I’m not sure if I’m going to continue making fun of Kira Cockrane beyond this third installment, but it’s so easy. Even in the case of World Net Daily, which is like an independent ecosystem of stupidity, I had to poke around a bit before I found a guy who believed that dragons were real and disproved evolution (really). Yet with Cochrane, I’ve simply run with her three most recent columns in The Guardian. In all earnestness, they should be ashamed for publishing them. Note: this opening is not the thesis statement from an 8th grade report.
Over the past five years, Margaret Mountford has established herself as the only person you can truly respect on The Apprentice.
The fucking Apprentice? I’ve gone through Cochrane’s archives and this is the kind of shit she always talks about. We all like dumb TV shows and movies, but even Ruthless occasionally tries to address something serious. Remember when feminists were less concerned with trashy TV and movies and more concerned with starving, abused women in third world countries, or the spread of AIDS through rape in Africa? I don’t either, but it would be nice once in a while. Anyway, let’s see Kira’s take on… The fucking Apprentice.
Quote:
Not bad for a former corporate lawyer.
Yeah, why would you respect someone like a successful lawyer? Unless, of course, they went on reality TV.
Of course, she doesn’t face too much competition. Siralan lapses ever more into cliche, Nick Hewer’s lips are so pursed he sometimes appears to be imploding, and the contestants run around in a storm of irrelevant numbers (“I’m giving it 110%”), and assertions that they’re not there to make friends – as if, for all the world, crowds of eager people were jostling by their in-tray, begging to be their buddy.
Oh my fuck. So you say that reality TV contestants are not the most dignified or articulate people? I think that became the consensus the minute everybody flipped out when Julie saw Heather’s pager and asked if she was a drug dealer. I realize we’re working from different histories of realty TV, but what I’m saying is that you haven’t made a very fresh observation here. You’re way behind the hack curve on this one. You were supposed to have moved on from marveling at the stupidity of the guests at least eight years ago and started ironically embracing it. Somewhere along the line, you might have observed “reality TV isn’t real at all!”
Which isn’t to suggest that Mountford stands out simply by default. She combines a steely core with acute moral and business judgment. She speaks rarely, but when she does, it’s with a waspish, careworn turn of phrase; “Edinburgh isn’t what it used to be,” she sighed, on hearing that one of last year’s more ludicrous candidates attended university there.
Oh, I get it. You’re writing a column about The fucking Apprentice because it has a WOMAN in the cast who you find likable and you are the WOMEN’S editor. Clever. What do you think of the wife on “Everybody Loves Raymond?” I think she’s fantastic!
How would you, of all people, be able to assess this lady’s business judgment at all, let alone from watching The fucking Apprentice?
Her appeal has often been attributed to her schoolmarmishness, her toughness, the idea that the nation would quite like to be put in its place by her. There is something in this. In a world of easy approval, where mediocrity is so often rewarded…
This actually made me laugh out loud. You are getting paid, pretty well I assume, to write a column consisting of three rudimentary paragraphs about The fucking Apprentice for a major newspaper. In this same article, you lament that this is a world “where mediocrity is so often rewarded.” I’m going to borrow that for the trailer to Hackwatch: The Movie. “In a world… of easy approval… where mediocrity is so often rewarded… One man… is about to shoot himself.”
Mountford’s endorsement has genuine worth.
More than that though, she seems to be a conduit for the audience’s emotions. Most of her communication is non-verbal, and it is always perfectly timed. Her eyes roll when ours do. She looks appalled when we do. Her jaw falls floorwards at exactly the same moment as ours.
Please don’t say “we,” assuming that everybody else shares in your enraptured journey while watching The fucking Apprentice. Oh, the dizzying highs and the invigorating drops. What has he said now? Appalling! Now, look what she has done. Jawdropping! And how comforting that the reaction shots of one of the hosts have been edited in to mirror your own! Kira’s world must be a magical place.
With her expressive eyebrows, her perfectly applied lipstick, her spot-on scepticism and her PhD studies in papyrology, Mountford represents the audience’s very best self.
I’m having a hard time seeing how the characteristics you’ve listed represent the best, check that, the very best, of the audience. She represents their skepticism… OK. I mean, you don’t realize her reaction shots are probably edited in and have serious moral and emotional reactions to The Fucking Apprentice, but OK, she represents your skepticism. Her lipstick, I guess, represents the class and dignity of the… audience of The fucking Apprentice. She also represents their… PhDs in papyrology?
An island of sanity in a sea of lunacy.
She is a fucking character carefully orchestrated to be the point of empathy amongst other characters carefully orchestrated to be unsympathetic. On. The. Fucking. Apprentice!