Thursday 16 November 2017

Elizabeth Arrghh!

Well, she survived another week and, as predicted, Elizabeth gets closer and closer to the ‘final 5’ who endure the interview from hell in the penultimate episode. She will, of course, breeze through this in the same manner that she has passed every other task, getting it mostly wrong when the camera is pointing at her, but executing Nobel prize-winning business skills at all other times. This we know because how else would she have ever passed the audition, let alone survived until week eight.
Ever since week two, when she was charged with the task of measuring the wall of a hotel room and confidently declared it to be 3 centimetres high, she has blundered her way through each task in the manner of Tommy Cooper sawing a woman in half, somehow getting to the end of the performance with hardly a drop of blood spilt and reputation and integrity just about intact.
In Wednesday’s episode, Elizabeth hi-jacked the task completely, casting herself in the role of comic-lead in a motor car advert completely dreamed up by herself. It’s hard to tell if her colleagues are now completely spellbound by her or if they are simply standing back in the sure and certain hope that she will self-destruct before them. I’m sure that, if she does, it will be on Claude Littner’s watch and will culminate in a hostage situation with Elizabeth holed-up in the board room, gun at Claude’s temple and demanding a helicopter.
Either way, James, this week’s losing project manager, stood blinking up at her and nodding in agreement as she outlined her plot for the ad.
“I’m a stressed-out mother trying to get my kids to school, I leave my handbag on top of the car and when I drive off it falls into the road.”
“It’s funny’” she added, reassuringly.
 James tried to speak, but no words came out.
Needless to say, the rest of the programme simply followed the team’s implosion. Their opposition may as well have just produced a campaign that involved them standing around pointing at their allocated vehicle and shouting ‘Car, Car, Car, Car’ for two minutes, they’d have still won. They tried their best to even it up by responding in the affirmative to criticism levelled at them by the industry experts to whom they were pitching.
“You’re right,,” said Creative Director, Anisa, “some of the feedback said they thought we were selling a bicycle.”
This is a mixed message of some extreme magnitude when you are trying to convey the benefits of a new car. Charles would never have stood for it, “We intentionally portrayed the car as a bike in order to give the customer and enhanced experience when they took it for a test drive.’ He would have said.
It didn’t matter, they may as well have advertised blancmange, the judges would have still preferred their output over Elizabeth’s clowning effort. Which, actually, may have worked had the car been named a ‘Pillock’ and backed by a digital campaign that offered something like, “The car for the big lumbering sod in your life.” But no, they billed it as the ideal ‘family car’ and called it an Xpando, with the accent on the ‘X’.    
Back in the boardroom, Lord Sugar started to make up his own rules. James, still confused twixt arse and elbow, decided that Sarjan and Joanna were the two candidates who deserved a further grilling by His Lordship.
“What about her?” said the Lord, pointing furiously at Elizabeth who was putting her hat and coat on and trying to exit the boardroom via the broom cupboard. With an air of ‘it’s my ball and we’ll put the goal posts wherever I say’, Elizabeth was told to wait outside with the others while Sugar was hosed down with cold water and had his dials re-set from ‘apoplectic’ to ‘mildly irritated’.
Having taken it upon himself to drag Elizabeth back in, he then proceeded to sack the only member of the team who’d simply stuck to his task and tried to apply a reasonable amount of polish to the Elizabeth-sized turd that had been presented to him. Sarjan left amid some confusion and one could only assume that, if he was gone, all four were going to be boarding a taxi for home. But dear Lizzie had weaved her magic spell again and Lord Sug relented. He must have looked at her baleful expression and realised that even he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of her. She’s priceless, and unless she kills herself clattering down the stairs one morning to answer the phone, he’s going to have to work with her. If she doesn’t win this series, she’ll probably just keep turning up uninvited next year until he gives her 250 grand.
Back at the house, as the ground beneath them started to shake, carefree expressions turned to grim resignation as the remaining candidates realised, long before she appeared at the door, that Elizabeth had been reprieved.

             

Why is Lord Sugar so bitter?

Lord’s, it turns out, are not the eccentric, aloof and aristocratic breed that they used to be. Privileged, maybe. Wealthy, yes. But disconnected from reality? No. Certainly not the one’s featured last week on Meet the Lords, BBC 7pm. It turns out that around a third of the Lords are, in fact, Ladies and that, far from being born into the role because one of their ancestors stormed some castle in Northumberland, most of them have reached the position through some level of merit. Indeed, the 92 hereditary peers in the ‘Unelected Second House’ must actually now be elected and can only put themselves forward when one of their predecessors dies (which is rare) or retires, which is even rarer.
The House of Lords, however, is starting to burst at the seams as those who have attained a life peerage ‘on merit’, which can mean many things, from performing important work on behalf of the community, to donating a vast sum of money to a Prime Ministerial cause at just the right moment, grow ever in number. Fortunately, one of the few times when nearly all the ermine-clad luminaries show up on the same day is when her Maj. The Q comes down for the day and delivers a speech about austerity whilst wearing a hat made of priceless jewels. Among the audience on this day was, of course, TV’s favourite Lords, Alan, The Lord of Sugar and Karen, Baroness Brady of Edmonton. You can only surmise that the reason Claude Littner has not yet been granted a peerage is because Lord Claude of The Apprentice Board would just be too obvious.
It would have been nice to see Prince Philip point at them and ask them what the bleedin’ ‘ell they had contributed to the smooth running of the country over the last 12 months, but he just sat there wondering who had won the 2.30 at Sandown and said very little.
After the ceremony, Lord S and Baroness B quickly threw off their robes and hurtled across London to the Apprentice board room where a dozen young business people sat waiting to be grilled on their part in the latest fiasco that passes as a basis for a job interview. This week’s task was all about picking the pockets of unsuspecting tourists while several of your accomplices distracted them. This was no easy task, given that there was a camera crew following their every move and part of the game was that their victims could ask for their money back afterwards. However, the teams set about their mission with all the enthusiasm of a Dalmatian chasing a stick.
You can generally tell who’s going to be kicked out at the end of the show by the way the edit focuses on one or two central characters early in the show. This week, Sarah Jayne stepped forward to take on the Project Manager’s role declaring that she “needed to prove herself”. Several colleagues stepped gratefully aside and began construct a makeshift gallows. Charles was assigned the job of preparing her for execution and dutifully obliged. Charged with escorting a party of tourists around the sights of Bruges, the team proceeded to march them in a vast circle around the canal looking for a 12th century hospital that may or may not have existed. When they returned to the very spot at which they had commenced, Charles announced that this was exactly what he had intended to do. Charles is a management consultant and so this course of action made perfect sense to him. Take the client on a journey that leads nowhere and then assure them that they had been in the right place all the time. That’ll be 300 quid and hour, thanks. Sarah Jayne gingerly felt her neck, from which she knew she would soon be suspended.
The other group were making great strides. By which I mean that Elizabeth was marching them apace toward a chocolate shop. Her frustration was that the tour could not proceed more quickly and, in the absence of a Saturn 5 rocket or the large hadron collider to propel them around the city, she put them all on Segway’s and urged them forward.
Elizabeth will win this. She may have all the sexual allure of Olive from On the Buses but she gets things done and getting things done is exactly what Lord Sugar needs. Anybody working for a partnership of Lord S and Elizabeth will be left in no doubt as to their role in the business and that role will be to listen, absorb and act upon the information they are given. She has been portrayed as the fool from episode one, as the Bessie Bunter in a Barbie-doll parade, but she will make it to the finish line and stand there going ‘Gosh! How wonderfully unexpected’ and win our hearts.
It was left to Lord Sugar to carry out the final coup de grace. Emerging into the board room from behind that opaque door, looking for all the world like he’s just endured a particularly difficult bowel evacuation, he listens wearily to the unfolding tales of woe from the previous couple of days. Karen and Claude sit either side of him and recount the misery of having to shadow these bozo’s over the last 48 hours and the trio allow themselves only a brief smile when his Lordship utters his obligatory put-down at the expense of one of the candidates along the lines of ‘Belgium? More like bell end if you ask me.’ Remarkably, Charles survives the board room, he sits looking like the first attempt at Thomas The Tank Engine’s CGI and promises to do better next time. Sarah Jayne leaves and we hear a single pistol shot.

The moral of the story is that Lords are superior people who hardly ever make mistakes and all you can do is sit there and await their verdict upon you. Next week is all about ‘negotiation’ and the apprentices try to negotiate a revolving door.       

Monday 13 November 2017

Trust Me – It Couldn’t Happen

Well, that was fun wasn’t it?
In the end Cath decided that, whilst being a Doctor was far harder than she imagined, it paid the bills and enabled her to live in one of those homes that, in the 60’s, used to house about 17 different families but are now occupied by the kind of yoga practising couple who drink coffee by the thimble-full and make their own pasta.
It had a few other drawbacks too, like having to change your identity from a disgraced Nurse Hardacre into a rather revered Doctor Sutton, but that’s not a problem these days. It used to be far harder before the internet of course. In those days, in order to prove your qualifications, you used to have to go all the trouble of pointing to a framed diploma on the wall of your surgery, these days you simply replace every online image of the person you are pretending to be with a picture of yourself.
Just a few years ago, for example, I played left back for a Scottish first division football team by convincing the players and management that I was Nigel Winterburn, the ex-Arsenal and England defender turned part-time TV pundit. “Seems to check out ok” said the physio as I passed my medical and handing me back my expertly forged Nectar card. I drew a reasonable weekly wage – not Premiership money, obvs – until I ruptured my spleen taking a throw on, at which point I withdrew from football altogether, carefully remembering to restore Google back to where it was before I started.
 Cath often reflected upon the predicament that got her into the pickle in which she now found herself as she stared into the gaping wound of another trauma victim that had been presented to her by the expectant ambulance crew. Had she not bemoaned the falling standards of NHS doctors who, she felt, cared less about patients welfare and more about the model of Nespresso machine that they were now able to afford, she would still be nursing away in Sheffield with the sort of bossy-boots attitude for which those nurses who wear the darker blue uniform are rightly known. She had been good at the “Hattie Jacques” frown and could change a dressing with her left hand whilst inserting a particularly stubborn catheter with the right. Unfortunately, she had been abrupt with the wrong junior Doctor and had been made to hand in her badge and gun by a senior administrator who looked as if she was trying to swallow a wasp-infested lemon.
It took circumstances and a fair degree of ‘bottle’ to place herself in Edinburgh with a stolen CV, a forged passport and an application for the vacant Doctor’s post in the busy A & E department of the West Lothian Trust. In the overworked Dr Brigitte Raynes (Sharon Small) she had found a willing employer who was so impressed with her CV that she completely forgot to check out her LinkedIn profile. “You’re too good for us” she stated, handing her a contract and wheeling in a casualty, “when was the last time you replaced a kidney?”
So Cath, now Ali, bumbled through the first three episodes, applying bandages, re-starting hearts and amputating the odd limb, while her colleagues, apart from raising the occasional eyebrow when they caught her referring to ‘Resuscitation For Dummies’, complemented her on her skill, bedside manner and willingness to empty bedpans. Not one, however, asked to connect with her on Facebook.
The tangled web of deception was bound to unravel. When estranged father of her daughter, Karl (Blake Harrison, sounding nothing like Neil from the Inbetweeners), turned up unexpectedly there was the distinct sound of a bag being vacated by a cat. Of all the missed opportunities in the world, the one that I find the most frustrating is why, when Karl realised that Cath (Jodie Whittaker) was masquerading under a false identity, did they not give him the line “Doctor WHO?”
Perhaps the writers felt that this would take a little of the realism away from the piece. Too late I’m afraid, for, while Trust Me made for a fine, edge of the seat drama, filled as it was with plenty of moral dilemmas and moments of genuine tension, it did not pay much heed to realism. After Karl is struck down by a car following a fist fight with her new boyfriend, he is briefly left alone and comatose with the very Doctor that his ex-missus was now shacked up with. Whilst everyone was looking the other way, poor old Karl croaked. “I don’t know what happened” says Dr Brenner, still standing on the oxygen line, ‘he’s just gone all blue and dead’.
‘Oh, well,’ says Cath, ‘much as I’ll never trust you again, I’ll change my name back to Doctor Sutton and carry on working here. Put him in the incinerator for me would you?’

Promotional interviews and general ‘blurb’ before the start of this series suggested that this sort of thing goes on more than we would like to imagine and I don’t doubt that some dodgy diplomas and suspicious certificates have enabled some unscrupulous gits to practice medicine when they shouldn’t even be allowed near Elastoplast but, come on. It’s hard enough to get paid by the NHS for supplying something they actually asked for, let alone carving out a career as a medic in A & E on production of someone else’s CV and a stethoscope.