Category Archives: Television

Apr 23 0 comments
Leisure, Television

Snap, Crackle and Flop!

Now that our Alistair has written out British Historys biggest IOU and left the nations great-grandchildren in hock to who knows who, for how knows long; It was nice last night to settle down and take solace in the latest episode of The Apprentice.

The two teams had just two days to become media advertising geniuses and create a breakfast cereal brand name, character, box design, TV advert and client pitch.
Wow! It’d take most execs. that amount of time to clean the whiteboard and get out their felt marker pens.

One team achieved the task admirably and produced a good campaign. The other team? Well, like all bad products, it all starts with a crappy list of ingredients.

First take a small amount of sclerotic Noorul, the man who never says too much. Well, getting him to say or do anything would be worthy of a prize in itself.

Then add a spoonful of negative Lorraine. “We don’t need the other side to beat us. I’m gonna’ f*** our teams chances up, by whinging and generally carrying on, quite nicely without any help from them thank you.

Mix in a generous measure of  ‘tantrum of the North’ Philip. “It’s quite simple, either I get my own way or I’ll lie down on this floor right now, wave my legs in the air and have the biggest hissy fit the world has ever known.”

To finish this concoction, simmer not-so-gently with Kimberly, ‘I’m an American, get me out of here’, Davis as the finest transatlantic wet blanket project manager ever and you have the makings of a truly, madly, deeply er … mess.

I won’t go through the events of the episode. You can watch them perform in all their cringe worthy mediocrity here.

But I forgot, there’s one other ingredient that you need to produce TV gold like this.

Just add Sugar.

Mar 16 0 comments
Financial World, News, Television

The Apprentice - you’re inspired!

Lock the doors, take the ‘phone off the hook, give the cat some prawns, banish the kids to their bedrooms, get granny an extra sherry. Yes The Apprentice is back!

March 25th. (Wednesday) sees the welcome return of this classic suited n’ booted, tycoon finding, knockout TV extravaganza.

Hosted as usual by the Sid James of the corporate boardroom, as Jonathan Ross refers to Alan Sugar, The Financial Times readers version of X-Factor returns for a Fifth series.

I love it when the contestants all start off luvey duvey with each other, talking about team building and giving their all, while all the time hoping and planning to stuff up one anothers chances at the first opportunity.

Though I do think some of the contestants must be looking to be awarded the business persons version of the V.C. because they seem very keen to put themselves right in the firing line.

For example who’d be a team leader in the first programme? Whew, lamb to the slaughter or what? Anyone who’s smart won’t do it but you always get some schmuck who’s talked into doing it by having their vanity massaged.

“We think you’d be great.”
“As soon as we saw you we thought you were the one to lead us in this first task.” (Titter, titter)
“Aw shuks, sure okay then, ‘course I’ll do it.”

You can almost hear the taxi driver starting his black cab up, ready to whisk them off to business oblivion land. (Though personally I reckon they just get dropped off by the bustop at the end of the road, London taxi fares, do me a favour!)
They won’t be remembered by anybody except possibly some drunken guest at their next party, “Oh you were the prat that went out first weren’t you? You got well stiched up!”

Sometimes their personal competition winning tactics also seem a bit strange to me. Do they not realise that if they get in the bad books of that weeks Team Leader they are going into the boardroom for sure?
If you don’t agree with your boss, shutup, look helpful and take solace in the fact that their gonna’ get theirs sometime soon and you’ll be smiling right at them when they do.

“Et tu, Brute?”
“Damn right matey. BIFF!”

It’s nice to see that Alan Sugar’s cockney accent hasn’t been rounded off by his many years of champagne and limos. It will be a welcome return of some of his not so chirpy cockney catchphrases including:-

“You’re not pissin’ my money up the wall!”
“I don’t like liars, I don’t like cheats. I don’t like bullshitters.I don’t like schmoozers. I don’t like arse-lickers.”
“You’ve gone out and lost me money!”

His accent is so strong I keep expecting him to say, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”, at any minute.

But it does beg the question what will the eventual winners actually be doing? I thought he’d sold his manufacturing empire and was just involved with property?

Perhaps they’ll just end up as glorified secretaries.

If that’s so I do hope the winner has brushed up on their shorthand and typing.

The Apprentice - The Best Of [DVD]

My company needs YOU!

Mar 02 0 comments
Leisure, News, Television

University Challenging

I really enjoyed watching ‘University Challenge’ this year. This comes as something of a shock to me because in the past I’ve loathed the programme with a vengeance.

I only needed to hear the theme music and like Pavlov’s dogs I would react; knuckles going white, snarl coming from lips, vein throbbing in forehead. You get the picture.

So when I happened to fall upon the programme by chance, halfway through the present series, I didn’t expect too much but lo’ and behold I found myself hooked. I’d spend a happy half hour vainly making attempts at providing answers but mostly I spent my time just trying to understand the questions.

The final was great, far more worthy than any sporting event, so imagine the disappointment when I discovered today that the winning team had been disqualified.

And the reason?

‘… students taking part must be registered at their university or college for the duration of the recording of the series.’

Apparently Corpus Christie College, Oxford had a team member who when the final was filmed was not a student anymore but working for PWC (Price Waterhouse Coopers.)

Duh!

I’m not the sharpest tool in the box but I can read a set of rules. A team consisting of some of the finest young minds in the country hadn’t noticed that one of their fellows was now working (surely they must have missed him at the student union bar) and that fact might cause a bit of a problem.

It’s strangely, reassuringly comforting that these people whose bedtime reading probably consists of Advanced Nuclear Physics or Ancient Latin Verbs and Conjugations had failed to cast a little eye on the rules as they steamrollered their way through the heats and semi-finals.

So in the great tradition of U.C. your starter for 10.

“Has anyone read the rules?”

“Nah!”

Bong!

Sources: The Guardian;      BBC

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

                Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Feb 09 2 comments
Leisure, Television

Todd Carty slips out

So Todd ‘Tucker Jenkins‘ Carty is out of ‘Dancing on Ice.’ It was obviously going to happen sooner rather than later or they would have had to rename the show ‘Sack of Potatoes on Ice.’

To say he was of a lower standard than the other competitors would be an understatement. As one of the judges Jason said, his solo basically consisted of him standing still and smiling at the camera.

Which means that the Charlie Chaplin of ice has finally made his last bow but we all knew that this lovable, slightly roguish figure only had a limited shelf life. He certainly had his share of second chances but these could only be sustained as long as Joe public was willing to cough up and pay to vote for him.

If it had been up to the judges he’d have been out week 1.

I think Todd’s performances (and I’m using the term generously) have actually been outdone by the commuters of Great Britain this last week as they’ve ‘Triple Salchowed‘, ‘Double Axeled‘ and ‘Headbanged‘ their way up and down the UK.

No-one can deny though that he’s been entertaining. I watched his performance to the song ‘Help!’ a number of times on YouTube and couldn’t help laughing each time when he whizzed off stage and re-appeared a few moments later with a sheepish grin on his face. But you can only do this so many times before the joke wears as thin as the ice he was skating on.

But he is a natural comedian and I hope to see him on the box in the near future. As is the case with these programmes they are usually undertaken to revive or kick-start a flagging career. It would be a shame to lose him to out-of-work-TV-hell.

But for Dancing on Ice, this particular sack of spuds has had his chips.

Figure Skating for Dummies

Todd - you were a star!

Feb 08 2 comments
News, Television, Theories

Reading the news causes pregnancy!

There seems to be something strange going on at the various news channels throughout the country.
A number of the regular presenters are getting pregnant. Already we’ve seen the demise of Cathy Newman from Channel 4 news as well as Kylie Morris from More 4.

You’ll no doubt know about Sian Williams from BBC’s Breakfast who bowed out last week to the pregnancy bug.

So I certainly won’t be surprised when I see someone from say BBC’s News 24 who looks seriously like they are awaiting a visit from the proverbial stork.

So what’s it all about?  Has some strange chemical invaded the water coolers of our local news agencies?

Is there some airborne super pregnancy bug around from which the newswomen of this country are succumbing too?

Or did they all receive a complimentary copy of  ‘Get pregnant NOW!’ in the post and decided to follow the advice to the letter?

Whatever the reason there’s going to some mini-newsreaders around very soon and their respective mums will be able to give a very professional update on their progress in hourly bulletins…

1:00am Fed baby.
2:00am Fed baby.
3:00am Slept soundly (so did the baby.)
4:00am Kicked father out of bed to feed baby.
4:30am Had to rescue father from extremely messy nappy changing situation.

Who’s next I wonder? Stay tuned!

Remember, you read the theory here first.

Feb 05 1 comments
Leisure, Sport, Television

Porn Bowl

American sports fans had a good reason not to wander off for more popcorn and stay glued instead to the TV during a commercial break for the recent Super Bowl.

(As we non-sports fans know commercials are the most cherished moments of a sporting event.  Ah! The bliss of getting back to gross commercialism.)

The match was between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals (yep, I haven’t got a clue either.)
Three minutes before the end of the game there was a break for a ‘message from our sponsors‘.

But instead of your usual advertising content viewers were treated to a graphic sex act performed by none other than Jenna Jameson from her Club Jenna cable TV channel.

Apparently the two feeds had been mixed up and the 30 second clip was transmitted to the sports fans of Tuscon, Arizona.

As one viewer, Cora King noted, “I just thought it was another commercial until I looked up. Then he did his little dance with everything hanging out.”

(I hope they meant on the clip, not the footballers. If not British football may still have a lot to learn.)

Well I think there’s nothing wrong with relieving the tension of a big match with a bit of relief.

Appropriately one of the Arizona Cardinals nicknames is ‘Big Red’ which seems kind of apt to me.

Nice to know sports fans can get a break from watching balls bouncing in the air by … well … you know …

Oh, if your mad keen to know, the Pittsburgh Steelers won but I doubt whether they felt quite as much joy as the guy in the clip.

Feb 02 0 comments
General, Television, Weather

Snow, snow, quick, quick snow!

The Wrong Kind of Snow

The Wrong Kind of Snow

Well you’ll probably have heard by now that the UK (i.e. London and the South East) has had the worse snowfalls for eighteen years.

What’s a modern First World industrialised, techno-savvy society to do?
Well the answer is simple, stay home.

Yep, that’s the answer. Other countries have far worse weather conditions to deal with. They get them all the time and for longer periods and do you hear them bleating and carrying on?
Nope.

Terrorist threats are nothing compared to the damage a special kind of water can do to this country.

You’ll probably hear a lot of reasons why we failed to keep good ol’ blighty running in the next few days (they have a whole list of them, pre-prepared. About the only thing that ever is.)

‘Only make the journey if it’s absolutely essential’, you’ll be told. Funny that, but most people are not in the habit of getting their cars out and randomly driving around in them.

We usually have a pretty good reason for venturing out, e.g. work, feeding yourself and family, picketing an oil refinery / power station etc.

What will really annoy a large chunk of the UK population will be the coverage this sort of event will get.

Scotland is well use to this sort of weather and complains about it very rarely but you only have to have one snowflake land on central London and that’s it. It all goes a bit biblical. Blanket news coverage to compete with the blanket of snow.

At least the poor TV reporters and camera crew don’t have far to trudge to get their stories and show off their North Face jackets.

The way they go on you’d think that Londoners will be eating the dead by nightfall.

Ah well. Us Brits like to talk about the weather a lot. We just don’t like to experience it.

p.s. Apparently all of London headed for the underground to sing blitz songs after the first snowfall but they found it shut …

Jan 30 4 comments
Books, Drama, Leisure, Television

Poldark - you CAN’T miss it!

I don’t know if anyone’s been watching the re-run of Poldark on UKTV History channel but if they haven’t then they are missing a rare treat.

Poldark Titles

Poldark Titles

It was originally aired in 1975 and had a huge following. (I’ll forget the fact that there was only three channels, no DVD, no satellite, no ipod, no playstation, no nothing really.) And accept that it was so massively watched because it was damn good.

For anyone not aware it is a good old romp through Cornish history revolving round copper mining but including much of what else went on historically along the way. Set in the late 1700’s it features the main character of Ross Poldark (played by the excellent Robin Ellis.) Recently arrived back from the American wars to claim back his inheritance and his beloved.
Of course it all goes a bit south (not much further south, we are in Cornwall after all.)

Ross Poldark (Robin Ellis)

Ross Poldark (Robin Ellis)

This of course is where the fun starts. Think of Dallas in costume (with the wind, without the sunny weather.)
Think of Dynasty without the glam, think of Eastenders with a Cornish accent. Think of Hollyoaks, no don’t think of Hollyoaks.

It’s all there and in bucketfuls. Or should I say shovel fulls, this is a mining tale you know.

I won’t give to much away about the story, but if you’re interested have a look. It won’t take long to catch up and it’s well worth it for the breath of fresh air that the brisk sea breeze brings. Just make sure you’re not down wind of the locals. They can afford to drink rum, not so much buy soap by the looks of it.

I think some of the characters are great. Demelza played by Angharad Rees is feisty, spirited and way to old for the part at the beginning of the series. She was meant to be sixteen-ish, a very big ish.
The statutory baddy George Warleggan played by Ralph Bates is an evil treasure.

And you have to admire the language, “You little moxy!”  ,   “I demand satisfaction!”

You don’t get that down Albert Square.

The pictures were taken from my telly. It’s not HD quality stuff but I think it gives a grainy, historical feel to this grainy, historical drama. (Okay I’m just being cheap and quick but ‘no ye never mind capt.’ )

From a mercenary point of view I’m still hoping to get a glimpse of an old Ford Escort or Hillman Imp parked round the back of an’ ol’ stone barn that’s sneaked into shot but until now I’ve been disappointed. But I shall keep looking.

I love this programme. I maybe coming back to it in future posts … You have been warned!

Buy the series from Amazon on glorious DVD

Buy the books by Winston Graham (the adaption is based on his Poldark books, kind of, well not too kind really.)

Poldark tries to beat them at their own game

Poldark tries to beat them at their own game