Ill Informed TV Reviews: I...

Right, here's a sort of accidental idea I've had whilst shambling around today- review TV shows, having missed the first 3/4 or so. Basically, I caught the tail end of Cookery School, Channel 4's answer to the BBC's cook-off monopoly, if the question was "can you make a sort of low-rent Masterchef in what appears to be a brick high-rise in Acton?"

Now Cookery School is much like an ordinary school: There's an overwhelming pressure placed upon the students and at the end of tomorrow's episode someone gets evicted... Oh hang on, that's not schools, is it? That's reality television... always get those two mixed up. Not schools at all really. (Well, maybe after Gove's finished tinkering: "Once you've bought and funded your own free school, you can kick the weakest students out at the end of every week...")

I watched the last quarter as the 'students' were tasked with cooking risotto with mussels and then chastised in front of one another by chef Richard Corrigan (out of off of Great British Menu) and 'cookery mentor' (or 'chef') Gizzi Erskine. Graduate (it's what we call them now that none of them can get actual jobs) Bram (who knew people weren't only called that in the 19th century?!) was complimented on the texture of his risotto. Clearly there was a bit of history with Bram, as Corrigan was forced to reconsider his opinion of his cookery abillities. Bram, clearly a bit of a 'character', did an impression of Corrigan, explaining that he expected the Irishman to deride his humble rice dish when in fact he had let out a gutteral "mmmmm", in the post-cookery interview segments that take place on the balcony, complete with black, spiralling fire escape stairs as if the students had all popped out for a cheeky fag break.

It's the classic format. Plucky amateur cooks try and make it big and learn a few things along the way. Like Masterchef. Except not really Masterchef, shh, what did you go and mention Masterchef for?! Well, I guess it's because Masterchef have a flash new studio complete with Time Commanders-esque surveillance balcony for Gregg and John to eye the incompetence of the contestants like dodgy food emperors at an amphitheatre. "Tougher challenges" claims the voiceover... and yet I thought that Imperator Greggus Wallacius had decreed that "cooking doesn't get tougher than this" every episode for about 4 whole previous series.

Anyway, the thing about Cookery School is that it's almost a throwback to the late nineties, early noughties heyday of Channel 4, where BBC formats were slightly altered and then shoved in brick studio space in Hounslow. Who can forget the seminal RI:SE or... you know... the educational things they used to do... sort of edgy stuff... about sex and drugs? Even the camera work is reminiscent of that Golden Age of television where top media luminaries like Kate Lawler and Mark Durden-Smith could run the rule over the day's news in an edgy early morning formats... no, not like Daybreak, even edgier (if you can imagine such a thing...).

But, I only saw the last 15 minutes, so the first bit could have been shot as a Bergmanesque character study of some tragic but loveable amateur cooks set in Malmo. I don't know. Next: Outcasts, the last 15 minutes of Episode 2... possibly.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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...

The Apprentice: You're Nicked...

Right, excuse the awful title, this is basically about the brand spanking new series of extended, reality, job interview show The Apprentice which is focusing on business(wo)men who have lost out in the recession. From unemployed graduates to failed entrepreneurs, the new series boasts an extensiev array of downtrodden, desperate candidates. So, as victims of the cruel cycle of business, surely this year's collection of candidates will display a good deal more humility and quiet determination? Well no. It would appear that despite the numerous failings and setbacks, the new contestants are the usual bunch of appalling, arrogant arseholes.

A 21 year old telecoms entrepreneur introduces himselves as "Stuart Baggs - the brand", another, Christopher Farrell, conveniently hid a weapons conviction and the fact that he was currently on bail for alleged fraud, yet another draws comparisons between herself and a Lamborghini (expensive, flashy and ultimately pointless given the laws in this country, presumably). It's the usual ragtag bunch of crisp-suited egotists and delusional, Machiavellian capitalists, with the odd loveable idiot thrown in for good measure.

Actually let's go back to Farrell, an ex-Army sniper who claims that he carries over his 'killer instinct' into the world of business (and apparently his personal life given some of the allegations made by his former wife in the article). Should there be a backlash about his involvement in the show? After all, most successful businessmen are fraudsters. Just look at Madoff and Conrad Black and... oh, hang on...

As I was writing this article, my attention was drawn (by the excellent Tom Searle, no less) to this candidate. Not quite sure how he aims to prove that he originally invented the bendy bus (possibly in the same way that I, as a young man, wrote a sketch about Captain Oates that I later found out basically covered the same ground and one written by Lee and Herring when I was a mere slip of a lad). The factfile goes on: 'Sacked from his first job making ice-cream at Haagen Dazs,' (it doesn't say why but presumably they let you take home one tub to eat in front of the telly whilst weeping profusely) 'Alex later found his forte in telecommunications'. I'm not entirely convinced that telecommunications counts as a 'forte', regardless of the fact that at least 3 of the other candidates also list this (just before the bit where it says they're unemployed).

Essentially, it looks a cracker of a series. A genuine criminal, a brilliantly delusional 21 year old and an equally misguided man sacked by Haagen Dazs are just the tip of the iceberg. Roll on next Wednesday as the wisened finger of truth shatters its first, already largely recession-ruined, life.

Mooks...

Yes, the Spooks series blog will happen... for nothing if not appalling laziness and lack of inspiration on my part. If you don't watch it, then I like to think that this is an able substitute. (If you missed part one of the blog, it can be found here)

I'll start with This Week's Topical Touchstone as it played an enormous part in the episode. Oil barons and crises dominated the 60 minutes, as the spies attempted to foil an attempt on the life of morally questionable Robert Westhouse. As it happened, last week's theory about Beth being killed off was brushed aside before the credits (a lot of action pre-credits in Spooks, if it was American ((or Downton Abbey)) there would almost certainly have to be adverts after the opening titles...) as, despite being involved in a lift-based bloodbath she was able to snaffle a phone from a dead man's hand and get back up for some espionage action once Lucas arrived on the scene.

After the credits finally arrived we were treated to a quick title screen simply saying "Lucas" an indication that this episode would be one of those convoluted affairs so beloved of big budget American dramas where we experience events from multiple perspectives (though technically Kurosawa's Rashomon deserves the credit/blame). The episode was very complicated as we discovered that not only did Westhouse have his own assassin on hand to counter the attempt on his life but the assassins responsible for the lift massacre were in fact attempting to kill Beth, who had sold out the brother of one of the killers to the authorities.

This was all explained from 3 different viewpoints with some other bits of action thrown in. We got to see Harry get his hands dirty again as he halted Westhouse (who had also planned a coup in Nigeria... did I mention that?) in his tracks. He nabbed a briefcase full of... something (I wasn't quite paying attention at this point and was duly punished for it) and headed for the door. Meanwhile the Nigerian assassin (the original one tasked with killing Westhouse before all the other assassins turned up) aimed his gun at the door, tasked with killing the briefcase-holder. We moved into slow motion and I prepared to eat last week's words only for Beth to run into the frame and knock her boss behind a conveniently placed vehicle.

Back at HQ (they still put up where it is on the screen... surely an appalling move for a secret service...) Lucas persuades Harry to retain the services of mildy untrustworthy Beth in return for accepting the role as Section Commander (there was no haggling over pay and Lucas wasn't required to go on an ICT course). Elsewhere our hero Mr. North found time to search through some trinkets from the days before his visit to Deed Poll and, as it happens, he had been involved with Laila Rouass of Footballers' Wives and Primeval fame (she was a doctor in this... a bit like in Primeval... but a proper doctor... with a stethoscope and things...). She wasn't overly pleased to be reacquainted but then popped up again towards the end of the episode, so you make of that what you will...

Next week, the ever-present, acronymical threat of the FSB rears its ugly head and the Deed Poll business gets out of hand...

Line(s) of the Week
'... he's been to the Ukraine more times in the last 3 months than is healthy.' Harry (or something to that effect) (It's also worth noting that Harry will probably appear here every week. He gets the best lines and Peter Firth delivers them so, so well)

Military Intelligence...

Yesterday saw the return of excellent espionage-fest Spooks, meaning that today I don't have to rely on 'the news' to write a blog. Huzzah. I know that various other outlets offer series blogs, opinions and reviews of Spooks, but this is the only one with wild tangential ramblings and little or no actual professional journalistic standard.

We were given a frankly terrifically jam-packed opener, where more took place before that credits sequence than I actually remember happening in some of the entire earlier series. Essentially, Ros (who got blown up at the end of last series - Nope? Me neither... it all seems such a long time ago...) only managed to attract 5 people to her funeral prompting Harry into a crisis of conscience. "Do you ever feel like you can't go on?" He asked Ruth, seemingly unaware of the luck he's experienced being the only main character to survive from the first series. But surely good old Harry wouldn't tender his resignation to the new home secretary later in the episode, would he? Ruth then presented him with the bombshell that Robert Glenister's marvellous home secretary had all the while been in the employ of Nightingale (shady corporation behind much of the action in the last series), prompting everyone's favourite MI5 knight of the realm to pay him a visit with some 'special' whisky. Death by whisky, arguably one of the greatest methods Spooks has ever served up.

After the credits we found Lucas North, who'd traded his sharp-lined dark shirts for a grubby khaki jacket and an accent, aboard a ship, tasked with the assassination of a top Al Qaeda (or 'AQ' as the 'professionals' call them) chief (no, not that one). He had a chat with ship's captain Dimitri (from Russia via Romford... as it happens, because he was a spy too) but before he could carry out his orders the ship was boarded by, yes, Somali pirates. Which reminds me...

Tangent #1
The topicality of Spooks is marvellous, as well as the Somali pirates there were some nice references to the Coalition thanks to the brilliantly odious new home secretary, played by the excellent Simon Russell Beale and his slightly uneasy initial relationship with stalwart of the old guard Harry. I'm surely not the first to point out that Spooks' equal parts glamorous and gritty portrayal of life in the Secret Service is perhaps a little unrealistic -at no point does Lucas North accidentally leave some crucial documents on a train, Tariq is able to reel off reams of bizarre technobabble uninterrupted by workplace discrimination and main characters are dispensed with faster than you can yell 'don't open the door, Rupert, there's a car bomb' at your telly - however, it's able to get away with providing a frankly terrifying vision of a London constantly under attack from nefarious baddies, computer hackers, ex-spies, ex-mentors of spies and environmentalists because of the flecks of topicality that it drip-feeds each episode with.

Well, the Somali pirates threw a spanner in the works. Remember that Russian prostitute played by whatsherface out of Hallam Foe and Art School Confidential that I conveniently hadn't mentioned up until this point? No, of course you don't. Anyway, she's a spy too... well, private contractor called Beth who then helps Lucas to break away from the captives and eventually escape to an airfield, leaving Dimitri to face the remaining pirates and stop them from making it to Plymouth where they planned to splatter the Queen with exploding boat debris, which he did. However said explosives had mysteriously disappeared when he went to check them, along with some submersibles (what we used to call submarines when I was a boy... except sort of robot submarines... choc full of plastic explosive). The Queen splattering was a decoy! Beth turned up in the middle of all this, basically to ask Harry for a job, prompting some more brooding from Lucas. The big news however was that explosive submersibles had breached the Thames Barrier (tick off Thames Barrier -again - on your National Security Risks bingo card) were on their way to Westminster as we speak.

The only way to stop them (after threatening an unbudging teenage hacker at gunpoint failed) was for Harry to make exactly the kind of terrible decision that had prompted him to tender his resignation in the first place. Beneath the Houses of Parliament lay an EMF bomb that would knock out all electronics within a kilometre's radius. Ruth reminded him it was a last resort and would knock out all computer systems in that area. "So the country will have to struggle on without internet pornography and Minesweeper for a couple of hours. Do it." Drawled Harry, the spirit of Ros' classic 'I am not impressed by anything' rhetoric living on despite her immolation. Ruth then pointed out that it was all computers again, for instance pacemakers and life support machines. "Bugger!" Harry's face seemed to say. Nevertheless, he gave the order. Cue befuddled Londoners staring at their kaputt mobiles on Westminster Bridge.

Wowzers trousers, all that action, surely no more major revelations can be made in this episode, right? Wrong! Harry told the home secretary to tear up his letter of resignation, providing Peter Firth a stay of execution for another year (that's worth 7 in Spooks years, mind). Elsewhere, Lucas bumped into a man who'd had a stroke who called him 'John' prompting a mortified look reminiscent of Armitage's classic turn as Guy of Gisborne, very much the real star of BBC's Robin Hood. The stroke victim then dropped a briefcase at Lucas' feet and left.

Bloody hell, eh? Revelations all round. What does Beth know? Is she really going to be killed off next week as the preview suggests (bloody preview spoilers... tsk...)? John? What's all this about John?

Well, frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a curveball and he'd just gone to Deed Poll...


Line(s) of the Week:

'Don't think I won't kill you because you're a teenage girl.' Lucas
'I'm suitably ennobled.' Harry

Saturday Night at the London Palla- Oh, Hang On...

Britishness is a curious thing, tricky to quantify exactly. I know where I am on a scale of weeping at Elgar's Nimrod to putting little flags on a white van, but the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, yet (and allow me to be painfully middle class for a moment- although I've already given that away by admitting to the whole Elgar thing ((I just have something in my eye is all))) is there perhaps anything that presents pure concentrated Britishness quite like the Proms and, more specifically, the Last Night of the Proms. Who could argue with the flag-waving and everyone joining in (each in his or her own key ((Tom Lehrer references for the win)) of course) with Elgar's magnificent arrangements of Parry's 'Jerusalem' and 'Land of Hope and Glory'?

Well, I'll tell you who could argue with that: Bruce Forsyth and Tess Daly, that's who. For, on the very same evening as the Royal Albert Hall shook to the thundering chorus of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D Major, BBC Television centre shook to the thundering chorus of clumsy footing and celebrity clapping as another team of hapless but enthusiastic amateurs took to the floor for the launch of the new series of Strictly Come Dancing. Alright, so the events that I've listed didn't exactly coincide per se, but it sounds much more exciting this way. I should also point out that this 'launch' of Strictly Come Dancing came 3 weeks before the actual series begins and mostly resembled a PE class where Ann Widdecombe was inevitably picked last.

The roster was revealed, featuring such pop culture luminaries as Paul Daniels and Goldie, to a series of increasingly laboured gags and then paired off predictably with the show's professionals (that's 'predictably' as in the pairings were predictable, rather than them obviously being paired with professionals as opposed to say goats or members of the BNP) over what seemed like about 5 or 6 hours, with the pauses usually reserved for results shows used here simply before reading out a name in a bottom-clenchingly infuriating waste of airtime. Instead of those pauses we could have had more dances choreographed by the new team of old favourites like 'that one that won with Ramprakash' and 'the other guy, you know, the blonde one' where people drop from the ceiling on wires to swing jazz versions of pop-rock.

I say predictable pairings, by that I mean that as soon as I heard Widdecombe was involved, it was patently obvious that she would be given to Anton, who I can only assume did something to massively upset the production staff somewhere around the second series and has carved out a living as a sort of carer for the celebrities with the most left feet. I also had a suspicion that male duffer of the series Paul Daniels would be inflicted upon Ola, after her triumph last year, that proved well-founded. After each group of 3 or so pairings, Brucie would hand over to the judging panel for ludicrous conjecture from Len about 'surprise packages' and 'good pairings' based on nothing but the brand new celebrities' abilities to walk down stairs without breaking an ankle, nonsensical, superlative silliness from Bruno, camp cynicism from the maestro Craig and well, a look from Alesha that suggested she was just happy to still be there being, as she is, in no way a qualified professional dancer/choreographer.

I'll offer my own staggeringly unfounded speculations right here, right now -

• Patsy Kensit - Will be one of those ones who's either really good or really rubbish.
• Gavin Henson - Might just be too big a rugby player to be good at celebrity dancing. Good feet for a big lad, though.
• Tina O' Brien - Oh yeah! I remember her out of off of Corrie.
  
• Jimi Mistry - He'll do well... I've seen The Guru...
• Ann Widdecombe - Could be painful, but she's no X-Factor-class mug without an iota of self-awareness. She knows exactly what she's doing. Sadly, this isn't Celebrity Big Brother and 'game-plans' won't get you anywhere if Anton can't swing you around his head like a cape.

Boom!

Weekend Stuff...

Well, well, well. How about that for a weekend. A real mixed bag, one might say.

An epic Doctor Who finale, a bollo performance from England's 'Golden Generation' against the Germans and some tremendous sets from a sweltering Glastonbury served up onto the tellybox by Auntie.

First things first, Who was really excellent. It had me thinking 'this is pretty good for the first few minutes' and then Matt Smith said "It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool." At which point the entertainment part of my brain blurted out 'Ok, this is the best thing ever'. The performances were towering, the writing nothing short of brilliant and just enough intrigue was left to leave me wondering how I'll get by until the Christmas special.

Second things second, England are a painful team to watch. With my Swiss hopes already dashed by remarkable profligacy in front of goal against Honduras and a rather dubious red card against Chile, I now settled down to watch Capello's unchanged 4-4-2 take on a youthful and exciting German team. England's chances had been talked up by pundits and fans alike, but I (though I must confess I missed the Slovenia game) wasn't so hopeful having seen two uninspired and frankly uninspiring performances against the USA and Algeria. But then, surely this was the moment to step up to the plate and silence the doubters, the moments when things would turn around?

Well, no, not really, as it happened. The positive thinking lasted all of 20 minutes and then 'keeper Manuel Neuer smacked a drop kick 100 yards down the pitch, bouncing over the heads of a hapless Terry and Upson, for Miroslav Klose to slot past a furious David James. Village. The fury was compounded seconds later as dicy German passing led to Lukas Podolski smashing home through David James' legs from the tightest of angles. It was looking as though it could be a cricket score, when a chipped cross from Frank Lampard found the head of Matthew Upson who fired it over a rather flappy Neuer and into the net. The lifeline we'd supposedly been waiting for? It was the much-maligned Lampard who struck again sending a trademark slapshot 0f the crossbar and in. Except well, was it in though? Well, yes it was, but that didn't stop the Uruguayan ref and his assistant failing to notice this.

It all became irrelevant in the second half however as another incisive German counterattack (as a historian it's very, very difficult not to draw parrallels with the Battle of the Bulge and such like...) saw 20 year old Thomas Mueller, one of Germany's most impressive youths along with 21 year old Mesut Oezil, slot home and the quickfire double salvo was completed with another close range finish from the Bayern Muenchen youngster, 3 minutes later. The rout was complete, the misery confounded. Hope was lost the moment that Capello revealed his game-chasing attacking substitution to be Heskey on for Defoe.

It was an abject, miserable performance from the 'golden generation'. Rooney looked as feckless up front as he had done all tournament, Glen Johnson failed to be in the correct defensive position once, Terry and Upson resembled the Chuckle brothers at centre half and all were run rings round by the youthful exuberance of the talented Germans, as painful as that is to say.

An 'inquest' was promised by the commentators. To be fair, Lineker and chums could have summed up the performance simply as 'the Germans were much, much better at football than we were'. Shearer wasn't best pleased either. Hansen declared that the Germans brought 'ideas that England just couldn't cope with'. Yeah, like 'defending'.

The big players didn't perform. It was simple, England weren't a team, they were a collection of egos made to wear the same colour shirt for 90 hopeless, agonising minutes. Rooney is perhaps the greatest villain of all. Knackered and impotent up front, he's made Slovakia's Robert Vittek look like Pele. Hopefully some of the deadwood will have been cleared out in time for the Euros in 2 years time, but don't count on it.

Third things third, Glastonbury has some pretty stonking performances. Obviously on occasions such as these, it is the headliners that draw the most attention. Friday saw Gorillaz deputising for U2 and their crocked, divisive lead singer Bono and, by all accounts, not particularly well. Revellers began to drift away from the Pyramid Stage during a downbeat set which included only a couple of big hits. Contrast this with the other two headliners, Muse and Stevie Wonder, who produced terrific feel-good greatest hits sets (and with my favourite Glasto perfromance of recent memory, last year's epic Bruce Springsteen set) and you can see perhaps why a psyched-up Friday night crowd didn't appreciate a dark, experimental study in melancholia.

Muse were all stadium rock and pyrotechnics, producing a marvellously lively collection of hits from their impressive back catalogue. They finished with a stonking rendition of space western epic Knights of Cydonia prefaced by a snippet of Ennio Morricone's Man With a Harmonica from Once Upon a Time in the West (a personal favourite of mine). Motown legend Stevie Wonder gave a hugely entertaining, light-hearted set, reeling off hit after hit and present Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis with a harmonica during Happy Birthday. Wonder has clearly lost none of his exuberance, giving a wonderful, life-affirming performance to an adoring crowd.

Druids... and The Doctor...

Well, Monday saw the Summer Solstice rung in in the traditional way. A load of hippie types dressing up and heading to sites of historical interest around Britain such as Stonehenge and Avebury. There are just a few minor issues with this.

Most importantly, how on earth did hundreds of thousands of revellers make it to Stonehenge without being vaporised by a collective alliance of Autons, Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans et cetera? I mean, The Doctor is still locked in the Pandorica, watched over by this new terrifying Alliance (or, dare I say, 'coalition'), so how did the Druids manage to avoid extermination? Hippie magic trumps cyber technology now, does it?

Actually, allow me to get sidetracked, the opening part of the Doctor Who series finale was an absolutely tremendous high point in a series that has seen the new key talent of Moffat, Smith and Gillan produce some astounding moments. Admittedly, the big twist of the Pandoric being a prison for The Doctor was a touch predictable (although maybe I just spend too much time writing things myself to enjoy the mystery of such things anymore) but there were still a suitable number of questions left unanswered and a few things to make one's brain hurt. Such as, Rory came back as a Roman, but he wasn't really Rory, he was just an Auton programmed to be and think like Rory, but then if he was erased from time and never existed and Amy forgot about him, then how did the Alliance know and... ow, my head.

As well as every star in the universe going supernova and The Doctor being locked in a large cube (maybe Phillip Schofield will appear at some point), we were also left with a dying Amy. Now, I imagine some serious deus ex machina appearing in the next episode and I don't imagine Amy will remain dead any more than I imagine the Doctor will end up imprisoned forever and the writers will leave every star in the universe destroyed. Theories and symposia on possible resolutions that I've read include both The Doctor and River Song being Prisoner Zero, River's vortex manipulator will save the day, that Amy's house is the TARDIS (bigger on inside, blue etc.), some kind of link between Amy POND and RIVER Song. I don't know though, it's all very much nerdy internet ramblings. The long and the short of it is simply wait until Saturday and then we'll all find out.

Anyway, back to the Druids. Flocking to what we now know are in fact the communications towers that are the mysterious lithics of Stonehenge to celebrate what is in fact a festival celebrated possibly as early as the neolithic period, which happily is also the period in which the monoliths were erected in Avebury. So neo-druids flock their to celebrate something not in fact originally worship by Celtic religions at a site that has equally little to do with actual druids.

Now, I don't really have that much of a problem with new-age-y types with beards and robes, however as a historian it does bother me that their research seems to be a little flawed. In the musuem galleries at Avebury there's a child skeleton found on Windmill Hill, a real wonderful archaeological find, but the Druids insist on it being reburied. Now, not only would this set a worrying precedent and possibly end up with a huge number of societies and museums caving in to the demands of a group with little right to force this issue, but in all likelihood the skeleton is that of a neolithic child, given the period of other finds from the same area and again is nothing to do with Druids.

Gah, it just strikes me as misinformed, lobbying for the sake of making it look like you're doing something instead of arsing around in robes. You know it is, it really is.

Sound Bites...

Yep, that title has a double meaning. Essentially I've spent most of the day watching television. One particular piece of the endlessness that piqued my interest was Prime Minister's Questions. Now, the format pretty much does what it says on the tin. With one subtle difference.

Where it's generally considered good form to answer the questions from the House, Cameron appears to be bringing a maverick approach and throwing the rulebook out of the window. "Ooh isn't he marvellous, the loose cannon." Is the inevitable response of Nick Robinson and pals. "I love how honest he is, admitting that he doesn't know the answer." Fawns another. But you can be sure that if, say, Gordon Brown had said that he wouldn't answer the question because he didn't know the facts, then people would have labelled him an incompetent arsehole. It smacks of laziness, as does the policy mentioned in the build-up to the election of letting us take over failing schools/hopsitals/police stations/circuses etc. (although I may have made one of those up). You're supposed to sort it out because that's you're job, we're not going to sort the country out for you.

I feel I'm getting sidetracked somewhat. My main gripe was Cameron's description of the Labour Leadership race as 'increasingly like a Star Trek convention'. I have absolutely no idea what that means. Diane Abbott as Uhura? Because that's borderline racist. Also what are the grounds for this. Who's Captain Kirk? It was on Newsnight, is Paxman Kirk? Paxman's probably Kirk... I'm going for Ed Milliband as Spock, Ed Balls as Scotty, Andy Burnham as McCoy and, well, David Milliband as... er... Sulu... The less said the better probably...

These pointless soundbites are arriving with increasing frequency and becoming more and more convoluted. I long for the day when Dennis Skinner would just come out and say he thought someone was a c*** (alright, he might never have actually said that) he's a proper politician who doesn't subscribe to the 'throw in a similie to hide your unoriginality' school.

I'm Spartacus, I'm Spartacus (Blood and Sand)...

I know, I've been neglecting you lovely people with all my talk of politics (boring) etc. So today I've decided to return to what I know, namely 'taking the piss out of television'.

Ok, I caught Bravo's Spartacus: Blood and Sand in my mildly delirious, dehydrated, post-rehearsal haze and well, well... where to start? I'll confess that I missed the first episode (although at no point did this seem to matter). Our hero Spartacus has ended up in gladiator school. He's given a bath (which apparently consists of a man pouring water over you with a ladle) and some of the senior gladiators explain the ropes. "It's the truest form of brotherhood" proclaimed the bastardy one (something mildly hilarious about saying this, wang swinging in what appears to be the Roman equivalent of a locker room full of jocks). It's horseplay ahoy. "This gladiator's been killed, the useless fuck, ha ha ha ha ha" "Work harder, cunty cunterson, or I'll sit on your face" and "Want some food, eh? Well, you shits, you can eat it off the floor" are just three of the quotes that I've made up because I can't actually remember any real ones, but you'll just have to take my word for it that a lot of the dialogue is basically that with different swear words and situations... and wangs... too many wangs.

John Hannah plays the Peter Ustinov role and bless him, he's trying his best, but Ustinov he ain't (but then neither is anyone) but he does at least attempt something towards gravitas on-screen. This reminds me of another point. I'm not entirely sure why this has been made. As far as TV goes this is a kind of stylised sub-'Rome' and as far as the Spartacus story goes, we already have a perfectly serviceable film. The script is ludicrous with more "cunts" than a German football league (by which I mean 'Kuntz' is a not uncommon surname, rather than any kind of personal attack) and it veers wildly from attempts at 'period' dialogue to what you'd hear from a youth in an underpass if you told him that he looked ridiculous with his trousers around his knees and he should bloody well put his hat on the right way, shouldn't he...

I digress, from what I can tell almost everyone in the Roman Republic spoke with slight Antipodean accents (this is never explained), foreplay was effectively sorted out by servants (particularly if it involves Xena: Warrior Princess) and don't get me started on the Legionnaires wearing Lorica segmentata in that period... (I know, I've turned into my Dad. What of it?) It's also worth noting that Spartacus: Etc. subscribes to the 'the bigger your six-pack, the more you're compensating for your acting ability' school of performance. (Also see: 300)

The story is spread criminally thinly, the performances (with the exception of John Hannah) could keep a carpenters stocked for years, the script is frankly ludicrous and the gratuitous sex and violence are... well... gratuitous and yet it is actually quite entertaining. If only for sitting and tutting at it (some of the dialogue is laughable... we're talking Twiglet ((the first one, not New Moon)) laughable here). I'm reliably informed by people far wiser than me (Charlie Brooker) that it gets better towards the end, though I imagine much of the charm will be lost if it even approached competence.

It's worth a look though, particularly if you're a teenage boy who doesn't understand the phrase 'homoerotic subtext'.

A Quick One, While I'm Away...

Ok, so I have lots of points to make and not really all that much time to make it in. That said, any kind of pseudo-cultural, cynical blog seems a bit trite and insignificant after yesterday's tragedy in Cumbria. For what they're worth, Or So I Thought...'s condolences are offered to all affected. Terrible loss of life and only 3 weeks or so into the rule of the Coalition. Now, I'm not saying that this is Cameron's fault, but in many ways, this is Cameron's fault...

Anyway, that's enough walking the razor's edge of taste for one blog. Moving swiftly on, Junior Apprentice continued its crash course through the corridors of busines, this time stopping at art dealing. Again, I find the best way to watch this (as with Eurovision) is with friends... alright, not real, actual, fleshy people who are in the room, but witty E-people delivering 140 character character assassinations (I'm not sure if that was actually quite clever or just clumsy syntax). Well, things opened with the usual hive of Tim 'I'm secretly 31, but shh, don't tell anyone' Ankers theories and we all agreed that he was in no way a 17 year old. Arjun was wearing a suit several sizes too big for him (one of Tim's? As several theorised...), whether he was staring in the Bollywood remake of Bugsy Malone, we'll never know (though I suspect the application will be in the post should he be fired at some point). Most of the attention was suitably garnered by mega-cow Zoe who decided that she was Charles Saatchi all of a sudden. What was it her parents did again? Oh, that's right, they're artists, aren't they. As she reminded us every five fucking minutes. That said, it was very difficult to distinguish between her obvious bullshitting and, say, Tim's. There were just as many. 'Ooh, nice use of space' and 'you're taking me on a journey's.

Tim had been operating with the other blonde one as his secretary (hopefully avoiding the usual trappings of the boss/secretary relationship as he would no doubt end up on a register...) and was looking particularly louche in the back of the mini cab. Zoe had once again been sucking off Clifford the Big Red Dog/Po/Iron Man (delete as appropriate) as her mouth was a lurid red, like some bollocks-spouting life ring. It seemed to work for her as she got the pick of the artists. Kirsty's infallible Scottish charm clearly not triumphing this time... ahem...

In the sale room, Zoe decided to steal everyone's customers and tell them about how she knew so much about art. Clearly one of those people who goes on a reality show so that they can end up presenting a feature about home decor on This Morning. Arjun, the sly dog, had picked up a few ladies on the quiet and had promptly sold them in excess of £2,500 worth of modern tat... sorry modern art, don't know what happened to my keyboard there... Tim decided to push people, who weren't having any of it, until a restaurant owner managed to flog him £1000 worth of photographs (no qualms there, that's pretty much art).

So what did everyone think come the end of the task? Well Zoe said that she had 'no idea how the others would turn on her' as she was 'very strong in that task'. No idea? Hahahaha. As the legendary Bernard Black (on whom I appear to have based most of my life) don't make me get sick into my own scorn. Have you never met you, Zoe? You're a teensy bit bitchy, of course they're going to turn on you. 'Delusional as well as self-obsessed and dressed like someone Arjun is about to pimp to Tim' was Simon Best's (friend of this blog) verdict on Zoe and I couldn't put it better myself.

As it happened, it was Tim's team left to face the music. "Tim, is it going to be Ankers away?" said Lord Sugar, who'd clearly been hoping that Tim lost so he could make that excellent pun. Nope, it was going to be Hannah away, because she was the most qualified. Remember Hibah? No? Well, she was fired for the same thing. That's how it works.

Finally, nemesis update. The best way I can think to frame this is that he's one of those guys that people seem to like and you appear to be the only one who can see that he's the king of all cunts. I have a lot of sympathy for Frank Grimes in The Simpsons, because, from a purely objective point of view, Homer is a bit of a bumbling, offensive loon and it's only natural that Grimes would question how he seemed to be so popular and why no-one could see his obvious flaws. I suppose, like all the things, the principle of nemeses is purely subjective... expect for this nemesis is actually a complete, mind-bogglingly punchable, marauding fucknut. Fact. That is all.

Ashes to Ashes, Eighties to Eighties...

Feeling a bit nostalgic? The beeb certainly is and their 80s Season is in full swing (it's like they knew the Tories were going to be in power...) which means adaptations of classic 80s literature such as Martin Amis' 'Money' starring the terrific Nick Frost, 80s films like Terry Gilliam's masterpiece 'Brazil' and the finale of Ashes to Ashes. George Osborne's doing his bit too by trying to get the levels of unemployment back up to their 1983 levels in celebration (satire *pumps fist*)...

Anyway, Friday saw 'the end of an era'. A complex, mythos shattering goodbye to Gene Hunt et al. So what did we all make of it? (This is a genuine question - I know a fair few of you followers did watch it, so leave some comments and we can brainstorm everything). Also, if you haven't seen it and intend to do so, this will ruin everything for you, so, you know, SPOILERS and all that.

Ever since the arrival of the wonderfully original 'Life on Mars', fans have agonised over the truth. Mixing nostalgia, surrealism, humour and action, Life on Mars went on to achieve both critical acclaim and enormous popularity (in no small part down to Phillip Glenister's marvellously un-PC DCI Gene Hunt), but despite all this it left the fans mulling over exactly what was happening. Both Life on Mars' Sam Tyler and Ashes to Ashes' Alex Drake wondered after their separate accidents if they were "mad, in a coma or back in time" and as it would happens they weren't really any of these things. In the finale of Life on Mars, Tyler found his way back to the 'real world' only to find that the bureaucracy and boredom of modern life made him hunger for his new (or rather really old) friends and colleagues, leading him to leap from the roof of the police headquarters and arrive back in 1973 in time to save the day. A hugely satisfying ending, but not one that cracked the secrets of the show's lore.

In Ashes to Ashes we followed Alex Drake frantically search for a way back to her daughter Molly, all the while creating preposterous sexual chemistry and tension with Hunt and scoffing at his uncouthness and approach to policing. The end of the second series saw her inadvertently shot by Hunt during an operation and at the beginning of the third she finds herself in a hospital bed still very much in the 80s and now haunted by a mysterious young police officer with half a face. Series 3 also saw the arrival of Jim Keats from Discipline and Complaints (well it was bound to happen to Hunt at some point). From the moment of his arrival a wee voice in my head piped up "there's a wrong'un, if ever I saw one" and, as it would happen I would be vindicated in my assertion.

There were a number of elements over which us fans had been attemption to fathom the significance of. The number 6620 was revealed to be the number on the epaulets of the copper with half a face, but what was the strange house about? Why were Chris, Ray and Shaz seeing stars? What's the significance of the time 9.06? Did Gene kill Sam Tyler? Hunt maintained that his last words to Tyler involved taking him to the pub. Drake decided that she would have to go to the spooky house in Lancashire and approached the scarecrow on the hill which happened to be wearing a jacket with the number 6620 on the shoulder. She began to dig under the scarecrow and Hunt begged her not to. She found the shallow grave of the copper with half a face and reached into the journal buried with him. Opening it she was greeted with "6620, Gene Hunt".

Cue an excellent, excellent revelation that changed the face of all 5 series. Gene Hunt had had half of his face blown off by a shotgun toting farmer on Coronation Day, his first day on the beat. Keats emerged from the shadows of the house and began taunting him. Not only was Hunt dead, but so were Chris, Ray and Shaz. Chris, a uniform copper, gunned down; Ray, distraught at his father's disproval and failure in the Army (referenced earlier in the series) hanged himself and Shaz was stabbed by a would-be car thief. It was all beginning to come together. Keats returned to Fenchurch East with a dejected Hunt and Drake in tow and proceeded to smash up the office, revealing that the entire world is a lie, effectively breaking apart Hunt's universe.

Keats, in full Satan mode (the only bit that I actually worked out before the final episode) proceeds to take Chris, Ray and Shaz to his hedonistice, oh so tempting division of CID and, in a brilliant twist on the usual image of Hell, asks them to take the lift down. Meanwhile, Alex convinces Hunt to get his act together and stop the Dutch gang that they had been attempting to foil before the revelations started coming thick and fast. Hunt dragged Shaz from the jaws of Hell with the aid of a walkie talkie but Chris and Ray were apparently left to their doom. At the raid, things went a bit awry. An undercover Shaz was found out and Hunt and Alex were left pinned down behind a decidely sorry-looking, bullet-ridden Quattro. As the 'Hollandaise' (as Chris called them earlier, before being corrected) gang made their escape, their car was t-boned by Ray's and Skelton and Carling gunned down the criminals as Vangelis' triumphant Chariots of Fire theme played. It was a beautiful moment. I was practically welling up by now. "He's killed the Quattro." Gene lamented. "He's killed my car!"

Lovely. Where to go from there then, well, as referenced earlier, the only place to go after a successful operation is 'the pub'. But this wasn't any pub, this was The Railway Arms from Life on Mars, complete with Nelson the barman. As Tyler had done it would seem that 'going to the pub' was a way of passing on from this 'Policeman's Purgatory'. Ray, Chris and Shaz walked in but Alex stopped, making a horrible realisation. That she couldn't go back to the real world, she couldn't see her Molly again. Hunt comforted her as a serpentine Keats, who had been lurking behind the pair, chose his moment to strike. Drake asked him the time, but he was reluctant to show her his watch. As it happened the time was, yep, you guessed it, 9.06, the time when Alex Drake died in her hospital bed, with her daughter at her side. Hunt punched out Keats and left Drake to enter the pub after an embrace and a kiss. But Keats wasn't done yet, he launched a maniacal tirade at a lonesome Hunt, who ignored him as he slithered away.

Back in Fenchurch, Hunt poured himself a well-earned glass of Scotch and leafed through a Mercedes 190D catalogue, when a man burst through the office doors yelling about iPhones and demanding to know what had happened to his office. A wry smile crept onto Hunt's face as he rose from his chair to the door and addressed him in the manner that we have all come to love and will no doubt miss greatly. "A word in you shell-like, pal?"

And there we have it. Enought revelations to wrap up the plot with enough left open for the fans to discuss. For the creators of the show this is the culmination of a work started in 1998 and an ending kept underwraps since the writing of Life on Mars. Just terrific. We learnt that Hunt had been a skinny, young rookie "head swimming with machismo", bursting into the farmhouse like John Wayne only to have his life cruelly snatched from him and had in purgatory been able to become everything he had wanted to be. He was John Wayne, he was Gary Cooper, he was Gene Hunt and he was a hero, herding the lost souls of troubled policemen to a better place. It was Paradise Lost with New Romantics, 'Paradise Lost in the Eighties', perhaps. Hunt wasn't so much a God as a man making up for lost potential and battling the demonic Keats.

Of course, we don't know everything. There are still a few boxes left unchecked. What about the other coppers? Viv and the rest, are they all dead too? Was Annie dead in Life on Mars? Gene maintained that he had forgotten what the truth of the world was exactly, so he knew at some point? Did Chris, Ray and Shaz have the Sam/Alex experience? Did Sam Tyler forget the 'real world' before he went to 'the pub'? Was DCI Lytton dead or a figure from Hunt's mind - the Jack Palance to his Alan Ladd? We may never know for sure, but what we do know, is that Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes' place in the pantheon of great drama is now assured.


Things that also ended this week...

Lost - From what I can tell, the ending was basically the same as Ashes to Ashes, except that Ashes to Ashes didn't fuck around with Polar Bears (Noah's Island rip-off much?) and ridiculous Black Smoke creatures. Yeah, I gave up when the Polar Bear turned up in the first series, didn't really get Lost... just a quick vent there...

You're All Fired, You Tiny Freaks...

It surely cannot have escaped your notice that last night saw the second episode of Junior Apprentice, in which Lord Sugar (worst paedophile nickname ever) tasks a group of under 18s (and one 27 year old) with various 'business' exercises. Last week's involved the wholesale flogging of a cooler full of cheese and saw miniature Michael Gove impersonator Jordan de Courcy fired the hell out of.

Ok, pressing issues first, if that's what Tim thinks 17 year olds look like, he is way off the mark. Right, now that's out of the way, let's get down to business. There were some more clips of the contestants saying "I'm a tosser, I'm a tosser, I'm a tosser/I'm a bitch, I'm a bitch, I'm a bitch" (delete as applicable) repeatedly to a camera with a trendy London backdrop. Here's a funny thing - Rhys, Arjun and Tim are all the same age... and Tim opens the envelope and it's 'BLUFF' written in big letters. It's the television business-based reality show equivalent of an odd one out round. I can only hope that Tim is secretly an undercover journalist.

This week's task - design a piece of camping equipment. Easy, right? Right. So why the fuck did Adam think it would be a good idea to create the FlexnSave? As Zoe pointed out, this product sells itself, which is great... apart from the simple fact that it doesn't. It's a cardboard box with some flimsy chessboards on top of it. Even a tramp who was contemplating as using it for accomodation let alone storage would give it a kick and say "I'm not impressed by the structural integrity of this." Adam meanwhile was obsessed with shoes and shoe storage, like a really boring business episode of Sex and the City (probably, I don't really know what happens in that show, other than stereotyping...).

In the other camp, Tim, doing his best impression of a teacher charged with supervising the contestants, brainstormed some ideas and came up with a sledge. Yeah, not great, but then infinitely less shit than a cardboard box with 'shoe-storage space'. Arjun blagged his way through the pitch and somehow convinced Argos to purchase several thousand units. As a reward they were given a fireworks display, laid on for them especially (yeah, just think about that sentence and work out why fireworks are never ideal as a personal present when you let them off in the middle of fucking Kew Gardens).

The cardboard team were relegated to the greasy spoon where they played backgammon on the FlexnSave and the loser, Adam, was forced to eat the product and his own bodyweight in shoes (this is a lie). Adam inexplicably brought Zoe back into the boardroom (the equivalent of smearing yourself in stolen honey and locking yourself in a room with a swarm of killer bees) along with Hibah and the bitching and backstabbing began. For reasons which I don't fully understand, Hibah ended up 'fired'. Zoe later pointed out that Lord Sugar 'sees himself in' Adam. Let's not dwell on that...