These identikit twits have the shelf life of a prawn sandwich, Sir Alan
An excess of truth is a dangerous thing in business. Jewellery boss Gerald Ratner all but wiped out his company in 1991 when he casually referred to his wares as ‘total crap’ and claimed a prawn sandwich would last longer than his trinkets.
Alan sugar had something of a Ratner moment on The Apprentice ( BBc1) when he struggled to describe his Amstrad products without using the word ‘terrible’.
Wandering off-topic during a boardroom dressing- down, the badtempered billionaire admitted: ‘Over the years, some of our engineers have churned out products, and we get it wrong sometimes. We won’t use the terminology “terrible product”...’
What could he have been thinking of? surely not the Amstrad e-m@iler telephone, the land-line device with a typewriter keyboard, like a microwave oven that sent telegrams.
And he can’t possibly have been thinking of the e3 videophone, a clunking great device with a miniature TV screen that looked like rubbish sixties sci-fi.
Alan loved that videophone, even when he had to halve the price in 2005, from £99 to £49, in a desperate attempt to flog it.
We shouldn’t call him Alan, though. It seems a tad disrespectful when everyone else, even Alan himself, refers to him so assiduously by his title. ‘Lord sugar here,’ he announced when he picked up the phone to his ‘industry experts’.
They parroted back: ‘Yes, Lord sugar,’ just as the apprentices do. Perhaps even his children are not allowed to call him Dad — it always has to be ‘Lord sugar’.
This was the second episode of The Apprentice in two days, to mark the series launch. To screen one a week i s subjecting BBc viewers to unwanted trash; to do it twice is the television equivalent of spam email.
It confirmed everything we knew from Wednesday’s opener. There’s no entertainment value in these moronic young acolytes — the lot of them are devoid of any originality or intelligence. Previous series have thrown up eccentrics, but none of these people will be remembered ten minutes after they have been fired.
There’s charlene, who runs a hair and beauty salon, but who wears a plaited bun on the side of her head that makes her look as if she has put on a Princess Leia wig askew.
And there’s Mergim, so thick and so vain that his idea for a cactus-oil shampoo ad was to film ‘a gentleman with a sexy haircut similar to mine’, while girls gathered round in slowmotion to stare and drool.
none of them could spell: they wrote ‘catus’ for cactus and ‘dessert’ for desert. One of them — heaven knows which, because all the men are identikit twits with their stubble and gelled hair — thought Manly Moist was a good brand name.
Alan’s new sidekick, claude Littner, doesn’t seem much smarter: he praised an ad campaign he said ‘resonates with ladies of a certain age’, which made him sound like a graduate of the same seventies business school as Reggie Perrin.
At least we can’t claim to be too disappointed. This series, the 11th, started with rock-bottom expectations and struggles to meet them.
Unforgotten (ITV) on the other hand was a big let-down. The first episode, though a whirl of divergent plots, was engrossing and full of promise. The second crashed with no pace and no progress.
If you didn’t catch the second part but still want to persevere with Unforgotten, you’ve missed nothing. neither story line nor characters were developed an inch. nicola Walker plays a copper with a heart, inspired to solve a 40-year-old murder because the dead man’s mother has been grieving for her son every day.
Walker was good, of course, but it hardly helped that on Tuesday night she was being utterly eyepoppingly brilliant as a very different policewoman in BBc1’s River.
Unforgotten retains its intriguing set-up, with Trevor eve as a bent business tsar, Gemma Jones a woman consumed by dementia, and Bernard Hill the priest with his hand in the collection plate.
But we knew all that, along with the identity of the victim, at the end of the first week.
This was slack drama, and with such a cast that’s a travesty.