OK, by now you should all know exactly what “The Apprentice” TV show is all about. It is the TV equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion or a lioness bringing down a sickly wildebeeste on the plains of the Serengeti. And so we watch a group of hapless, boasting cocks and cockettes parade around in front of us trying to win the approval of the UK’s leading Nookie Bear impressionist (that will get us a few hundred hits from Google – and this time around I seriously believe Surallen has had cosmetic surgery in order to enhance his overall Nookieness. His hair now looks as if it is the cross between the type of fluff you find on the top of the head of an Action Man and the short and curlies located on your scrotum. Mind you, his face does look like a talking ballbag too – but that takes me back to my old illustration for this show where I superimposed a ballbag on the head of the great man. Ho ho – ain’t I a wit?)
Anyway, the producers got their special selection filter out working again. Got the mouthy asian bird – check. The ugly ginger bird – check. The pushy baby faced bloke – check. But this time around there are a few new stereotypes to include, like the Islamic fundamentalist bloke who’ll have everyone running in the opposite direction when they do the task that involves hijacking a plane (I made that up in bad taste, you know) and the whiny American bird who is obviously going to come a cropper during the mid-phase of the show during a big showdown.
The first task involved them cleaning and they chose to clean cars. Of course, you can approach cleaning in two ways: as volume sales or in terms of securing a large contract. With volume sales, it is head down bang, bang, bang – knock it out kind of stuff. The guys did that with the shoeshine business, but also had a car cleaning contract to fulfill. Both the male and female team fell with the contract work because they weren’t consistent and couldn’t work at speed. It’s cleaning frigging cars, ferchristsake. So we all know that they are inept.
Anyway, I lost consciousness for a while and the boys lucked out and won due to the girls blowing too much cash on supplies. A schoolboy error and when it come down to the boardroom, the wrong person got dumped. Moaning Mona should have been given the bullet just for arguing with her potential employer. But Sugar blew it once again purely to keep her in for future entertaining confrontational appeal. Ho, ho.
So it is the same old stuff and there is a law of diminishing returns, but for the first time the UK series has overtaken the entertainment appeal of the US counterpart. For years, Donald Trump has literally trumped on Sugar with a superior programme, by putting on extravagent challenges, amazing rewards and acting like a big fucking millionaire, whereas Sugar always felt more like a desperate manager of Dixons than some Mr Big Know-It-All business bloke.
But this time around Trump is doing ANOTHER celebrity edition (Piers Morgan won last year’s series) and the celebrities are shit and Dennis Rodman dominates the proceedings by acting like an eight-foot baby who has run headfirst into a barbed-wire fence. The show has been limping along and there’s no real tension, no real action and no real excitement, all be it for Rodman getting drunk, disappearing and trying to beat up his team mates.
So at least Sugar is providing a pure “Apprentice” experience. But who is going to win? It’s too early to say. I’d like to see the little baby-faced bloke win – you know, the one who has the funny walk/run. It is a comedy walk that he’s nicked directly from Shane Ritchie from the recent “Minder” remake on Channel 5. Yeah, he’ll do – though it really is too early to tell. Might be the ginger bird? Who knows!
Category: Diary
This somehow seems to make sense:
You can now purchase a compilation CD of my various improvisations I’ve recorded for YouTube over the years. Presented in glorious stereo and remastered for the CD medium, the tracks have taken on a new life and represent the music that can be created in one go under the unfailing, critical eye of the red recording light.
It is a shame that old Fatboy Slim AKA Norman Quentin Cook has checked himself into rehab due to his fondness of the sauce, because his new album “We are going to need a bigger boat” released under his 21st pseudonym “The BPA” (Or Brighton Port Authority) is a pretty decent effort. This is my second favourite tune off the album after “Toe Jam”:
My latest waste of cash is a Godin Multiac nylon guitar I purchased for a good price on eBay. After being impressed with the XTsa guitar, I was eager to try another of their instruments and have always had an ear for nylon instruments, though cannot profess to have any proficiency on such an instrument in the classical context. For me, I play the Multiac the same way I play the electric, with a pick and as a lead instrument in the genre of “rock” or whatever they call it.
The guitar itself is a wonderful piece of craftmanship and feels solid and expensive. The electronics means I can connect it to all my GK-enabled Roland gear and get any sound from it. Its MIDI tracking is second-to-none and this is what turns me onto the Godin guitar range. If you want a guitar that can solidly track MIDI data, the RMC piezo pickups in Godin guitars are THE BEST. THE BEST. THE BEST. I said that so it goes in. Roland might have the market with the GK range of MIDI pickups, but the RMC piezos have the best all-round use.
Don’t think I’ve been lazy with the lack of music output on this site. The way things are at the moment, my studio isn’t exactly how it was and I’m doing little bits of recording as my bass is packed away. For your consideration is the next piece which is a demo track that I recorded a few weeks back. It showcases the Multiac and will form the basis of a “proper” song once I’ve thrown some bass and electric guitar at it. For now, you just have drums and acoustic guitar. It’s fairly loose and is more of a framework to hang other elements on. It’s how I record, from the bottom-up I think it is described in music circles. At the moment, I’ve got loads of little bits of music on the hard drive recorded like this. Fragments of songs to be, little riffs that have been committed to a stream of zeros and ones, bits that will one day be recombined to form something more solid. A digital musical pot noodle – just add water – or in this case magical musical glue.
Anyway, enough of the preamble: this is a demo track using the Multiac and I really like the tone it has.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Alan Moore wrote a graphic novel a long time ago. I thumbed through it and went “meh”. Now there’s a movie about said “unfilmable” novel, I’ll wait for it to come on Sky or Blu-ray and sit there for three hours and go “meh”.
But this is the Watchmen movie I want to see:
I’m not one for remixing and, in my humble and honest opinion, most remixes are superfluous to requirements, but a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, yours truly entered a remix competition. Actually it was late 2002, if my stress-addled memory holds up. Yes, I know it sounds preposterous that I should even dare to remix another’s music but I was swayed by the fact that when I downloaded the music files containing instrument samples etc., I noticed that the original version of the song completed omitted the vocals & lyrics that had been laid down by the singer. I thought that this could be the basis of my remix and I would restore the words, try and turn into a song proper and add a bit of Darren Lock guitar magic. 🙂
I couldn’t find a video of the original track on YouTube so you’ll have to do with this live performance, which captures the same song structure that appears on the album.