Up For Hire: Episode Two

BBC Three18.10.11

A contemplative jobseeker is fired from his chair by Bacon
Tonight's episode starts with a barrage of X Factor-imported catcalls and cheers. YES! It's the guy who created Innocent Smoothies! Woop-woop! Bizarrely, he is placed beside Andi Osho and Katie Hopkins. It seems to be the guest set-up for this series: a comedian, an entrepreneur, and a former reality TV star. All three overlap so much that it is difficult to say which is which.
Richard Bacon overstates the importance of Up For Hire by claiming the Internet "exploded" after last night's episode. At most, there were a few hundred tweets – comparable with any other programme, apart from maybe the overwhelmingly popular Zumba Party Fitness on QVC. Nevertheless, he says it direct to camera, so chillingly overlord that it is necessary to believe him. "Is your degree worthless?" he demands. Yes, sir, it is. And that is the theme of tonight's episode: not is your degree worthless, but your degree is worthless.
Young people from the audience are interviewed in the BBC television studios, the majority of whom claim their media-related degrees have got them nowhere; media degrees are mocked in front of abashed graduates; and Mickey Mouse's name is cried with as much hysteria as someone confronted by one of the skittering non-cartoon beasties. Never does anyone champion the actual purpose of university: to learn. Nor does anyone suggest that perhaps a degree in video production might actually be quite useful when pursuing a career in, well, video production. Obviously the only real way to get a job with a degree would be if society started churning out production-lines of doctors. But then who would produce videos of it?
Presenting knowledge itself, in whatever form it may take – red-brick or Russell – as an unimportant asset in this garish BBC3-pink bubble is more than slightly dispiriting.
Unexpectedly, the only moderately sane voice is Katie Hopkins: cutting through her knee-jerk assumptions about red-brick universities (specifically the deplorable "blow yourself up" line), she launches into a proper scathing attack on the government and how it is them who have messed up so horribly, horribly wrong. Not the young people, as this show keeps insinuating, but the government. How refreshing! She was quickly silenced – which was sad, because her impassioned speech took her halfway across the studio floor and Bacon seemed confused as to how she'd got there. A bit like her tenure on The Apprentice, to be fair.
So far, Up For Hire is a well-intentioned but vapid series. I may be biased, however, because their tie-in BBC Lab employability test rather pessimistically scored my self-efficacy as present-fatalistic. But then, I knew they'd say that, so what is the point?