THE APPRENTICE!!!

The most addictive series ever devised for television is back! Another group of numpties stride across a bridge looking all steely and “grrr”, little suspecting that soon they will be causing us all to laugh hysterically. This time around Siralan has no particular opinions on “schmoozers and bullshitters” but apparently does not like it when people “piss his money up a wall”. Lovable lieutenants Margaret and Nick are back in full effect! There is still a useless Amstrad emailer phone crammed into every shot! The house is not as nice as the one last series! Let the games begin!

Siralan tells the teams that the program is not a platform to launch a media career and the men shouldn’t spend the whole time “wandering round in their pants with their three piece suites showing” (Ha ha ha – and also “spoilsport”). Perhaps he should also have told this to media whores Saira, James and Paul Goddamn Torrisi from last series.

The women’s team surprise us all by coming up with a name for their team in two minutes flat (“Velocity” – meh) without fighting and having hysterics. At this stage in the game it is hard to tell everyone apart, but for one woman (Jo – looks a bit like Sally Gunnell, probably describes herself as “mad” and/or “wacky”) who stands out for all the wrong reasons as she spends all the time whooping and laughing hysterically/ punching her fists in the air, apart from the time she responds to criticism from Siralan, when she is actually on the verge of tears. Take a pill, bipolar girl! I somehow think that she will not be lasting long in the program.

The men are more entertaining and spend ages “brainstorming” and “free associating” before finally coming up with a name (Invicta) that sounds like a 1970s aftershave. The instant standout (for all the wrong reasons) bloke is Syed, who looks like a handsome Bollywood star and instantly reveals himself to be a massive cock by repeatedly suggesting that they call themselves “The A Team” even though there is tumbleweed/bells chiming each time he suggests it. He also suggests “The Winners” and looks like he wants to cry when his ideas are ignored. For the task he wears a ridiculous muscle shirt to show off his manly biceps (I bet he calls his arms ”guns”) and reveals hitherto unplumbed depths of dickery every time he opens his mouth.

The task is selling fruit and veg at a market in Hackerney. The girls choose, um someone to be team leader and decide to run around New Spitalfields and sexually harass blokes into giving them produce that is on the verge of going off - for free! Genius – they even end up with too much stuff to fit in their van. The men choose ultra wet, posh boy, cancer survivor Ben to be team leader and just buy stuff boringly (with Syed making a dick of himself whilst trying to haggle) and all run off to set up their stall. All seven men sell from their stall whilst the women sell from the stall and also go round businesses with trays of fruit to sell. There is more sexual harassment and comedy use of the word “melons”. The men run into problems when one of them works out that the guy running the scales doesn’t know the difference between pounds and kilos and has been selling stuff half price. Doh. He later makes up for it by roaming the streets and persuading passersby to spend £2 -£5 on a single apple! Perhaps he is a hypnotist or something. The men run out of stuff and buy more stuff from a corner shop to sell. The women also run out and go back to the wholesale market and get the rest of the free rotting veg that they blagged. The men spend £300 and earn £700 and the women spend £40 and earn £1,100!!! Wooo! Siralan is a bit narked that they used “wiles” to sell their stuff and also that they were selling manky crap, but they still win and one of the men is going to be fired!

Wet Ben picks Syed (of course) and Samuel to take with him to the boardroom (Samuel = this years Raj only better looking, as he “isn’t much of a salesman” and spent the whole time just stacking fruit onto the stall). Basically Syed goes into mouthy git overdrive whilst Ben mutters ineffectually that he is being terribly ungentlemanly and looks like he is actually going to cry. Samuel just sits there trying to look clever and sucking his cheeks in. Syed talks and talks and talks. Shut up, Syed. I think Syed is this year’s Paul, only without actually being any good at anything. Ben, of course, is dead meat though Siralan comments that Syed is basically an annoying bastard and that his “card is marked”. Ben complains that the others weren’t very loyal before he is cabbed off to oblivion. Has he never watched the show before?

Next week: Charity calendars! Kittens! Babies! Crying (from adults and babies)! Siralan thinks something looks like “a load of shit”! Awesome!

The IT Crowd: 10 things that don't make it geeky enough

1) Not enough cables lying around. If you can see the carpet, it's not an IT room

2) No server rack twinkling prettily in the corner, with a desk fan turned in its direction to serve as 'air conditioning'

3) No secret porn/network games server - usually an ancient 486 that somebody has overclocked to oblivion, with several extra gigabytes of memory nicked from sales' computers.

4) No secret spying on colleagues' emails in the interests of 'security'

5) No Star Wars/Matrix/Trekker/Buffy memorabilia with attendant 'in-jokes' like naming all the mail servers after Darth Vader's closest personal friends.

6) Only one machine per desk? Amateurs!

7) No tottering pile of yellowing O'Reilly books propping up a table corner which in turn props up the semi-redundant Sun server.

8) Nobody ringing up with enquiries about the printer not working because it hasn't got any paper.

9) Decor too tasteful.

10) Not enough Pot Noodles/mangy old Pret wrappers/empty boxes of ProPlus littering the floor underneath the desk. And NO KETTLE. How do these people eat if there is no kettle with which to reheat one's Pot Noodle?

We're going to get some interesting Google hits after this one...

My boyfriend made me watch one of those stupid C4 docs “Ohs noes I don’t like my penis” or whatever it was called. (C4 are really scraping the barrel these days btw) and it was pretty rubbish, with a couple of blokes going “Yeah, I’m bigger than average – you just have to be a bit careful so you don’t hurt your partner” – like wow, stop the press, and a couple of “cultural commentators” talking clichéd nonsense (though at least it wasn’t Paul Ross and Kate Thornton – small mercies etc)

However, imagine my surprise when one of the guests turned out to be J0nah Falc0n (deliberately misspelt to stop the egotistical bastard googling himself…) – this American bloke who is “famous” for having the biggest cock in the world (13.5 inches – yowsa) and also for being the biggest cock in the world – basically all he does is whine on about how he tried to get famous due to his big cock and now no-one takes him seriously because they are obsessed with his big cock. The words “made”, “your”, “bed”, “now”, “lie”, “in” and “it” spring to mind.

The reason I was so surprised is that I actually used to post on the same message board as him years ago! What are the chances etc?? It was about 1998 and we both used to be on the Salon.com Table Talk boards – he was well known as a notorious troll who would derail any discussion about US films with tirades about how he hated the director Paul T And3rson – And3rson’s crime was to cast Marky Mark as the lead in Boogie Nights when it should have been J0nah – who could have played the part without any plastic prosthesis!! (not sure how he would have coped with, say, the acting and saying lines etc but that never appeared to be a consideration). Falc0n’s vendetta against Anderson got more and more intense until he was basically accusing him of being a talentless, drug fiend gaylord (Fiona 4pple = beard, apparently) who slept his way to the top. All this was probably libellous and Falc0n was banned in the end. The phrase “I’ve got a 13 inch cock!” lived on in Table Talk history for years afterwards as a shorthand way of saying “I’m a tool!!”

Years later and I finally get to see him in the flesh – he is kind of plump and shifty looking with mad eyes and, yes, a big cock. All the talk about how people objectify him etc would be a lot easier to take seriously if he didn’t roam the street in skin tight gold trousers smirking when people point and stare. Perhaps one way to stop people objectifying you about your giant cock would be to stop drawing attention to your giant cock on TV documentaries and internet message boards etc yet 8 years later he is doing the exact same thing. Talk about a one trick pony. Or should that be one prick pony? Ha ha ha ahem… (tumbleweed blows across website)

PRISON BREAK

Wentworth Miller sounds like a baddy from a Henry James novel but actually he is an actor in craptastic new C5 series Prison Break. Wentworth is supposed to be a structural engineer even though he looks more like a barely legal Gap model. The Gap model-ness carries through to his acting too as most situations are met with a Zoolander style Blue Steel pout/glare. Wentworth deliberately gets himself sent to the prison that he helped build to rescue his brother (who looks like a gay porn version of a rugby player), who is on death row for a CRIME HE DIDN’T COMMIT!! To help them escape, Wentworth has had the entire prison blueprints tattooed on his body (using a magical tattoo method that didn’t even make him bleed). His plan involves sucking up to the prison doctor, making an Allen Key out of some carefully selected bit of metal and helping the prison governor make a scale model of the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks. Okayyy.

Wentworth has a cunning plan but has seemingly forgotten to factor in the presence of other prisoners who might actually stop him from doing whatever he wants. So actually it is a very stupid plan, n’est pas? Unlike Oz, the programme is unable/unwilling to show you what you really want to see in a prison drama (ie full frontal nudity, shower scenes, rough prison sex etc) and so prison life comes across as irritating and dull rather than actually dangerous and scary. So far there has been a very lame riot, a bit of mild sexual harassment and a brief moment of stabbery. Boring!!!

Gay rugby brother is in prison because of a conspiracy that I don’t really understand (because I find myself reading whenever PB is on, not because I’m thick or anything). You can tell there is a conspiracy because all the baddies wear matching ugly chunky signet rings and phone each other up to tell each other to “take care of that meddling priest” etc (cue priest being killed to death). Gay rugby brother’s drippy lawyer/girlfriend (Robin Tunney, who always looks like she is on the verge of tears) is investigating and is probably going to be targeted next. Perhaps she looks sad because she knows she is going to be written out soon, or else the scripts are so bad that they make her cry real tears of pain.

You can see what the program is trying to do (be “24-for-morons” meets “Oz-for-morons”) but it is all so shoddy and badly written and acted that it completely lacks the thrills and excitement of its main influences. Also the whole premise seems to be slightly problematic – either they break out of prison (in which case the program is over) or else they don’t (and the whole point of the program peters out.) Perhaps they will escape from this prison and then be sent to another one to break out of next series?? Either way it is unlikely that I will still be watching.