Apprentice Club Juniors aka The Junior Apprentice is currently being shown on BBC1 instead of the new series of The Apprentice proper, in case we all vote for Sir Alan (I will never call him Lord Sugar, it just sounds wrong) in the general election which had already taken place by the time episode one was transmitted. Or something. This version features ten 16-17 year olds (or so they say) who have to take on the stereotypical roles from previous real series of the programme such as The Beret One, The Cockernee Wideboy One, The One Who Cries, The One With A Beard and The One With A Malfunctioning Emotion Chip. I don’t understand it though…

Like the real show, someone has to pretend to get out of bed and pretend to have a conversation with a voice that is dubbed on in post-production, telling them where to go for today’s inexplicably elaborate meet and greet with Lord Sir Alan Sugar. Here we we the one who usually has very red lipstick and a beret on not being a convincing humanoid.

Margaret has been replaced by Karen thingy who is dressed as an 80′s air hostess. I do not understand why.

Two of the contestants are of primary school age and the nervous boy on the right has done a mess in his massive suit. Again, confused.

Meanwhile, their parents (who are pretending to be younger to be on the telly) are in the Sugarmobile perfecting the special Apprentice method of talking on the phone by holding it like it is not a phone at all.

Another aerial shot of London, probably from Torchwood Goes To London or something.

Oh shit, The Beret One’s pal has fucked up good and proper by holding the phone like a normal person!

Perhaps inspired by Karen, The Beret One has now put on an even more elaborate 80′s air hostess outfit. Sneaky!

London! Because they are off to a TV studio that masquerades as a City board room. I do not know why they keep up this pretense.

This is their product? Really?

The post-production recorded voice ‘receptionist’ has gained a physical form as a wig on a mannequin head. I am baffled.

HRH Lord Sir Alan has to finger the loser. It is part of the routine and thay cannot be ‘fired’ without it. Not that they work for him in the first place, confusingly.

Fired! Oh dear. If only she had learnt the Aprentice phone action.

Item! Hmm… the Twitter hashtags experiment of #slapamailreaderday was fun but I still despair for the future of humanity what with them Northern Koreans with their nu-clear sounds and the Californians terminating human decency and respect. Hashtags came about because I got rather hacked off (I know, don’t look if you don’t want to be annoyed) by puny humans who read a certain paper for people who don’t like to think for themselves about how everyone should be able to marry the person they love and stuff:

I am almost proud of my red arrows. They don’t do no flying tricks in the sky though.

Nice to see that Mail readers approve of slavery. Not all that surprised, just ashamed. I blame this “Stalinist socially-engineered dictatorship” we arte living in. Or is London now an imdependent state and I missed the memo?

Tracey is quite right. Why make a load of fuss and nonsese about civil rights when there are people starving in Africa? I hope Trace eats all her din-dins.

Meanwhile Paul (who appears to live in prison) is “not homophobic in any way but…” then is. And this is meant to surprise me? He thinks same sex marriages are the siliest thing has has ever heard of so I assume he doesn’t get out much. Well he could be staying in for a long time. Oh shame.

Item! Hard Times indeed, Patrick Wolf. The video looks like what a musical episode from Doctor Who in 1972 would look like if they ghad more money to spend. I like it but then I would.

Item! While I remember, here’s episode 9 of The Apprehensive:

Avin’ a bladdy larf, etc, etc

Bleurgh. I have a mug of lemony green tea on my desk so that means busy day. So after a multitask spectacular working day where I think I convinced someone who knows these things that I was up on the E Book formats trend (huh? I like my papery ones) and some bus rides that included a man who randomly shouted a grunty noise every 20 seconds or so and a large lady guzzling the crumbs of her prawn cocktail crisps (nice ) by pouring the packet down her gob I got home to less Dad mess than usual (bathroom tiling continues, we are gays and are not capable) but no Jamie as he is still at work

So anyway, here are some things:

I promised him I would blog about the tunes (schmoozer, moi?) so here’s Troy This:

I even went to MySpace which is usually a no-go for me, where his ‘Sounds like’ box contains the following information: Sounds like: tina turner and david bowie had a three way in the 80′s while jay-z videotaped madonna giving a strip tease while singing over some house remixes of some cop killing hip hop. Hmm… I found him via the marvellous Oh!Crapp blog (recommended again) and he’s one of those clever talented geezers like Frankmusik who has the poppy knack. Some of the songs remind me of Prince pre-god and fan-bothering and even without the guest vocals of Robyn on American Dream (Happy Song) it would still be played quite a lot on my iPod. Also good: Back That Up. Those musical bloggers I am fond of like XO and Paul Fizzy Pop should check him out as they should like him.

The Apprentice is on telly tonight, The Apprehensive for last week is here now:

Pants indeed.

Also: Little Boots – Overload (Sugababes cover)

Little Boots does Sugababes… no not like that you dirty bugger.

It’s Sunday and I am trapped in my room while Jamie does more work for work and my dad does more tiling for our bathroom. Occasional banging and drilling (ooer) means my reading of Under The Skin (halfway throught now and it is a proper book and everything) gets distracting so I shift to catching up on the Phonogram comics. Yes real comics not collected editions. Gotta support the indies and so I bought them on my London trip on Friday where I went for drinks and lots of chips & wedges with old bookshoppy people and micro-celeb spotted Denise Black from Queer As Folk in the pub and Rikki Beadle-Blair from all sorts of theatre and TV stuff in the newsagent next to Fopp where I bought a Snickers. It’s a showbiz whirl, so it is.

Stuff of interest this week:

The Saint Etienne deluxe reissues begin and one of them is more of an ‘issue’ as Continental has never been out in the UK. My pirated copy will soon go in the bin when I get the real thing. It’s got some of my favourite tracks on it plus some that have never even been released anywhere ever. Also out at the same time: Foxbase Alpha. That’ll be my third purchase of it (I think the cassette lives in a dusty drawer) but I have deluxe fever and it has new songs called Chase HQ, Sally Space, The Reckoning, Sweet Pea and Winter In America.

If I was drunk I would have bought this in London:

Christopher Eccleston miniature Hero? With wallet, staff and pigeon? Who could resist?

Well me actually. Although I loved this week’s BBC2 episode.

Another week, another last week’s The Apprehensive episode.

Pants. Etc.

Other thrilling events this week include the moment I realised that eating a yogurt whose lid had puffed up and tasted a bit funny was probably not a good idea, the moment where I realised that all the bottles of Kopparberg pear cider in my cupboard were of the previously-unheard-of non-alcoholic variety (why? why? why?) and the moment that this wek’s episode of Dollhouse was rather good and surprising again. Which means of course that it will be scrapped as I am a sucker for those prematurely-cancelled telly shows.

I’ve been a bit lazy writing about The Apprentice but everyone else has taken up that role so well. This week I have mostly been not using my Wii Fit but wondering if the home gym machine contraption the Apprentices had to invent would be more fun….

Hmmm… that’ll be a “no” then. I could be all obvious and talk about Ben with his wanker braces, twat socks and horrible smug ‘I would go fuck myself if I actually could’ face but instead it’s gotta be Maj. Or Madge as I want to type his name… “Me and my friends from school have set up a theatre company called One Life. We go around schools doing plays on knife crime and workshops. We all came from the rough area of Coventry, we didn’t go to the best schools and we came up with idea of educating youngsters on how we succeeded. We wanted to let them know that there is another way out. Knife crime is so rife in the UK right now it’s unreal. We are hopefully doing something that gets youngsters off the street and change their lives. We want them to realise there’s so much they can do if they put their minds to it.”

Maj is in the real Legz Akimbo?

This week’s Apprehensive video is not up yet so here’s last week’s:

Comics highlight:

Doctor Who Big Finish ‘coming soon’ highlights:


Irony highlight:

Danny Dyer (multi-ranged star of The Football Factory, Doghouse, Dead Man Running, Outlaw, Severance, The Business, Mean Machine…) told some tabloid “Mathew Horne is one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen in my life. Corden’s obviously OK but Mathew was terrible in The Catherine Tate Show. He’s just got nothing about him, the geezer. No substance and no depth. It annoys me a bit that no one’s clocked that. I’m not trying to do anyone out of a pound note, I just think they’re s**t. Mat is absolute rubbish.”

Hmmm… while I am no fan of Horne’s work (I would have chosen the word “tedious” if I was Danny “hard man” Dyer) I was amused to see that Dyer is secure in his own highly versatile talent to criticise a fellow thespian for having no substance and depth… but at least he is not trying to take hard-earned money that has been out of circulation for 25 years away from his fellow actors. Phew. Don’t send a hard man round to my house please Mister Dyer.

It’s not quite cancer but…

Shocking news from the Daily Mail! Pupils who spend time doing other things when they should be doing that studying they should be doing will do worse in exams… says an expert.
Experts have confirmed what parents and teachers already feared – youngsters who use Facebook do worse in exams… The American research found that Facebook rituals, including building an empire of friends, adding applications, joining groups and ‘poking’ other users, can swallow up hours of study time. Some users were spending as little as an hour a week on academic work. ‘Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,’ said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University.

Eating cakes instead of studying means less studying, picking your nose instead of studying means less studying, having a wank instead of studying means less time studying, reading stupid Daily Mail stories instead of studying means less time studying…

University student D**** Jones, 21, said: ‘I was in the library trying to write a 2,000-word essay when I realised my Facebook habit had got out of hand. I couldn’t resist going online. You do that, then someone’s photo catches your eye. Before you know it, a couple of minutes has turned into a couple of hours and you haven’t written a thing.’

There’s always gotta be a stupid person to use as an example. Thanks, Miss Jones.

Work work work Twitter Twitter Twitter boo hiss boo Facebook crapness Work-Twitter Work-Twitter Twitter Twitter… aaarrgh!

Anyway, The Apprentice is back so I remembered that it means something else (something even better in my humble opinion) is also back…

Oh yes. I could watch The Apprehensive all day. If I had time.

Celebrity Shitness Society summed up in one story today:

Damnit Jackson, I was going to go to that an’ all!
I had to place an order for 70 more Jade books for my old bookshop today as they had sold out of the initial batch over the weekend. Nice to see the quality of the locals’ reading tastes has not been affected by my departure.

Other silly thing that amused/bemused me:

I knew The Daily Mail would be all over that. I didn’t bother watching it because I am such a horrid little racist* and neither did the outraged readers. Probably…

Good on you, R.Schumann! Smash that effin’ and jeffin’ telly up while you’re at it!

And then the Mail removed my comment where I called Amanda Platell a spinster. How rude.

Tweet sized review: Bugger, that final Flight of the Conchords was pretty shitty.

* or rather, I couldn’t be arsed as I had Wii Fit hula-hooping to do, followed by Butterworth cupcakes.

If you like The Apprentice you’ve probably already discovered that you love this…

Boleg Bros YouTube page is full of very funny short Apprentice films that recap the previous episode in an extremely peculiar way. Very very funny though. Trust me on this.

Day three of holiday@home involved going to London again and pottering about in The Tate. No, not Donna Noble, the other one. It was a bit rubbish actually, unless you like hordes of French students with bloody rucksacks and badly-behaved English kids wrestling each other to the ground in the cubism room. I had a lot of art history deja vu when looking at the funny pictures and was reminded why I really couldn’t be bothered with all the arty-fartiness of the olden days life. We took some pictures on the bridge previously known as the wobbly bridge but it was rather sunny so they were mostly squinty, except this one:

After that we went off to ye olde docklands to visit Peter and Jeremy in their swanky flat which is probably called an apartment these days.

The views included that bloody dome, city airport, the DLR and an enormous pile of junk, which sounds rubbish but it was very nice indeed. We had a barbecue (although mine was ovened as I am one of those funny vegetarians) and lots of posh squash, some rambles about the old days when we (me, Pete and Kate) were students with varying degrees of studiousness (in the 90s), a disagreement about Madonna’s status as anything other than a woman with mediocre talents and a good eye for marketing, and some more posh squash. Then we eventually went home, which took a while…

… We had to watch The Apprentice before going to be of course. It was nice to see the sneaky horrible Chin Bint get fired (although her Environmental Awareness greeting cards idea the other week was genuislike) and then Other Jenny went too, just in time fot the B*Witched reunion. Probably. Her lipstick scared me anyway, giving me Una Stubbs Aunt Sally flashbacks every week. Shame it wasn’t Michael “I am 100% arrogant” Sophocles too, with his random Jewishness that only appears when it suits the ‘plot’ and not when he has to know what a kosher chicken is. As a vegetarian non Jew I thought everyone knew about those things. Siralan wasn’t having any of that bloody nonsense but three “you’re fired!”s in one show would be a bit much.

To tie these bloggy events together, I avoided Apprentice spoilers at the barbecue that afternoon when our friend Pete revealed that he had been filmed for a forthcoming episode involving the Apprentices attempting to convince people to hire expensive cars. Now that’s something I look forward to seeing, if he survives the edit. Stay tuned…

I started the day with confusion:

What does that mean? I tried looking on The World’s Gretest Newspaer website but all the stories were little red Xs in boxes. How great. Make your own minds up.

For some reason there was a lot of dog poo in inconvenient places on the pavement today. Not that poop in the street is in any way convenient, unless you’re one of them perverts. There were also a lot more chavs in the bookshop than usual due to the schools being off. This implies that they go to school when they are supposed to but seeing as most of them just huddle around the gift section shelf that houses such classic ‘hilarious’ titles as How To Swear In Foreign, How To Chat Up Wimmin In Foreign, How To Flirt and How 2 Txt Flrt (not in foreign) and read out the most hilarious bits in the delivery of a baffled Hollyoaks actress who hasn’t got the range then I am not convinced they’re attending those 3 Rs lessons. Maybe the Daily Mail is right and it’s all compulsary lessons in being gay these days.

Reasons you should be reading the Buffy Season Eight comic, parts 45 to 48:

and

and

and

Has that convinced you yet? Issue 13 is out now. The first collected volume is still out in bookshops and the second collected volume is due any day now.

I’m horrible addicted to The Apprentice. And this version too:

Memo to self: Employ a Dame Margaret lookielikey for when I do the appraisals.