Chopping list for Sugar
IT was double sacking week on The Apprentice. Hurrah!
I’m not saying tree surgeon Tom was wooden, but when he finally got the chop it was a miracle no-one shouted: “Timber!”
If you cut him, he’d bleed sap. Tom made his live debut as a salesman on a TV shopping channel.
“Was any of it awkward?” he asked. Just all of it, mate.
“I feel like I put my personality into that,” he added, which was true coz every week Tom demonstrated he has the personality of tumbleweed.
Not that stroppy-chops Khadija was much better. “This is self-inflating,” she announced, trying to flog a blow-up plastic lounger. “It’s not self-inflating,” said Camilla in her ear.
“Okay, you do have to inflate yourself,” Khad corrected. D’oh!
It didn’t help that the lounger looked like an intimate female body part (and they’d already had one giant fanny this series – Frank Brooks).
Or that Khadija had, in Lord Sugar’s words, “all the charm of a debt collector.” She looked “like she was in pain”, observed Shugs, whereas Tom “looked like he’d just walked in off the street”.
When they went to his teeth-whitening item, Tom half-froze. “Hey, how’s it going?” he asked, hesitantly, looking flustered.
“We’re going to start at £49.99,” Camilla it Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday,
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EC3R 6EN told him. “This is starting at £56.99,” Tom said confidently. Awkward? It was a blinking disaster. In the boardroom, Sugar sacked him with no discussion.
Rival presenters Daniel and Sarah Ann had far more screen presence and won despite producing an unusable promo video.
This task didn’t quite scale the heights of cringe hit by Simon Ambrose years ago, when he demonstrated how to screw legs to a trampoline and ended up fiddling suggestively with a small pole over his groin...
But it did cost two candidates their places. Sugar, who is as cheerful as Mark Carney with piles these days, axed Trappy Jackie too.
No-one mentioned that live TV presentation involves a whole different skill-set from being an entrepreneur.
Or that this show has got more in common with the Generation Game than business ability.
The first three tasks this series were shopping abroad, making a kids’ comic and cooking dodgy doughnuts…Not exactly Dragons’ Den.
But who’s complaining? While X Factor wobbles, The Apprentice continues to deliver a fine line in utterly deluded dimwits.
DID you spot the options on the shopping channel’s production consoles? “STRAP ON” and “STING”...they could have made a completely different show.
SUGAR: “A self-inflating lounger? Sounds like Piers Morgan.”
VIC Reeves’ Big Night Out hit our screens in 1990 like an explosion of comic chaos.
Crackpot characters Judge Nutmeg, Graham Lister and The Man With A Stick could have come straight from a psychiatric ward.
You can still reduce a generation to hysterics just by shouting: “What’s on the end of your stick, Vic?”
It was zany, surreal, profoundly silly... And now it’s back, as Vic & Bob’s Big Night Out with Bob Mortimer rightly given equal prominence to Vic, AKA “Britain’s top light entertainer”.
It started with the daft duo singing insults at a couple eating dinner, and
throwing in groaners like: How do you prepare your turkey for Xmas? We just tell ’em straight, ‘You’re going to die.’
Highlights included Lister’s return to Novelty Island, slo-mo corned beef munching and Vic pulling open his face to reveal a chiming church bell like a Dali painting made flesh.
But 28 years and several stones on, the show doesn’t feel quite so invigoratingly zany.
I laughed at George Meatmarket’s yodelling backside, but I’d had a few by then.
Still if they bring back Judge Nutmeg next week all will be right in the world.
All together: “Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice...” FARANG: Dead Man Running, right... Fleur East...The Last Kingdom (Netflix)... Dynasties: Lion... Get Shorty – an overlooked gem. BEN and Katie, left, A Very British Country Home – pampered pinheads...Death & Nightingales – death might be quicker. BBC drama’s weird addiction to characters giving preachy speeches in the middle of action scenes (see Doctor Who, Sherlock etc). Talking heads talking tosh on BBC4’s Stevie Wonder doc – great clips though. Cringey Kristina on First Dates.
PEOPLE who would make better Question Time hosts than Fiona Bruce – Andrew Neil, Nick Ferrari, Camilla Cavendish, Chloe Westley, Agnes Brown ....
Still, could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Gemma Collins.