Monthly Archives: April 2006

A relieved cheer went up over the Quinn household last night as Syed was finally fired from The Apprentice. A few weeks ago I said I expected Sharon and Tuan to be the next ones to be sacked and expressed the concern that Syed would win the thing; in the event I was spot on about the first two but by last week I had changed my mind about Syed. We never saw his redemption as predicted by Heat magazine’s Mark Frith, but up against Ruth and Tuan in last week’s boardroom I thought I could see the writing on the wall. Syed could survive against a nonentity like Taun, but head to head against someone of Ruth’s calibre and I couldn’t see him staying, and that is how events turned out.

Week by week Syed revealed himself to be an empty vessel. His main talent, as far as I could discern, was an incompetence verging on the illegal; by not collecting the right keys when letting a flat, to claiming a car would increase in value when selling to a customer, to forgetting to write the contestant’s names on the backs of raffle tickets he had sold and then considering not entering those tickets into the draw when he realised his mistake (or rather when Ruth pointed it out to him). The only thing that Syed could say in his favour was that he was a good salesman, but even there I found him unconvincing and amateurish; only his ludicrous self-confidence helped him out, forcing him to keep going well past the point where I would have thrown in the towel, and so enabling him to get sales more by persistence and the law of averages than by genuine ability. Such perseverance is valuable, but I think it can only get you so far.

But enough about Syed; I imagine that, beyond a brief stint on the Z-list celebrity circuit we have seen the last of him and we can allow him to get down to honing his “genius”, as he intoned straight faced on last nights “The Apprentice: You’re Fired”. Two weeks left to go on The Apprentice then, and if there is any justice it will be Paul and Ruth in the final. Michelle seems like a little girl, out of her depth and lucky to be there largely by dint of having ended up on the winning side a good few times. Ansell is a bit of a wild card; he quietly gets on with things and doesn’t do much wrong so it depends upon how he does in his interview, but for me the Tulip and the Badger are the standout candidates.

When I first wrote about The Apprentice I was pretty scathing about the lot of them, damning them all and tarring each contestant with the same “business idiot” brush. Now, however, I have a lot more time and respect for Ansell, Ruth and Paul and I would be happy if any of them won, although by rights I think it should be Ruth. So The Apprentice has also been a valuable lesson for me in looking beneath the obvious, beyond my own prejudices and in judging each person as an individual. It has also boosted my readership considerably (although I doubt it will last), thanks to this link and to the numerous people searching Google for “syed apprentice” who have come this way. This post should keep that hit counter ticking along nicely thank you very much; sorry to anyone who feels I have wasted their time.

I don’t, if I’m being honest, usually if ever watch BBC1′s offering New Tricks of a Monday night, but readjusting to British Summer Time following a weekend away in New York it was the perfect brainless nonsense to ignore while I tried to work out what time it was in the Big Apple and therefore if I was justified in feeling as tired as I did.

It wasn’t great, but it was at least an improvement on what I’d seen of American telly (24 hour news whingeing about gas prices for 24 hours) and the unwatchable BBC America (can you believe four hours of back to back Cash In The Attic interspersed with adverts for Footballers Wive$ on Saturday evening as we were getting ready to go out?).

Yes, New Tricks seemed the perfect sort of rubbish to switch your brain off to, only I couldn’t relax because I was transfixed by Dennis Waterman’s lower face. Even when he wasn’t on screen all I could think of was the way he seemed to be struggling around his mouth furniture, as he had apparently transmogrified in front of my eyes into the vicar from Dick Emery.

In fact, with this in mind, perhaps New Teeth would be a more apt title for this series?

PostScript: You will be as disappointed as me to learn that, according to the New Tricks website

The theme tune, sung by Dennis Waterman, is not commercially available, and there are no plans for it to be released.

This is upsetting. If Dennis Waterman is still so deluded, post Little Britain, that he has talents as a singer, then the least he can do is to release the song as a single and test himself in the marketplace. Perhaps he fears the customer is a little more discerning in 2006 compared with his glory days of the ‘Eighties.

PostPostScript: My foreign jaunt explains in part my failure to cover the continuing tale of Charles Clarke, but only so far, as there seems little point in me engaging in a bit of belated “me too” blogging when I have nothing to add except the obvious and many others have said all that needs to be said on the matter(s). No, this is the place for irrelevant twaddle about actors’ false teeth. Next week, when Tony Blair is arrested for a public order offence and put on an ASBO I will probably be talking about Jonathan Ross’s haircut. Stay tuned.

Jimmy McGovern was interviewed in last weekend’s Knowledge section of The Times, where he discussed his forthcoming drama series The Street which starts this Thursday.

The idea for The Street has been percolating inside McGovern’s head for years, loosely based on the street where he grew up in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the fifth of nine children of a betting shop manager and did not speak properly until he was 8, and then with a stutter.

All the writers are Scousers but McGovern did not want the dramas to be filmed in Liverpool, so tired is he of Liverpudlians complaining that they are portrayed in a bad light, so it was made in Manchester. McGovern believes it’s a “f***ing shame” that people here are so sensitive. “I’m sick of it. Every Cracker I’ve done has been based in Manchester. I’ve filled Manchester full of psychopaths, but no one there complains.”

Which I suppose could suggest a couple of things. Perhaps it is evidence that there is something in the claim that many Liverpudlians exhibit a chippy siege mentality, a persecution complex of the sort that Boris Johnson (or was it Simon Heffer?) was referring to in that infamous Spectator editorial that followed Ken Bigley’s murder.

Alternatively, it could show that Mancunians are a more dour and depressive lot, that they are just more grimly accepting of the fact that theirs is a city riddled with sickos and psychos and that they simply get on with it.

Or it could illustrate a combinations of both of these points, or none of the above, or something else entirely. I dunno.

Just over halfway through now, and The Apprentice is proving to be compulsive viewing. In my previous post on the matter I felt sheepish about admitting to watching it, but I make no such apology now; it is the best thing on the box by a goodly way.

Alan Sugar has made a few strange decisions when firing people, but his broad thrust has been right; getting shot of the pointless planners and management consultants, the people who “give good flipchart” as Adrian Chiles says on “The Apprentice; You’re Fired”. It is encouraging that he can see through the business-speak bollocks of the likes of Mani, Alexa and Samuel, and I can see the door beckoning for Sharon and Tuan in the near future and for the same reason. They may be nice enough people, but they are basically rubbish.

Despite being (or perhaps because I was) a failed salesperson in a previous life I am gradually warming to and gaining a grudging respect for those candidates who ooze sales talent. Paul and Ruth in particular can seem arrogant at times, they can be too smug and too bolshy respectively, but both are charm personified and hugely impressive once they are wooing a customer. More importantly they both appear competent, an attribute most of the other candidates lack. How it will all pan out next week though when pitching to corporate clients will be interesting to see; acting like a second hand car salesman is great when you are, well, selling cars, but Paul’s cheesy and wince-inducing presentation to advertising execs a couple of weeks back doesn’t bode well.

My main concern, though, involves Syed. He continues to act the up-himself oaf, without any obvious qualities other than his own self-deluded self-belief. Tragically, Alan Sugar looks to have a blind spot where Syed is concerned, as he did with Jo; last Friday on Jonathan Ross he was full of praise for the lad. Then yesterday on “…You’re Fired” Mark Frith went on about how the next few weeks would show us the redemption of Syed, and that the public would swing round behind him. Short of Syed receiving a personality transplant I can’t see me backing him, but my real worry is that Mark Frith has inside knowledge, and that his prescience is actually down to having viewed the preview tapes and knowing the outcome. The Wikipedia entry for The Apprentice shows Syed to be one of the few candidates who doesn’t have their own website listed; is that because he doesn’t need one, having won the job of being the apprentice months ago?

I await with breath bated and fingers crossed.

Update 10/4/06: Syed does have a website, here! Yay! Not much going on there (you can take that to be about Syed or his website) but hope springs eternal. Thanks to this comment on this post at Blogjam for the information; Blogjam is a new blog to me, but the post on The Apprentice is fantastic, essential reading if you want to know who really should win the contest. The answer may surprise you.