MORE APPRENTICE!

Another cavalcade of laughs, thrills and utter cringing embarrassment this week. The task is to create a charidee calendar for Gt Ormond St Hospital and pitch it to retailers. Spineless Samuel is head of the boy’s team and phrosty pharmacist Nargis heads up the girls’ team.

Samuel immediately goes into brainstorming creative overdrive and starts drawing loads of complicated diagrams on the blackboard explaining how your branes work when you have an idea. He is a product developer for Ford IRL so probably spends his working life thinking up cunning new designs for those little trays in cars where you put your loose change. In the end Margaret steps in and tells them to get their act together and actually do something. Samuel is reduced to nodding and looking wan as the rest of the team decide to do a calendar showing babies dressed up in adult jobs (all the jobs they think of stereotypical male jobs by the way – dicks!). Samuel later has a manly repressed crying session (as featured in the trailer). What ev uh. There is a noticeable schism between the boys this week, with Samuel, shaolin monk lookalike Tuan and tall gaydar triggering Mani forming one camp and cockfarmer Syed, beefy ex millwall player Ansell and Paul Tulip (tee hee) in the other camp.

The women do some research on teh interweb and deduce that cat calendars sell the most. Emotionally unstable Jo starts shouting that kittens have nothing to do with Gt Ormond St and they ought to do shots of tubercular babies whose lives were saved by the hospital. Everyone else disagrees and eventually they start doing their cat calendar while Jo goes off to have a little cry.

Cue montage of kitten/baby photography. All the babies seem to be crying and cockfarmer Syed tries to cheer them up – perhaps relieved that he has found someone on his own level to relate to. It looks like a disaster but they get some decent shots (tho they decide that babies hand cuffed together would be a bit weird for the police baby month!). Meanwhile, kittens do cute kitten things for the camera. Ahhhhh.

Tuan is left in charge of calendar design while the others discuss pricing and prepare a sales pitch. The other blokes’ personalities emerge a bit - Paul is smug and irritating. Mani seems to be overconfident but wrong a lot. He is a total knob but he hates Syed and keeps shouting at him for no reason so he can’t be all bad. Ansell seems quite sensible and voice of reason – final four candidate??? Meanwhile the calendar is totally hideous and looks like something I would knock up in my work lunchtime on a graphics package I had not been trained on. Garish background colours and ill placed wacky logos in comics sans serif font a go go! Tuan is taking too long to decide the exact shade of hideous puce for March so he is stripped of his job and the rest of them get it sorted out quickly instead. Tuan goes to another office to cry – dude, you’ll never make it through the 35th Chamber of Shaolin if something like that gets you down.

Why is everyone crying this week? It’s only week two!

The girls’ calendar is v smart and tasteful. Someone with a northern accent (Ruth Badger??) complains that there is no space to write things down and record dates etc (the highly artistic naked French rugby player charity calendar is like that too though! – also call me pls Frederik Michalak) but Nargis tells her to shove it.
Pitching time – to Harrods, Virgin and “Calendar Club” (some kind of seedy online dating forum for calendar fetishists – perhaps!). Mani pitches for the men and is truly awful. He faux emotionally talks about the “self evident right” that babies have to go to hospital and “talks them through the calendar” saying things like “Ha ha ha. There’s a baby playing cricket! Awesome! I love that shot!” Oh shut up. They seem to have forgotten to set a price and the man from Harrods sneers to their faces. It’s not looking good.

Nargis decides to pitch for the girls and is so utterly utterly awful that I have to wrap my jumper round my head to hide from the TV screen. I will try and record it verbatim:

Nargis: (whitters on about cats a bit)

Bloke: Can I just ask you something!

Nargis: CAN YOU LET ME FINISH PLEASE!!!

(Everyone is aghast – tumbleweed blows across meeting room)

Nargis: Do you have any questions?

Bloke: How much does it cost?

Nargis: (freezes like rabbit pinned down by headlights of HGV. Long excruciating pause) C…C… Can you repeat the question?

(Nick winces as though someone has just stabbed him in the kidney)

Etc

The exact same thing happens at all three pitches – why did no-one talk to her in between them???

When the results come out it turns out that the boys have sold no calendars to Harrods or Virgin but won out overall by selling loads to Calendar Club – gasp!! The men go off to have dinner and make smug hateful comments about their vanquished foes. The women come back for the post mortem and Siralan complains that the calendar is rubbish, has nothing to do with hospitals, isn’t branded properly and has no space to write down important dates (eg “Feb 26th – give up on Amstrad emailer finally”). Bu bu but Siralan! The boys’ one was SHIT! Just look at it! Are you blind, man??? He also points out that the presentation was aggressive and rubbish too. Nargis picks Jo (of course) and Icy Lawyer Karen (why???) to take back in with her and someone is going to be fired.

Jo starts shouting that she had the same thoughts re kitten/baby dichotomy as Siralan but of course spoils it by ranting and erupting into heaving sobs etc. Siralan says that he likes her moxy but tells her to calm down ffs. Karen says she has no idea why she was chosen and Nargis says that Karen sabotaged the presentation through telepathy or something that doesn’t really make sense. Nargis came up with the shit calendar idea and gave the worst presentation in the annals of presenting – Nargis is fired!!! In the Cab of Firedness she says it is all Karen’s fault and that she didn’t do anything wrong. Yes, keep telling yourself that, you delusionoid.

Next week: they have to do the “buy ten random things for the least money” task! Oh Jesus help me, is Jo the girl’s project leader??? The blokes pretend to be getting married soon to blag free stuff. Someone is a lightweight (cough* Samuel??? *cough) and is fired.

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.