Apprentice Delayed...

Right, I haven't been able to see last night's Apprentice, thanks to the excellent Special Relationship last night and several hours spent on trains, so it will be postponed until tomorrow. Presumably we all know what happened anyway. It's almost unavoidable.

Hors d'Oeuvres, Hors d'Oeuvres...

Today was a rare occasion where I managed to catch PMQs. There was a lot of general bickering and a nice joke from Ed Milliband about Clegg's crafty fag habit. If I was in there and an MP for, say, the New Forest (this constituency probably doesn't exist), I would have said "I put it to the Right Honourable Gentleman that he can't see the wood for the trees... and no amount of cutting down our woodland will change that." Eh? Eh? Oh, I'm wasted on you...

I'd be rubbish at the admin, but I'd have a hell of a confrontational soundbite.

Fooks...

Right, I've had a monster of a day so today's series blog is going to be, what I believe is known in the trade as, 'concise' (i.e. shorter than it should be).

Harry and the Home Sec were given a quick blast of a dangerous computer hijacking program (a bit like a Firefox add-on, right kids? Hey? Eh? Ah, my satire is wasted on you...). Tariq finally snapped, clearly furious at having no lines that weren't clunky technological exposition... except that, it was a cunning ruse to secretly tell Ruth that the grid had been compromised, which she then conveyed to Harry through a glass of water and a note. Magic. This is why I love Spooks. Reading a note by pretending to drink water. The very best Her Majesty's Military Intelligence has by way of covert note passing.

Lucas had agreed to meet Vaughn in Battersea Park, taking with him reliable Mr. Gunny. Vaughn demanded the Albany file in a sneery, evil way... oh Boo! Boo! Hiss! Fantastically Dimitri was showing off a disarmed bomb he just had lying around. Dimitri is fast becoming a cult hero, bombs lying around, working out people weren't using chemical explosives to treat Diabetes... an all-round genius. There was a quick 2 minute* window in which for Harry to give the team the low-down on the surveillance. Lucas picked up a sassy American cryptographer Danielle Ortiz (and by 'picked up' I don't mean that. For god's sake, grow up! I mean he was handling... hold on... why are there no spy terms that aren't synonymous with sex?) and began ferrying her around the capital. She seemed familiar. Perhaps because she's been in something else or perhaps because she was basically the Spooks' version of Lisbeth Salander.

Dimitri cracked out the Nikon and started snapping the cyberterrorists ("oh yeah, grr, you're a tiger, pout more" etc.) before returning to the grid and slipping the memory card to Beth to take into the ladies toilets (because these are cyberterrorists, not your average perverts) and run face recog on. In truth, the device of confinement and the rising tension in the office as everyone had to 'keep calm and carry on' made for a terrific episode. Tariq gave the game away by a split second glance at the camera after the classic 'pretend to drop your important documents so that Beth can help you pick them up and slip you some classified intel' trick.

Lucas fobbed Ortiz/Salander off with some lies and went to the location Vaughn had tasked him with investigating. And who should open the door but MALCOLM!! (Fanboy yay!). Meanwhile, ex-SBS man Dimitri attempted to shoot his way out of the now locked down building before declaring it 'useless'. No? Because MI5 wouldn't bother bulletproofing their perspex doors and walls, would they? After retrieving a parcel from Malcolm, Lucas returned to the car to find that Ortiz had given him the slip. After some brooding and manhandling he forced her back into the car.

Using crazy voice synthesomething technology, the hackers were able to use a robotic Harry to order Lucas to 'neutralise' Ortiz. Dimitri formulated some terrible plan involving - yes, you guessed it - bombs... Lucas' moral code might be a little off-kilter these days, but he knows when he's being played and phoned up the faux-Harry to ask him his favourite opera. He quickly sped away in the car, having a tire blown out in the process and Ortiz taking a bullet graze to the neck. Lucas then beat an armed man to a bloody pulp. Ortiz was in bad shape but promised that she wouldnt' tell anyone about Lucas' trip to Malcolm's house or Albany, at which point we were reminded just how off-kilter his moral code was when he pretended to phone and ambulance and let her die.

Harry made a bold phone call to the terrorists (because we do negotiate with terrorists) except that was all a cunning ruse too and Dimitri had in fact blown the communications to hell, allowing a loop of faces and Harry on the phone to be played (somehow). Armed Met burst into the building and apprehended the cyber terrorists. Hooray!

It would seem however that Malcolm handed Lucas a fake Albany file, prompting him to break into Malcolm's house (Lucas has done a mighty heel turn in these last few episodes...) only to find it stripped out. Spooky.

Welcome Returns
Colin Salmon's comedy American accent.
Malcolm.

Tariq's Tank Tops
Green.

Quote of the Week
'I've got a terrible crick in my neck, you see' Harry (you probably had to be there)
Oh, and
'Oi, Evershed, stop being nosy' Dimitri

NEXT WEEK
Lucas! Ruth and Harry! Ruth and Lucas! Lucas with a gun! Schoolchildren!

This Thing...

Right, better do one of these things. I'm quite tired, insomnia, feeling ill and having to get up at 8 are not happy befellows. Do I have diabetes? I might have diabetes... Anyway, today's not about diabetes per se, but rather about John Peel.

Unbelievably it's been 6 years since the definitive disc jockey and music journo John Peel left this confusing world of nonsensical hip-hop and mass-produced rubbish from Cowell's high waistband and frankly who can blame him? One cannot overstate the impact that Peel had on the British music scene. Any presenter that does not count him as an influence is either a liar or not worth listening to anyway. While he may have supported the wrong team, he was nonetheless a towering genius. There isn't really much else to say.


He had diabetes, you see. Hence the tenuous link...

Essentially, Peel was and is a legend and we shall never see his like again.


I'm getting very bad at these...

I'm sure things will pick up again soon, particularly if, say, someone fancies handing me a job in the media in some capacity...

Apologist...

This isn't good enough. In fact it's being written on a phone, that's how bad it is. As you may have guessed, there is no FriPic. It's getting increasingly difficult to do, but I will try (honest) though it would be easier if someone could, say, shower me with cash or provide me with a London-y creative type job (I'm quite cheap and I make excellent tea). Any takers? Is that a no?

The Apprentice: Bread...

So another week another early morning phone call from Lord Sugar's office. Alex Tiggywinkle was first to the phone (Baggs was slightly slower to emerge from his hibernation) and summarily informed the others to get up to be ferried to the usual posh-ish location and informed that they would have to bake and sell bread/cakes/pastries... a bakery task, essentially. A bakery task.

A lot of cooking tasks this series, perhaps prepping all the candidates for the inevitable positions as pub chefs, baristas and bar staff. Lester and Melissa/Jenny Eclair/Lady Gaga showed huge interesting in the PM role and inexplicably the coiffured Melissa won out. Over on the other side, comedy surgeon/businessman Shibby (think Beaker meets Spence from Holby City) put himself up on the chopping block. They showed another classic Shibby VT at this point. I swear they give him a script and record it several times, going "can you be... even more twattish" after every take.

Melissa was looking increasingly like she'd lied about being a catering manager as she failed to pick out which bakery goods people liked. She continually crumbled under the pressure and eventually decided on 'mixed fruit jam croissants', under pressure from Full Metal Jacket who was blowing his top (not a surprise for anyone who read that news story I posted up last month). It was to the boardrooms, then, to pitch their baked goods. Cue the team sitting in silence unable to work out basic calculations.

When Shibby's team turned up to the same pitch, they were all business. Firing out cheap prices for massive orders and then high fiving each other outside the boardroom. All well and good until the three tasked with working in the bakery practically all had coronaries. "We're not making croissants!" "We are now!" Sandeesh was a leading dissenting voice, 'stirring' as the kids would no doubt say... the bastards. In the car, Paloma, so keen to press the hotel for another 500 bread roll orders and the croissants, was now bemoaning the situation... and blaming the bakery team for not telling them what they could make.

Over in the other team's bakery Full Metal Jacket was joking about their pitching team's ability (or rather lack thereof). He may have his real-world indiscretions, but I like Full Metal Jacket. He seems like a real person rather than the brash, arrogant automatons that flood every series. But then this was a week full of revelations, as the erinaceous Alex became a character full of pathos and I found myself rooting for him as he leapt to the rescue with some uncooked dough weights.

In Shibby's bakery, the revolution was in full swing, as the entire team ignored the hotel order. This threw a spanner in the works at Beaker's next pitch where had a bit of a teenage strop about a large order, muttering "you know, we're not supermen" into his ledger. Paloma reprimanded him, to which Beaker replied with the fairly valid point that they can't agree to orders they can't fulfill.

In Melissa's bakery, Full Metal Jacket was running the show to plaudits from Nick (something that very rarely happens) and to teary thanks from the team leader herself. Shibby, wearing a bright, stripy jumper delivered the news that they hadn't been able to fulfill the hotel order. As a surgeon one would hope that he was able to deliver bad news. Simply put, he wasn't. If he explained to me that my kidney transplant had not been a complete success in the same way that he told the hotel chef that he only had 16 bread rolls, it would have been Beaker who was in need of an organ donor.

Baggs was being mouthy again this week, in charge of Melissa's market stall. Melissa herself had an argument with Alex (who appeared slightly less sympathetic when he started bringing up his 11 A* GCSEs) before being reigned in by the ever effecient Stella. Eventually they managed to sell all their produce (albeit on the cheap), something that their opponents were seemingly incapable of.

In the boardroom it was of course revealed that Shibby's team had lost, leaving a dejected looking team including Surrey Investment Banker Bates. Bates has that imperious yet glassy-eyed and absent look about him, constantly swaying his head from side to side as if it was disconnected from his body. I'm not sure he even said a word in the boardroom before Shibby elected to bring back Paloma and Sandeesh.

"I think we were on different wavelengths" said Shibby. "We clearly were. I'm a businesswoman and you're a joke." Retorted Paloma, one of the first classic boardroom fight soundbites of the series. Shibby had a Downfall moment and over the course of the episode increasingly became a joke character, snorting with inappropriate laughter and generally losing the plot. However Sandeesh had effectively sabotaged the task from the inside and had just remained quiet. So, given Joy's firing last week, surely she would have to go. Sandeesh however flashed her enormous eyes at Lord Sugar and he gave her another chance. Shibby was predictably fired.

The Quiet One
Liz Locke. She's that one who hasn't really done anything yet. In fact you probably won't even recognise her from that name. That's why she's going to win.

Help...!

This is somewhat of a plea, even though I don’t really enjoy asking for aid through the medium of this blog (although some would say the entire thing is a ‘cry for help’).Essentially, I need your aid for this.

Since I discovered this summer that Edinburgh is basically the best thing since sliced bread, I've been enormously keen to go there in a professional capacity, despite the fact that it's possibly the least financially viable idea known to man. However, Ideastap have been crazy enough to offer the incentive of stumping up a cool 10 grand to two new productions. Now, Ideastap are notorious for making some odd funding decisions (one need only look at the winners of last months Editor's Brief), but it's surely worth a bash.

So what's the project, well, to put it simply, I've no idea BUT we have more than a month to work it out. Is hoping for a perfect blend of young comedy talent, performance poetry, short films and sketches to prove to facile toff commentators like Quentin Letts that young British comedy is in fact in rude health too much to ask?

So, if you're a comedian/poet/director/writer between 18 and 25, drop me a message and we'll see if we can't bloody get to Edinburgh.

Kooks...

We might as well kick off with This Week's Topical Touchstone which one could hardly ignore as it was treated with the customary, classic Spooks heavy-handedness. Yes, it was the Israeli/Palestine situation and the eagerness of Lighthouse (or 'Obama' as we know him) to engineer peace talks. But we all know better than to think that political forward thinking can ever actually take place in the world of Spooks (or even the real world for that matter)...

This weeks' plot was decidedly convoluted (as usual) and revolved largely around a double Lebanese agent switcheroo. We quickly (I say quickly, it took the actual plot about 20 minutes to get there) worked out that an attempt was being planned on the president's life. Of Beth and Dimitri, who had been tasked with babysitting the delegations one went about their job in an ordinary way and the other got beaten up... again. Guess which? Yes, Beth got tied up and nearly died for the... I've lost count of the number of times. She wasn't alone however. Lucas nearly died too, his assailant resolving to leave him tied to a drain by his belt however. (It was at no point explained how Lucas got free from the drain. Presumably there's a whole episode here where some yoofs nick his trousers and he has to bite through the leather belt and then chase them). Lucas' attacker later gave himself up and explained that he wasn't the one who planned to kill Lighthouse and he had instead been trying to kill the one who planned to kill Lighthouse. Got that? Good.

There was some sort of minor argy bargy between the delegations involving lunch (I didn't particularly understand this bit, but then I was trying to read an article about Wayne Rooney on the Guardian website at the time, so cut me some slack, will ya...). The Palestinian head made a joke about dates, I forgot to mention that earlier... oh and the Israeli ambassador was called Levi Cohen, which I believe is the first name listed under Jewish Characters in the Hamfist Guide to TV Stereotypes. Cohen doesn't get on with his daughter, also a politician, mainly because he allowed her to be kindapped in 2001... you think she'd be over that now but apparently not (whatevs... etc.).

The main point was that Beth's captor cut himself in the right thigh with a sterilised knife (one hopes that he dresses to the left) and limped away, leaving her to engineer an escape by using a jack to break the radiator pipe she was tied to and tip off Lucas about the limpy assassin (big on the old limps this series). Ruth and Tariq quickly tried to work out if a shot was possible from the roof of the hospital. Tariq noting that it would indeed be 'a record' 1.67 miles and (repeatedly) that there was another building in the way. They quickly called Dimitri who reeled off an array of astonishing ballistics based facts and informed them that it was basically impossible. Ruth pointed out that the sniper might have prepped the building beforehand and sure enough the sniper fired off a quick salvo, taking down the Palestinian rep. Lucas loomed behind him however and when the perp went for his handgun, shot him down.

The sniper died with an unsettling grin, so unsettling in fact that even stony Lucas was unsettled by it and phone Ruth to explain just how unsettling it all was. He'd achieved his goal of creating chaos at the front of the hotel and forced the president to take the back door where someone else would be waiting. Dimitri ran off to find Anna Cohen, who had conveniently disappeared.

We built to a stunning denouement where Anna Cohen turned herself into a walking diabetic bomb by injecting chemical explosives with her Insulin syringes. A masterful play, even by Spooks standards of implausible heel turns and improvised weaponry. Fortunately Dimitri whose growing on me each week was able to talk her down and disarm his second bomb in 2 weeks, all the more impressive when you consider that one of them was a human.

Back at HQ we were treated to the usual 2 or so minutes bolted on the end that we don't really need. Lucas was told that the sniper had been fed false intel the whole time and that Anna was completely responsible. Another hard day over, Lucas/John went to Maya only to find that her partner Michael was home and that Michael was Vaughn! Yes Vaughn faked a Stroke (somehow) and was in fact cleverly pulling all the strings somehow. There was not even one mention of Albany this week. So much for finding out why the file was just a Turner. We may never know...

Character of the Week
Dimitri was this week's go to guy with all manner of ballistics and explosives expertise. He identified chemical explosives instead of insulin from one sniff (mad skills) and persuaded Anna not to spray her innards around the office suite. Top work from the new boy.

Clamour of the Week
Over on the Guardian blog there are calls for Tariq to be given something more than clunky exposition by way of lines. I, however, suspect that Tariq is the sort of character that would remain largely silent, were he not tasked with explaining most of the plot and implausible technological leaps (unless he was playing Call of Duty with a headset).

Next Week
Lucas! John! Lucas/John! Harry & Ruth! Compromised Grid! Shouting!

Bicentennial Blog...

Nope, not a remake of the not-so-seminal Robin Williams robot drama, but rather this is, unbelievably, the 200th post on this blog. How has it been? To quote the immortal Dan from Him & Her played by the magnificent Joe Wilkinson 'peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs'.

So, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to forc- suggest you read some of the classic blogs.

There was last Christmas' essay on my favourite horror tales, which seems all the more appropriate given both the repeats of Mark Gatiss' fantastic Crooked House and his equally brilliant History of Horror, this was followed a mere month later by a blog about a new miniseries concerning the Borgias (which as yet doesn't seem to have materialised) (vintage me for all you blog fans). We saw the first Twilight film and my cogitations on that subject (a bit like a far superior text-based version of Vampires Suck), followed by the sequel. There were some seminal FriPics like Lambing Live (yet to be sued), the Election (the government hate me) and Modern Art (I'm definitely right about this) all as prescient today as they were, ooh, several months ago.

The lifetime of the blog has seen the Winter Olympics (I had a lot to learn about Curling at that point...), a Eurovision, the broadcasting of the series Spartacus: Blood & Sand, the World Cup, both Junior Apprentice and real Apprentice and a highly academic post about comedy (that's academic as in scholarly rather than irrelevant).

So, here's to the next 200 posts of cult comedy, cynicism and various other c-words!

(If anyone has any personal favourites ((though I'm sure you've all got better things to do with your lives)) feel free to leave a comment. You followers are all brilliant)

Off the Rails...

Today has been spent largely on trains, so I imagine that fellow commuters would frown upon me attempting to record a comedy sketch in their presence (though it would be amazing to try and do that in the Quiet Carriage). This has somewhat put the FriPic on ice, I'm afraid. Perhaps you can rewatch some of my past glories (and epicfails) instead. Thank you for your understanding (and please take all your baggage with you, or we'll have to blow it up).

The Apprentice: Life's A Beach...

We began in the house with the weary candidates being called to Heathrow's Terminal 5 where a big TV with SiralunsLordSugar's head on it (yes, it's already descended into some manner of Orwellian hell) - interestingly Lord Sugar had 'urgent business' to attend to (remembering what it was like when Amstrad actually made serviceable technology, perhaps?) - who instructed them to create some manner of beach equipment and then pitch it to three businesses. Stella was called up to the boys and promptly made Project Manager. Mussolini last week was quite an act to follow. Laura was made PM of the girls (and believe me, that's probably not the last time that you'll see those two letters in conjunction with the girls team this week...).

The surgeon's suggestion of some sort of 'massive hand on a stick' with which to apply suncream onto your own back received a deafening silence. Jamie Lester came up with the idea of a towel... but a towel that was also a pillow... and a fridge. All they needed was the name... And yes it was hedgeho- I mean, Alex, who was full of ideas. This was the man who was convinced that he'd invented the bendy bus and within seconds he began an altercation with Bates under which some of the incidental music from Curb Your Enthusiam was appropriately played. The erinaceous Mr. Epstein offered the name Cuuli (with umlauts). The next task was designing the prototype. Jamie Lester claimed that 'when I open my mouth, I'm not holding back', apparently he wasn't thinking either as he described his glorified towel to a bemused looking manufacturer (he went on in his VT to talk about being like a champagne bottle an for a moment, it was as though he was being played by Russell Tovey - watch it for yourselves and see).

Over with the girls, Paloma, who wouldn't look out of place as an all-action heroine in a dodgy 90s Sky TV drama, was attempting to conduct some manner of market research... and failing spectacularly. Mouthy Joanna offered a book rest. A classically misguided Apprentice invention. This resulted in a quick rush to design a prototype that not everyone in the team was entirely convinced by.

Thoughts then turned to advertising. The boys spent most of their evening persuading Stella to get into a bikini. What a surprise that the Complete Banker Bates turned out also to be a mild misogynist... In the surf shop, Full Metal Jacket demanded a top with tassles. The girls, meanwhile, continued their spate of wild arguments and Laura was averse to people talking, apparently, so averse, in fact, that she had to leave the room to be consoled by Joy.

The next morning, as the Cuuli was unveiled to widespread approval, the ladies' Bookeze was also unveiled to... well... this:
What appears to be a heady mixture of bemusement and disgust. The Bookeze: easy to assemble in a mere 8 pieces... oh and they glossed over the fact that you seemingly have to take the book out to turn the page.

The next stage was preparing the pitch, always a joyous moment for the Apprentice viewers - who will make an unbridled arse of themselves? To say Bates lacked natural charisma is an understatement comparable with 'that whole business from 1914 to 1918 was bit rum, wasn't it?'. Stella tried to break it to him that she wanted Lester to pitch while Full Metal Jacket's best attempts to let Bates down gently fell on ungrateful, borderline-teenage ears. Despite Bates sulking afterwards, this was somewhat of a Waterloo for Stella proving that she was capable of standing up to the male bravado and forcing her own feelings home. Bates interpreted this as 'piss-poor' and that 'it wouldn't damage my confidence at the end of the day anyway, because I don't really care what she thinks... and, just shut up, you're not my real Mum'... Alright, so I made that last bit up, but that's essentially where it was headed. As it happens however, Bates was still allowed to do the pitch anyway. Go figure.

Pitching for the girls was Jenni Eclair-alike Melissa. Joanna carried over last week's handbags and began taking jibes at the jargon-filled pitch. I would say that it would join the ranks of 'ideation' and other classic Apprentice lingo but it was so inpenetrable that I can't remember any of it.

The time for planning was over and the real pitches began. Hewer, holding his pen like a cigar and classic sour-faced expression plastered on, oversaw Bates' monotonous attempt to prove to Boots that the Cuuuuuli was more than just a towel. Which he couldn't... because it isn't...

In the car to the girls' first pitch, Joanna had a brief altercation with Joy, seemingly over the fact that the latter actually had some semblance of decorum and moral decency. Their mid-pitch assembly demo invariably resulted in disaster, with at least 1 of the 8 pieces being put in the wrong place/the wrong way up, etc. Any product where you have to insert the caveat 'you'll find it's slightly bendy' is almost certainly not worth investing in.

So, to the board room! Lord Sugar didn't have any urgent business to attend to this time and thankfully was available in person, not via TV link with Nick wearing a giant foam hand and pointing it at the unlucky candidate (although, in some ways I like that idea more). The Shug seemed impressed by the Cuuli itself, but less so by the name and immediately quizzed Epstein the hedgehog on the use of umlauts, raising the marvellous point about Germans nicking sunloungers with their towels first thing in the morning (we've all been there, right kids?)

We learnt that the girls had turned down an offer from Boots because they'd demanded exclusivity and consequently lost the task by failing to sell any units... at all... Madness. The catfighting began, Laura uttered the phrase 'I managed to the best of my ability', the best of her ability being what Bates would presumably describe as 'piss-poor'. Joanna turned on Joy and turned out to be a real bitch, pressganging Laura into bringing back the target the unfortunate Joy instead of the admittedly equally fairly blameless Sandeesh.

For Joy, it was a lack of get-up-and-go that proved her undoing. Ironically, she was made to get-up-and-go by SiralunLordSugar's finger of fate. Boom! On a serious note, Laura or Joanna definitely should have gone though...

The Quiet One: Stuart Baggs 'the brand' was very quiet this week, presumably realising that, while there are many words to end that sentence, 'brand' definitely isn't one of them... which they didn't... 'cause it is...

Next Week: Baking. Remember the 100 chickens? I imagine it'll be like that.

Mine...

So, the rescue of the Chilean Miners is underway and handled in a customarily sensitive fashion by Sky News who spent most of last night reminding us that 'of course, it could all still go wrong', in the same way that they implied that the Raoul Moat standoff could turn into Infernal Affairs at any moment. Fortunately it transpired that after much banging and testing, the Fenix was finally put into use hauling forth the miners from their earthy prison. (Of course Murdoch ruined this too by placing a counter on the screen which stood at '0 out of 33 miners' for a good 6 hours or so).

On a similarly bleak note, today is also Margaret Thatcher's birthday. Interestingly that fateful day also signifies what could be the first major crack to appear in the Coalition, as it transpired that the Lib Dem's pre-election promise to abolish tuition fees turned out to be bollocks. Quite how 'abolition' turned into 'raised to an unlimited amount', I'm still not entirely sure. Poor old Cable is seemingly being scapegoated in a manner not seen since the 1930s and it surely cannot be long until he realises that Clegg has not only hoodwinked the public but his own party as well.

Still, it's the Apprentice tonight. So it's not all bad...

Dukes...

Break out the implausibly named chemicals, it's time for this week's Spooks series blog! (As always, here's the link to last week's to keep you in the loop). Weirdly, last night I had a dream that I was in Spooks. It was all very exciting and not quite everything actually made sense. So it was pretty true to form, really. I was Armitage. I even did the Armitage voice and everything.

I must confess that I missed the pre-credits stuff this week and had to go back to iPlayer it, seeing as most weeks half of the entire plot unfolds before the title sequence. This was not one of those occasions however as we were given only a minute or so of fairly banal action with a 'holyshitwhyhavetheygotallthoseguns?!??!' moment at the end. As you'll remember, we've covered Al Qaeda, Somali pirates, Nigerian oil tycoons and last week the Russians, so where to go from there? The Chinese, of course. It was three Chinese agents responsible for the 'holyshitwhyhavetheygotallthoseguns?!!?!?!?' just before the credits, but forget that because Armitage/Lucas North/John (and his torso of many tattoos) is in bed with Laila Rouass/Maya (it is Maya, I checked). There would seem to be trouble in paradise however as a labelled photo on the table in Lucas' lovely open plan kitchen (civil service cuts not quite reaching MI5 yet) would seem to indicate that someone, possibly Vaughn (he of the lopsided face), was onto them.

Meanwhile Beth was using all of her charm attempting to turn a CSS agent Kai (a brilliant turn by Benedict Wong, who was equally fantastic in the Countdown episode of The IT Crowd... the range, dear readers, the range!) to get some valuable intel on their business in England and Harry had heart-to-hearts with both the home secretary and Colin Salmon (who was playing a slightly ropey-accented CIA agent), both of whom warned him not to tread on Chinese toes in the present climate. So naturally, Lucas and Dimitri (yes, Dimitri was let out of the office again this week) were tasked with breaking into the Chinese Embassy. Tariq, who gets lumbered with some awful technobabble-infused exposition (I do miss Malcolm, by the way), poor bloke, lets them in via the window where they roam the building with torches (not exactly Splinter Cell, is it?).

As it happens, someone's dropped a bollock and tripped the alarms. We know this because Kai politely phones Beth to warn them, even though she scared him away earlier that day (again... charm). The CSS man guides Dimitri and Lucas to the roof before Lucas undoes all the hard work by finding another way out 'because they'll know we had inside help if we both go out this way'. Lucas decides his way out is smashing a window and nicking some laptops, then feigning innocence when angry-looking, gun-toting Chinese officials catch him. He puts on a London-ish accent (the perfect disguise) and claims to be a petty-ish criminal, leaving the Chinese to hand him over to the Met, the fools.

Beth met Kai again, with both Lucas and Dimitri watching from afar (Dimitri was really earning his paypacket this week). Lucas' watching was interrupted by a phonecall from Vaughn, who was in a pub for reasons which I don't fully understand, who told him to get the 'Albany' files. Cut To: the MI5 'Interrogation Suite' (yes, this is what flashed up on the screen, so it must be true) where Tariq was conducting a polygraph (or presumably something less technically dubious) on Kai. Lucas headed for the mainframe to look up Albany, but bottled it, realising the implications. I was disappointed to learn that his username was simply 'Lucas North', I was hoping for something along the lines of 'FSBsux' or 'NorthbyNorthwest' or at least 'LNorth36' or something.

The mysterious clueword of the episode was 'Amphitrite' and it was Ruth (yes, even Ruth was allowed onto the grid this week, mostly for her remarkable translating abilities) who was tasked with finding out. Displaying some impressive spy skills including pretending to have Diabetes and ignoring fire alarms, she eventually discovered Amphitrite to be not a dangerous chemical (we had enough of that last week) or even the desalination tech that they originally thought, but rather a woman: a certain Dr. Jiang. Who was being held in a room by the CIA, who had been tasked with protecting her from the Chinese (so even Colin Salmon was talking smack).

Lucas, still needing someone with Level 7 clearance to be his fall guy, picked poor old Stephen Owen, a 22 year old data analyst - easily the least cool job in MI5... like being a dinnerlady at Apple or Andrew Ridgeley- and stole his details with which to nab the Albany file. Which turned out simply to be Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar (depicting the famous pre-battle message flags). All that trouble for a jpg of (an admittedly brilliant) painting, duly delivered to Vaughn on a USB stick with ample time for a quick voddy and to rush to the hospital to embrace Maya.

Meanwhile, Kai was being played by the Chinese all along and turned out to be an unwitting triple agent and was promptly thrown into the back of a transit with Dr. Jiang. The secret services were warned that any intereference would result in a bomb being set off in London. Cue Dimitri's time to shine. Not content with being outside the office on at least 3 separate occasions, he had to diffuse a bomb while Beth, Lucas and what appeared to be a Met task force intercepted the van. Kai went crazy and got embroiled in a standoff, as it all went a bit John Woo. Dimitri melted the bomb with a Zippo lighter (who knew?) while Beth took a leaf out of Lucas' book and yelled Kai into submission.

And they all lived happily ever after... nope... this is Spooks. We finished with more tension between Harry and Ruth, young Stephen being arrested for compromising the mainframe and it transpired that the CSS agents had another agenda as well as Amphitrite... none other than a black and white photo of our own Lucas! Which meant that the negative shot at the end of the show was of a black and white photo. A negative of a black and white photo. Confusion at its best.

Exchange of the Week
More than just a quote this time. It just had to be the conversation between Harry and the home secretary.

HARRY (regarding the Chinese): So we should simply roll over for the bigger dog?
TOWERS: If you roll over you sometimes get your tummy tickled... [stares lugubriously at takeaway coffee] I don't think they put the hazelnut syrup in.
HARRY (does uimpressed face (you know the one... the Harry unimpressed face) gets up to leave, nods): Home secretary... [leaves]

Next Week
Israeli paramilitaries! Beth tied up! Harry and the home secretary argue! Business as usual!

Side-Projects...

I've made a foray into performance punk poetry (think sort of John Cooper Clarke meets Stewart Lee) under a pseudonym and some poems have been put up on a tumblr. I'm aware that having to post a link to the page will compromise my pseudonym, but then again, there's not much point in a pseudonym if no-one reads your work anyway, so here's the site and you know nothing about whether I'm real or he's real or whether we're the same or different, right guys?

(A more serious question, if anyone knows of any decent poetry open nights, I'd be grateful)

Friday Pictorial the Twenty Seventh: Sugar...

This one needs very little introduction. 99.9% of you understand where this is going...

The Apprentice: Sausage Connoisseurs...

Yes ladies and gentlemen, last night saw the majestic return of The Apprentice and, as we hoped and predicted in last week's candidates preview, this series is blessed with an abundance of marauding bellends. Stuart Baggs, who we earmarked last week as a real card, opened the bidding at only 49 seconds in with 'everything I touch turns to sold', only to be quickly followed by surgeon and business owner (surely you can't do both without detriment to one or the other) Shibby Robati who claimed, much to his own glee, that his 'first word wasn't "mummy", it was "money"'. Surrey investment banker (if ever 3 words were harder to come back from) Chris Bates threw his hat into the ring by claiming he was an 'all-round exceptional human being' (or something equally twattish)... as if we wouldn't hate him already. In fact, many of the candidates' statements were so obtuse, hackneyed or genuinely stomach-turning, that it was as though they'd simply hired actors to play a parody of typical Apprentice candidate archetypes.

Astonishing opening gambits and we were yet to have the credits. When the strains of Prokofiev were finally over, we saw the candidates shoved into the board room at midnight and ordered to go to Smithfield and craft some sausages. It had all the ingredients for a classic first task - forcing the contestants to wear silly hats, a good chance of potentially fatal cock-ups and a wee bit of sales tagged on the end. First the teams had to pick a name, a simple task, one would imagine. The women decided on Apollo (named after the space missions rather than the Greek god, apparently) and the men argued over whether 'Fusion' was more cliched than 'Synergy', eventually deciding that it was and completely missing the fact that they are both equally cliched and mean exactly the same thing. Joanna accepted the title of project manager after Melissa shirked duty despite showing initial interest. For the boys 34 year old Dan Harris stepped up to the plate, banging the table and roaring. "It was like being back in the dressing room" said Karen Brady, providing you with all you need to know about what it's like to be a woman working at a football club run by Davids Gold and Sullivan.

The first step of the sausage task was buying the meat. Synergy, having decided to pursue a sausage with the minimum legal requirement of meat in it (surely that won't come back to bite them in the arse, will it...?), charged off seeking the cheapest price available. Apollo, meanwhile, attempted to create a gourmet sausage with a staggering 70% meat. Meat acquired, both teams moved into the kitchen, taking a crash course in sausage manufacturing (the entire episode was essentially one, long, strung-out innuendo) before forming a production line with varying degrees of success. Dan quickly turned into a sausage Mussolini, all yelling and arm-folding, Joanna managed to get a degree of consensus and harmony from Apollo.

In Synergy the 'characters' certainly came to the fore. "Who is doing the mincing?!" demanded Mussolini. Baggs carped on about something or other, Epstein (you'll remember from last week, that he was convinced he invented the bendy bus and had been sacked from Hagen Daazs) spent his time looking like a hedgehog and Jamie Lester (who looks like a composite of all the previously successful male candidates) branded Dan Mussolini "a nob". Among the quieter ones were Raleigh Addington (the only candidate approaching Bates in the appallingly posh stakes) and indeed last week's blog's pick Christopher 'Full Metal Jacket' Farrell of the hidden convictions.

Both teams struggled with the sausage skinning machine, something that never looks graceful or impressive at the best of times. Apollo's simply fired out quantities of minced meat seemingly at random, while Synergy's rusk-heavy mix came out resembling something between pet food pellets and a turd, blocking up the nozzle in the process. Eventually both teams managed to create enough processed cylinders of meat to flog to an unwitting London public.

This was where it counts. Graft and sales. Stuart Baggs (who has his own erinaceous quality, now that I think about it) came out of the blocks quickly, terrifying potential 'sausage connoisseurs' with a bizarre combination of sexual aggression and unyielding hounding. "It's 100% meat" he claimed. Right, so that's 100% 42% meat then...? Epstein manned the griddle, presumably resembling a hedgehog too much to be of any use in a high-pressure sales situation. Mussolini led a splinter group on door to door sausage-selling, less a trailblazing march into a gap into the market and more harranging innocent West London residents by buzzing and yelling "do you want some sausages?!" into a receiver.

The women focussed on flogging their 'gourmet' sausages to banker-y types and a restaurant with a good degree of success. Meanwhile the boys subteam brought their limp, rusk-filled excuse for a sausage to a female chef who displayed more business acumen than the entire team had for the rest of the episode and drove a hard bargain and we were whisked back to the boardroom for the fallout. Sometime the editing can be misleading, but it certainly seemed that the women had adopted the correct business strategy, whereas the blokes were a bunch of in-fighting neanderthals.

Mussolini screwed up his already slim chances immediately in a bizarre display of non-adherence to board room etiquette and was quickly informed to "sit in a conventional manner" by Lord Sugar. One of my favourite ever Sugar quotes, I think, up there even with "you've gone from anchor to wanker". Nick and Karen gave their verdicts and numbers and the boys had lost by £15. Much, much closer than anyone would have guessed. At the inquest, previously subdued Raleigh laid into Mussolini branding his behaviour 'shameful' with all the air of abused spouse. Mussolini correctly brought both hedgehogs back into the board room and, frankly, Siralun mi'Lud Sugar should have fired all three.

Epstein was reminded of his own failure by Sugar and quickly gave a hurt speech about 'tough times', still hard to accept from a man with such a degree of hedgeholio about him. Baggs dug himself into an enormous hole with a smattering of appalling trash-talk and sickening sycophancy but inevitably it was the slouchy Mussolini that faced the finger of doom.

The One You Won't Remember: Sandeesh (Nope? Me neither...)

Next Week: Beach Holiday Paraphernalia

Pudge Speaks Out...

Yes, it's David Cameron's speech today, so this will be a political-ish post. I should point out that I can't actually watch the speech at the moment, so I will instead be following it by watching the worm reaction tracker on the Guardian website. As of several minutes ago, he'd plummeted to -250 there or thereabouts. I'm not John Pienaar but I'm pretty sure that represents fairly resounding disapproval and, brilliantly, Cameron isn't even on the stage yet, so this should be a treat...

As the speech is yet to take place, this is very much a pre-emptive blog, so I'll supply you with some things you may well hear, a sort of conference bingo, if you will.

1. Awful fawning over being in power.
2. Some cheap jibes at the previous government.
3. Apologising that they happened to miss several announced policies out of their manifesto...
4. Attempting to justify marriage tax breaks despite it costing more than any of the savings made from the equally flawed removal of tax credits.
5. Thatcher - (I notice that Cameron, in fact, just called her "the greatest peacetime prime minister of the 20th century" - I'm fairly certain that tells you everything you need to know about how the next decade or so will go...)
6. Attempts to prove that the coalition is held together by something more than quasi-Tory Clegg and reams of Duck tape...
7. Some new euphemism for 'rolling back the state'...
   

On the plus side, The Apprentice starts tonight, so there'll be plenty more fawning twats to direct your anger at, expect all the fallout from the first firing in tomorrow's blog.

Flukes...

It's time for the Spooks Series Blog the third and yesterday's was a classic example of Spooks formula. Pre-credits bloodbath, running, techy talk, exposition, pouting, world-ending chemicals inexplicably being stored in Central London - the LOT.

At the opening, all eyes were on the Azakstan Freedom Front (Azakstan is a bit like Kazakhstan only slightly more fictitious, one assumes) as they attempted ot break into a research facility before being promptly shot dead by balaclav-clad men including our very own Lucas.

Yup, it was a Russian-themed episode which can only mean comedy Russkie accents ahoy (one of Spooks' real vices) and plenty of terrifying bioweaponary. Harry (Peter Firth is literally the best actor in the world when it comes to being singularly uimpressed by everything) is eventually persuaded to allowed well-dressed FSB agent Viktor onto the grid to track Azis Aibek (who you will also remember as definitely non-Russian, non-handicapped Anderson in Sherlock, one of several facts to the detriment of his credibility as a terrorist from the ex-Soviet Union) an escaped AFF member with a gammy leg who was attempting to unleash an implausibly name but incredibly potent chemical weapon.

Lucas, Beth, Viktor and Dimitri (yes, even Dimitri was let off tea-making duties for this one) headed to the Tube to stop him in his tracks. Which brings us neatly on to This Week's Missed Topical Touchstone - The Tube Strike. Imagine the beauty of Aibek arriving at Charing Cross with his bag of bioweapons only to find that all major lines were closed. Instead This Week's Topical Touchstone seemed to be the Cold War (and to an extent the Georgia/Russia conflict over South Assetia) neither of which are topical per se. All parties eventually found Aibek (surprisingly nippy for a man with a limp) who dropped his bag (which was in fact empty anyway) and headed for the surface, with both Lucas and Viktor (two men of athletic build without limps) somehow failing to catch him up.

He was heading for Doctor Kirby (who some of you will remember as Kemp, the werewolf-exploding priest cum evil genius of Being Human series 2, one of several facts to the detriment of his credibility as nice guy scientist who just happened to help invent one of the most dangerous chemical weapons in the history of humanity) (Donald Sumpter seems to play a lot of 'K' characters, perhaps that's where the first K went from 'Azakstan'...) to demand the location of his beloved bioweapons. He refused and was promptly beaten up (again impressive from a man with a limp) leaving limpy to take his anger out on Kirby's daughter.

Lucas, Beth and Viktor nearly caught Aibek at Kirby's daughter Meg's house, but he mananged to get out. Lucas and Beth left Viktor to console the poor girl. Viktor's idea of 'consoling' appeared to in fact be 'murder'. Yeah, that's right. Whodathunkit? That the FSB agent would turn out to be a wrong 'un? Aibek was caught and Beth's suspicion was suitable arounsed by Viktor smoking, sat on the bath with a dead Meg lying on the floor next to him.

Lucas and Viktor (fully equipped with spy camera to record the destruction of the bioweapon) travelled to the location where the dangerous chemical was cryogenically frozen and attempted to retrieve it, only for Aibek (bloody handy at escaping the authorities for a disabled man) to club them both over the head and make off with the bioweapon (when will you learn MI5?!). I say 'make off', he made it as far as the roof where Viktor followed him and shot him... just before Viktor himself was shot by Beth and the recorded footage cleverly put through Windows Movie Maker (presumably by Tariq) to make it look like Aibek murdered Viktor and made off with the swag (bioweapon) and then shown to the Russian ambassador.

Right at the end Laila Rouass turned up again (I've forgotten her character name already, I want to say 'Maya'?) - you'll remember that in this she's playing a doctor, like in Primeval, except for this time a real doctor rather than a 'doctor' specialising in the already dead or extinct species, which is surely cheating for a doctor, isn't it?- and kissed and made up (literally) with Lucas/John, who explained that he'd been in prison for 8 years (neglecting to mention that the 'prison' was run by the FSB and he was subject to torture and interrogation at every possible opportunity).

Quote of the Week
'Target's made a drop' Lucas North. Because sometimes even spy jargon has to sound like a euphemism for defecation.

Real Life Credibility Cameo of the Week
Kirsty Wark - To paraphrase a classic opening, they say you appear on Spooks twice in your career, once on the way up and once on the way down. Good to see a Newsnight presenter on again...

Bleurgh...

You know how sometimes you're in a motorway services at 7:45, having got up at 5:30 and you think 'I know what'll sort me out - a black coffee' and so you head to a coffee chain (let's call them, I don't know... 'Rica') and grab a medium Americano? It's never as good an idea as it sounds.

You go for the medium, thinking '"medium" is normal-sized, right? That's how it works.' Not necessarily. They guilt trip you into buying a medium because no-one wants to ask for a small, no-one. Medium is only 'medium' because the 'large' Americano is large enough to drown a toddler in (again, I'm not advising this...), it's a large by any normal person's standards.

The caffeine then takes its toll on everything it can. Brain, bladder... all the b's, essentially. You will also spend the next 3 or 4 hours being twitchy and convinced that you're suffering from palpatations.

This is essentially a long-winded way of saying, I feel a bit bleurgh so today's blog won't be very good. Still, Spooks tonight, so at least tomorrow's will look after itself. (I mean, I still have to watch, remember what happened and come up with a concise and witty article about it, but it basically writes iself... well, I mean, I still have to write it... but... ok, it's all me. ALL ME)

Friday Pictorial the Twenty Sixth: Sustenance

Another poem. Because some of your are that way inclined. Inclined to a bit of the old poetry, I mean.