The Rebel Billionaire

We watched the first episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (hashtag #FFS LOL) which promised to fill the Apprentice shaped hole currently in BBC1’s Thursday night schedule. It was quite interesting – Ramsay going big on investing in the person not just the business and as such there will be tests of character as well as business acumen, starting with a swim to a cliff than a forty foot jump off it – who knows how important these tests are, followed by a proper business-y task of selling street food on a Cornish beach. To its credit, the business element felt far more real and on the level than a similar sort of task on The Apprentice, which these days are mainly entertaining contrivances based on how business is run only really on a homeopathic level, with a much bigger emphasis on costings and margins, but it’s not nearly as amusing as The Apprentice and by the end of the episode I can’t say I really gave much of a damn about any of the contestants to be honest. Ramsay is coarse but constructive throughout as you’d expect, although his “we’re DONE” walk off after elimination was inadvertently comic rather than dramatic.

In short: it’s alright. It marks itself as being different from The Apprentice quite successfully but I don’t feel all that compelled to continue, although I’ll probably give it another week at least.

However there was another show that combined adventure with business acumen, and that was The Rebel Billionaire: Branson’s Quest For The Best, Fox’s spoiler for The Apprentice about twenty years ago. In it, Richard Branson challenged 16 people in challenges consisting of tests of character and business acumen, to the point where I did wonder if these shows are related somehow. However, whilst Ramsay seems much more about the business, Branson is more about the adventure. One of the contestants has posted a potted version of the show, the finale seems to be available in full.