting ones every month. I might, from time to time, examine my belly button for signs of fluff and contemplate the artistic merit of the incoming waves.

This would, of course, be a somewhat useless existence. But no more useless than when people who should know better mangle the language so badly that it makes my brain hurt. Such an occurrence happened last night.

I was watching the new BBC1 series of The Apprentice. I usually enjoy the antics of the contestants on this show and, in truth, I should know better than to set my expectation levels of them too high. But I never seem to learn.

What happened was this: The contestants were grouped by gender and the female team set about the task of choosing a name for themselves.

Because this was the tenth series, they decided a title on the theme of “decade” was a good idea. So far so good. However, their analysis of “on the theme of” appeared to merely be that it contained the same first three letters. They ran through a few options decathlon, decaffeinated . . . and a few more equally mind-bogglingly bad ideas before deciding upon “decadent”.

This was bad enough. Indeed this was stupidity so vast that they would be contenders for a place on the nation’s Stupidity First XI.

Amazingly, none of them knew what the word “decadent” means. Just digest that for a second. These people are supposed to be the cream of Britain’s young entrepreneurs yet they didn’t have even a tentative grasp of the meaning of decadent.

Please tell me that it isn’t just me who thinks this was an incredible state of affairs? There were 10 of them!

I realise that these people are selected for their entertainment potential. Their bungles, bodges and brouhahas are what attracts an audience. But this is beyond the pale.

I could forgive a foreign language student from Uzbekistan, who has only been studying English for two weeks or so, for not knowing this. Similarly, I could understand children up to the age of about 6, possibly 7, not knowing.

But it is a terrible indictment of the level of education in the UK that a group of 10 people selected to appear on a TV show that requires a modicum of intelligence, a soupcon of nous, have vocabularies that are so limited. I know of budgies with wider command of the English language!

And I’m sorry to relate this, but it gets worse. The truly ridiculous part was that although they agreed they didn’t know what “decadent” meant they went with it anyway!

I found myself wondering what might have happened if one of their number had suggested Deceitful? Or Decayed? Or Decapitated?

For the record, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of decadent is: “characterised by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline”.

When Team Decadent appeared before Lord Sugar, he suggested (in an appropriately scathing tone) that they might want to rethink their choice of team name. I would posit that they might attempt a rethink on a more basic level. Perhaps returning to primary school and paying attention when the class is doing their first adventures with A, B, Cs might be advisable.

However, I disagreed with Lord Sugar. I think they should have been forced to keep the name.

If we look again at the OED definition, these people are a perfect example of being in “a state of cultural decline”. They should have been made to go through the entire series bearing a label marking them out as exactly what they are.