vallierojas: Nerd triumph

Geeky men everywhere will be cheering Tom Pellereau's unlikely victory in The Apprentice. But let's not get carried away

The most recent series of the Apprentice was already a few weeks along when someone, somewhere tweeted that one of the contestants looked like me. I think I waited about three minutes before I went downstairs to have a look.

"People are saying one of them looks like me," I said to the child I found lying on the floor in front of the television.

"Yeah, Tom," he said. I scanned all the worried faces at the boardroom table.

"Which one is he?" I said.

"The geeky one with the glasses," he said.

"That one?" I said. "I don't look like that."

"You really do," he said.

When Tom Pellereau (who actually looks remarkably like the actor Michael Sheen who, in turn, can look like almost anybody) went on to clinch series seven, it was immediately hailed as the triumph of the nerd, a victory for the nice guy, an inspirational win for any man who considers himself to be one or the other. Of course the two aren't necessarily synonyms, but there's bound to be a fair bit of overlap. Being skinny and wearing glasses on TV is still enough to get you marked out as a nerd, and on the Apprentice anyone not exhibiting sociopathic levels of self-belief can be considered the nice guy. In the airless pretend world of business in which the Apprentice operates, there is no need to make a distinction between a nice guy and a nerd. They both come under one umbrella category: losers.

Except Tom won. He won after losing so many weekly tasks that even on the night of his triumph, You're Fired presenter Dara O Briain made him a present of a chair from the losers' cafe. He won despite being the least good at promoting himself, and terrible at defending his failures. In a game where the other contestants invariably model themselves on what they imagine to be Lord Sugar's type of person ? ruthless, serious, focused, thick-skinned ? Tom got away with being none of those things, but he hung on in, improbably, an inventor with a notebook in his pocket.

Are nerds becoming cool? At the weekend I saw the band Stornoway play at a festival. The lead singer Brian Briggs, who wears his guitar almost as high as Simon Cowell wears his trousers, stepped up to the microphone between songs and recounted a newspaper story about a cat in New York surviving a 40-storey fall from a window.

"Interesting fact for you," he said. "Most small mammals like cats have a non-fatal terminal velocity." After a moment of perfect, collective perplexity, the crowd went wild.

The triumph of the nerd has long been a resonant theme in pop and film, and some kind of permanent shift has been heralded before. The explosive success of the tech nerds of Silicon Valley, the change in status afforded the DJ (in the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, nerds and DJs are allies), and the timely arrival of unlikely pop idol Jarvis Cocker all seemed to signal the end of an era when old fashioned alpha males dominated. More recently we've been pleasantly startled by the appearance of pin-up telly scientist Brian Cox, and a Labour leadership election where the two front runners were both Milibands.

In hindsight (which happens to be one of Tom Pellereau's specialities) these were all false dawns. Despite high-profile successes on several fronts, nerds have transparently failed to take over the world. That's probably because the very definition of nerd includes some element of exclusion. Successful nerds are anomalies, alpha males in specs. While being nerdy may have the occasional moment when it becomes perversely fashionable, that doesn't mean the majority of us are doing it on purpose.

This makes Tom's victory all the more extraordinary, given that he succeeded in a sub-genre of reality TV where the cut-throat nature of the competition is part of the entertainment. People who don't play the game the way it's meant to be played shouldn't last beyond week one. Two unlikely triumphs don't necessarily constitute a trend, but it's an odd coincidence that the most recent series of Masterchef ? a cookery programme rejigged to inject more ruthlessness ? was won by the unassuming, bespectacled, decidedly nerdy Tim Anderson. This was also a rare cause for celebration among people named Tim. Martin Amis once called Tim Henman "the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all". That may be grossly unfair, but he said it quite a while ago now, and I certainly wasn't in a position to object at the time.

It could be that being an affable, clever-but-unfocused, wholly unapologetic geek is the newest way to succeed in a threadbare format where both audiences and Lord Sugar seem to have grown weary of watching the arrogant, the self-regarding, the pushy and the grimly determined triumph over more human candidates. Or maybe the whole series was simply engineered to make it look like that's what happened. A suspiciously self-assured Tom appeared on the live post-final wrap-up, not nearly as spluttery, puppyish and bewildered as the heavily edited character from the series.

His victory is still a welcome surprise if you're nerd though, or even if you just look like one.

Tim Dowling

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds