THE TV series The Apprentice has, like past and present governments’ attitudes on same, lost its meaningful place in society.

You just can’t sack a proper indentured apprentice unless they have done something really bad within such establishments.

Leaving school at 15, I served a five-year apprenticeship which included a private medical once a year, a day at college and a shilling weekly for tool money, and I was trained by some of the best local trades.

After five years, National Service beckoned, and I soon achieved all top trade pays within because of my civil training. In fact I was an embarrassment to the Army trained instructors.

During the 1980s TV made heroes out of actors parading as bricklayers in Germany supposedly helping to rebuild war-damaged buildings.

Thirty years earlier I was probably one of the first as a young national serviceman stationed there that actually, in my spare time from camp, trained young German women on sites.

All money I was paid, along with money raised swimming their famous Mohne Dam, helped with the many thousands of Deutsche Marks raised to send a very ill local lady to America for lifesaving medical treatment.

An offer to appear on TV in the 80s highlighting the need for governments to take action on the hundreds of thousands of young on the streets soon prompted the then government to act, with them offering employers countrywide the first two years’ wages to employ the young, and it was a great success, but later discarded by newly elected governments, Over the last 25 years, because of our failure to train our own, governments have allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants in, most with no skills at all.

The present government now boasting some one million new apprenticeships is like me thinking I could well be the next PM.

After my 40 years of letters to Westminster, large building firms etc at my own expense, work and tears, what have we now got?

Yes it’s Lord Alan Sugar and television making a sheer mockery of a once fantastic system, called proper apprenticeships as we once knew it, that kept this country up amongst the best in the world re. skilled persons.

Gerald Stoodley, Turin Court, Andover