“What is the point in growing old,” said Kenneth Clarke cheerfully last week, “if you can’t hound and persecute the young?” Right on, Ken. Your aperçu is reinforced weekly, with glee, by the most ageist television game show ever, a weekly treat for the curmudgeon. With shame, I have only lately identified the source of my own low joy in watching it, and am thinking of doing penance for uncharitable thoughts.

But its true meaning crept up on me by stealth. When I first watched The Apprentice on BBC Two, it seemed an amusingly structured primer on basic trading tenets, halfway between It’s a Knockout and the Harvard Business School. It was a mercantile panto with Sir Alan Sugar playing his heart out as the Demon King. However, since such simple business basics can be written on the back of a beermat – know your market, watch your margins, organise your team – it took a while to work out why we all persisted when it took on a shlockier BBC One format, studded with brand names and glitzy plugging of the “treats”, and took to selecting contestants mainly for their good looks and delusional personality traits.

Then I got it. I realised what the buzz was, and blushed. The Apprentice is all about middle-aged people hating and baiting the young. Elderly Sir Alan starts the day by telling the novices how great he was in his own youth and setting them an embarrassing task. At the end of the day he emerges from a fake corporate spaceship and sits on the best chair to pout, snarl and snap: “Yer a shambles! Yer fired! Sure as I’ve got a hole in my arse, yer hopeless!” The young have to sit cringing and muttering “Yes, Siralan”.

In a society that worships and mimics youth, and fears its dominance in new technology, music, fashion and telly, this is a sweet fantasy for the past-it generation. On either side of the gerontocrat sit his aides, equally stricken in years, reporting with gleeful malice on what the poor saps did wrong as they sold coffee off barrows, got out of their depth in art galleries or sweated through traffic jams on a mission to unload dangle-dollies on disdainful retailers. Every chance to point up their inexperience is seized; editing is lovingly crafted to showcase their moments of spite and deluded arrogance (“I’m a winner, I’m the best, I’ve got my own company”).

And we, the middle-aged, whoop with glee as our prejudices are confirmed. They may be young, they may have firm bellies and shining hair and run down the street plying their pathetic wares without puffing, but they know nothing, har har! They’ll never afford houses, hee hee! And before bedtime the appalling old waxworks will put them in their place, pitilessly. Even the winner will only be an “apprentice” – a gopher for the wrinkled mandarin. It’s not nice, it really isn’t.

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