Stepping back in time with Hydra Executives. I am staring down Richard Best in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel. After a strategically long pause I say: "Let's cut to the chase. Who wins?" Best, an architect from Los Angeles, is one of the two remaining contestants on Hydra Executives, an Apprentice-style reality show filmed last year in Abu Dhabi, whose final episode will air next Wednesday. But it's not going to be easy to extract this secret from Best. He stares back and says, in his laid-back California drawl: "I can't tell you that, but the one thing I will tell you is that one of us wants to discuss the final show a lot and one of us doesn't want to."
A mysterious grin crosses his face. As the series, which pitted a team of Americans against a team of Brits, nears its conclusion, Best and his English archrival, Stephen Rumney, have been brought back to Abu Dhabi to drum up some publicity for the finale. The two are staying in the same place - at the Rainbow Hotel Apartments - and have apparently been spending some uncomfortable time together.
"It's awkward," Best says. "I feel it more as the show comes to a terminal focus." It's a unique temporal predicament common to the world of reality shows: the entire competition is finished long before the first episode ever sees the light of day. Filming finished in early 2008, so both men have digested the outcome (still a closely guarded secret at press time) and moved on with their lives. But as the episodes appear on television, the contestants are thrust back into the frenzy of competition: old dramas resurface and they re-experience the "reality" of the show.
Abu Dhabi, as it happens, might view Hydra Executives in much the same way. The economy is now feeling the impact of the global financial crisis, but on television the boom is still raging and Hydra Executives feels like a relic of another time, one when you could sell a multimillion-dirham apartment on a street corner with nothing more than a printout. "Coming here at that time and experiencing the real estate and economy was like nothing I had seen before," Best says. "When I went back home last summer, it can be only described as the feeling when you get off a people mover at the airport. A sudden slowdown."
The less-exuberant mood at the moment of his perhaps-triumphant return to the Emirates has not escaped his notice. But Best, who once donned a dishdasha on the television show, says he plans to open an office here for his firm and "change the face of architecture in Abu Dhabi" with environmentally friendly designs and building technologies. "It's still a lot better off than the rest of the world," he says. "I believe the economy will turn around faster than any other economy."
His time on the show changed him from a publicity-shy thoughtful type into, well, a bit of a diva. At the photo session that followed our interview, he struck a number of self-confident poses that could only come from months of training in the world of TV celebrity. He's also gone in for a slight makover: since the show finished, he has cut his shoulder-length hair. "It's put me a little bit under the radar," he says. "I like the change."
He first heard about the show from an email sent to alumni of the school of architecture at the University of California Los Angeles, where he received his master's degree. It was at the audition at the Beverly Hilton that he first met Sulaiman al Fahim, whom Best calls "the doc" - because he has a PhD in real-estate finance from the American University in Washington, DC. Fahim, the CEO of Hydra Properties, plays the role taken on by Donald Trump in the original show and by Alan Sugar in the UK version (or, if you like, by Biodun Shobanjo on Nigerian television). Trump's abrasive (and briefly ubiquitous) catchphrase, "You're fired!" has been sculpted here into something a little more subtle: "Impress me!" is Fahim's demand.
"He has the face of a very friendly young man, but the instinct of a businessman who is 60 years old," Best says of Fahim, who he also calls a "maverick". He says the show opened his eyes to the value of publicity in business. "I plan to explore the intersection of entertainment and architecture," he says. His latest project in Los Angeles was the design of an environmentally friendly nail salon. For Abu Dhabi, he wants to challenge builders to construct buildings that combine "sustainability and sculpture".
"We need to make buildings more flexible," he says. "Why can't we create buildings that close and open like a flower. Or when the sun comes out, a building that turns away." He smiles again, considering the possibilities: "That is, if I win."
* Bradley Hope
