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Sweet Like Chocolate?

I like chocolate. For the right price, I will buy chocolate. You could decorate the box with pictures of people vomiting slugs and I’d probably still buy it if there was nothing else on offer. The point is, it would take some spectacularly bad packaging to put me off. Congratulations then, to Camilla and Daniel, who successfully made a chocolate box that most people on first look would assume contained something else. I’m not sure what, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be suitable for discussion over Christmas dinner. Yes, this week saw the candidates designing new Christmas chocolates, from the confectionery itself to the box it came in, and while the design of Khadija’s team was admittedly uninspired, it looked like a box of chocolates you might find in a supermarket. The other team’s efforts… didn’t. Their bright red box, long, thin and bearing a picture of a highly sexualised elf, did not go down well, surprisingly enough. What’s more, their elf had green skin. That’s goblins or orks, green is a highly unusual skin colour for an elf. Anyway. It was misjudged. It was highly misjudged.

I’m struggling to find the right metaphor for how badly Camilla and Khadija did this week. I suppose the best is the simplest, they saw the edge of the cliff and just kept driving right at it, assuming that their car could fly. I don’t know how they thought ‘Santa’s Choco Seduction’ a good name for a box of chocolates. I mean, I would be okay if they cut off the last word and added ‘lates’. Santa’s Chocolates just sounds a lot less sleazy. They decided on a ‘naughty/nice list’ theme, but that swiftly descended to a ‘cheeky’ (You have no idea how much I hate that word, just writing it makes me want to vomit) theme focussing on the naughty side of the list. Finally, they made the final, and perhaps inevitable, plunge from attempting to sell their product with a nudge and a wink and an expressive eyebrow raise to trying to sell it with, what I believe is only rightly described as, ‘Phwoarr!’ power. They would thus successfully turn Christmas day into parents having hissed arguments in the kitchen about the suitability of an elf of the night for a family Christmas, and then having to gather their assorted spawn and have ‘the conversation’. Alternatively, they could just lie through their teeth about why Uncle Marvin wants to keep the box when they’re done. Wow, I got through an awful lot of apostrophes in that paragraph. I’ve nearly used up my yearly allowance, so I hope you’re happy.

I could try to mock the other team, but to be honest my heart wouldn’t really be in it, even if I DID focus on Sabrina. To be honest, my comments for that side of the table have to be restricted to well done. I was impressed, particularly by Khadija. Khadija produced some, perhaps unoriginal, but pleasant sounding flavour combinations that I would not be alarmed to see on a chocolate box. She weighed her ingredients and produced good chocolates. You could not criticise her contribution to this task, some said she went too safe with her flavours, but I have to agree with her, I’ve never seen mince pie chocolates before either. Given everyone’s performance this week, she’s probably now my favourite to win.

Camilla and Daniel were very lucky to escape firing this week. Sarah Ann was probably the least destructive of the three of them, all she did was get drunk on the first day and ignore the planned disaster going on in the sub-team. Oh, and she forgot to weigh her ingredients, resulting in chocolates containing… well, chocolate, and nothing else. And last week she did that awful advert for the Bin Stopper. On second thought, it was probably her time to get off. She even joined in with the other two when they decided to start their pitch to Waitrose by dancing ineptly at them. Admittedly, they had been to a workshop the day before where they were taught to be an elf by someone who looked alarmingly like Agent 47 minus barcode, but that was no excuse to dance at those poor people and then demand that they joined in. They refused, quite plainly, but Camilla and Daniel kept trying for a decent length of time. I’m not surprised they didn’t get any orders.

  Oh, and I can’t forget the way this week began. Lord Sugar turned up on the Apprentice House doorstep at a silly time in the morning and demanded an audience with the candidates all wearing their sleeping clothes. Wait, he arrived at 8 AM. That’s… not actually that unreasonable. It’s unpleasant, but not unreasonable. Usually he summons them at 5 AM or some ungodly hour that he’s only awake for because he sleeps during the day, hung upside down from the rafters like a bat. He presented to them a room bedecked in Christmas decorations, which apparently he had his ‘elves’ do secretly during the night. I’m not sure if there were any boughs- hold on. He had his elves sneak in and no one noticed, then that man at the elf school… Don’t, don’t tell me Agent 47 works for Alan Sugar? That would be awful! The people who get fired probably never leave those taxis! They probably all blow up in freak fuel leak accidents or spontaneously fall out of the windows. Is that why Lord Sugar had so much trouble committing to the word willy in the board room, did he think it might offend 47?

I feel the need to say something because I have a feeling that if he reads this, as I’m sure he does, Lord Sugar might take offence. I am NOT accusing Alan Sugar of hiring an assassin. It was a JOKE which I thought might be FUNNY. On the other hand, I apologise to the world if I’ve given him ideas. Regardless, drunkenness is no excuse to allow travesties of taste and sense like ‘Santa’s Choco Seduction’ to go unhindered, so this week’s result was a reasonable one. Farewell Sarah Ann, you were rubbish.

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The Bin Stopper

Why do I watch The Apprentice? Other commitments have stopped me from writing for the last couple of weeks, but I’ve taken the time to think about why I actually watch what I do. Given the extreme distaste I hold for business and avarice, it seems strange that I take an hour every Wednesday to watch a show which holds them as its cornerstones. I think it’s because it makes me angry, and I seem to seek out those things that make me angry. I’m not entirely sure why, but I seem to gravitate toward programs that raise my ire. No wonder then, that I watch The Apprentice. They gave me a treat with that art episode. Not only did I get infuriating entrepreneurs, I also got fine art knobbery and some prick obsessed with his massive stereo. Delicious. The candidates had to pick a collection of modern art to sell to assorted members of the ‘public’, as well as to a corporate client who had been arranged before hand. One of the teams got stuck with a man who ended up not buying the painting presented to him, which was admittedly an acquired taste, because he failed to comprehend that sound is a subjective experience. He claimed his massive stereo system made sound objectively better, which is nonsense. You cannot make something which only has worth because of how much people like it objectively better, only objectively different. The worth of sound is determined by whether people like it or not, which is subjective. To say your system makes music objectively better is just arrogance. I didn’t like him very much. The other team tried very hard to scare away their corporate client as well by choosing a sculpture which needed explanation, then having the people who chose it stay away when the client decided whether to buy or not. Specifically, this was Jasmine, who then compounded the issue by selling a piece they actually were interested in while their backs were turned. She didn’t do well, not least by proving Sabrina right. Jasmine told Sabrina and Sian to leave the corporate client to her, which Sabrina then protested and protested and protested until eventually Sian did have to go back to make the deal. Which made Sabrina right. That cannot be forgiven. She’s been praised for being enthusiastic and energetic, but for me it goes beyond enthusiasm to just bouncing off the walls. She might as well just stand in the middle of the room and shout “Look at me!” repeatedly for all the good she seems to do. Jasmine fell that week and while I didn’t mind her at all, I couldn’t bear the thought of Sabrina being given any more credibility, so fully support the decision. Then last week the remaining candidates were required to select items and sell them during a very short window on a shopping channel. One team chose a useful looking cleaning tool, but made the mistake of trusting Daniel and Sarah Ann to produce an advert for it. This resulted in thirty seconds of Sarah Ann waving the device about and blathering its virtues at a speed that cannot be comprehended by the human brain. She finished her promo for the spin cleaner by slamming it horizontally before her and shouting ‘This Bin Stopper!’ like she was just finishing some martial arts demonstration. The other team’s offering looked relatively professional, but they proceeded to do so badly at actually presenting that they ended up losing. To be honest, the fault for that lies mainly with Camilla, who spent most of their time on air whispering through Tom’s ear piece that he should use the tooth whitening stuff in front of the camera, seeming to forget that one cannot speak while brushing their teeth, and the act of tooth brushing is not a visually appealing one. Tom fought her off, even saying directly to the camera that he wasn’t going to use it, but she kept going until he caved in, and it was a disaster. Tom was in trouble from the start really, he should never have been project manager. He was pushed into it by Jackie in an attempt to get him out of the way, and it worked. Justly, however, Jackie left the process too for that very act of manipulating Tom into the most vulnerable position. I think Claude described her very well actually, very clever, but manipulative. I enjoyed watching her, but it was probably her time to go. Farewell then Jasmine, farewell Tom and farewell Jackie. You each had your skills, even if Tom’s was just being so bland I kept forgetting he existed, but overall, you were rubbish.

[leycaria-blog]

Lloyd of the Dance

IT’S CHRIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAS! Like hell it is. Personally, I think there should a blanket ban on all Christmas products and advertising until the first of December. Anyone caught violating it would be suspended upside down in a chimney until Christmas Day as penance. Of course I’m excluding advent calendars, but I think of them as advent products rather than Christmas products, and banning them until December makes them very difficult to use properly. Regardless, I think I’ve made the point that I maintain a steadfast attitude of Bah Humbug until the twenty-fifth is actually in sight, so you can imagine my outrage as the Christmas adverts started coming out of the woodwork.

I’ll start with a bizarre and disgusting advert that, to be honest, has nothing to do with Christmas. Yesterday I had the misfortune of watching Oasis’ new advert for a product they aren’t selling. They’re following on from that bizarre and disgusting thing a couple of years ago where an advert had two pretend strangers kiss for the first time in front of a video camera. I can’t even remember what it was advertising, but the clinical aura and the sense of unease it imbued in the viewer was difficult to forget, and in a bid not to be forgotten Oasis has gone for the same thing. Two strangers are asked to drink from a single Oasis bottle with a cap at both ends, one which isn’t even a real product. Surprisingly enough, this results in hesitant scenes, mostly culminating in both gagging and spraying a mixture of saliva and Oasis juice drink all over the room and each other. Unpleasant doesn’t quite cover it. I don’t even know what it was trying to say, that Oasis is so good you’ll be willing to ingest someone else’s putrid, curry flavoured mouth gunk just for a sip? I’ve no idea who though this advert might have been a good idea, because it really isn’t. I’ve never really tried Oasis, and I’m certainly not going to now that I’ve permanently associated it with the image of two people spitting on each other.

Of course, the Oasis advert is just trying to tie in to the current fashion in advertising, that of seeming friendly and promoting social unity or whatever. In theory, I don’t have a problem with people trying to bring a little more love and understanding into the world, but when the message is being put across by a multinational cooperation I start to lose my faith in whether it’s actually genuine. While the advert remains disgusting, I get the principle of bringing people together. However, when this is being said by Coca-Cola, who on a fundamental level couldn’t care less about togetherness provided people keep buying their cans of liquid sugar, my natural cynicism kicks in and I start seeing such adverts as little more than an attempt to sell more drinks by associating them with something that people want at that moment in time, which is all an advert really is, if you think about it. Usually I wouldn’t care, like when they use Star Wars to advertise toothbrushes or whatever Star Wars is advertising at the moment, but I do think that the world could stand to be a little more united so the thought of massive companies pretending to care just to make themselves even richer genuinely angers me.

In my eyes, banks are the worst offenders. I’m aware that I’ve had this little rant before, but I was out of ideas for this week so I’m doing it again. The bloody Lloyds adverts have been around for a while now, with their new slogan, ‘By your side’, which makes me want to wretch. I mean, they’re all crap, but the mental health one angers me so much I try to avoid it whenever I can. It’s a good advert. It makes an excellent point about mental health and recognising it, which I suppose isn’t surprising when you consider that it was made with Mental Health UK. If this was just an advert promoting mental health awareness I would fully support its broadcast, but I just can’t for the simple principle that it was made by a BANK. Banks are not ‘by your side’. Banks are the wretched monoliths which tower above capitalism like volcanoes, just waiting to burst and pour rock and fire down on the poor people below. Banks are businesses. They can dress themselves anyway they want, put silly hats on or wrap themselves in sheep’s wool but the fact remains, they don’t care about you. They don’t care about your family, your health or your mental health. It makes no difference to them whether you live or die or are sold into slavery providing you keep giving them money. I’m well aware that there’s probably a significant number of people in the UK suffering from mental health problems because of Lloyds’ bringing them to financial or physical ruin. They don’t care about people, they care about profit, so pretending to have such noble goal doesn’t endear them to me, it just drives my ire as they profane something so worthy of respect. I suppose the slogan isn’t too inaccurate after all. If you sign any contract with Lloyds, they will be by your side for life. They’ll follow wherever you go, keeping to the shadows and just biding their time, waiting until either the world destroys you or they do so they can siphon off whatever’s left of your life as profit. By your side indeed.

All right, now you know quite how angry I am at the moment, let’s finally hit Christmas. John Lewis! Ever since that incredibly trite advert a few years ago with the boy and the baked beans the world has been watching your Christmas advert, and they’ve been going downhill from what wasn’t a high summit in the first place. This year they decided to cut all ties and do nothing to do with Christmas or John Lewis, instead showing a two minute trailer for an upcoming Elton John biopic. The implication is that if you buy something like a piano from John Lewis for Christmas, the recipient may then metamorphose into Elton John. It’s completely ludicrous. John Lewis only started selling pianos this year, just to get their advert to make sense. You get the feeling that they booked Elton John for the job then just sat back and watched a Flog It marathon. “Ought we try to write something for this year’s Christmas advert?”                                         “Nah. We’ve got Elton John.” I find it hard to believe that the planning of the advert went any other way. It’s a film about Elton John. That’s it. They end with the tagline – ‘Some gifts are more than just gifts’, which is true, but ignores the fact that 99.99% of gifts are. They certainly are if they come from John Lewis, they even have a section of their website labelled ‘Gifts’. I’m not even going to touch on how clicking that brings you to a rather sexist page for ‘Gifts for her’ and ‘Gifts for him’. I don’t think my poor laptop would survive.

Sainsbury’s! Oh no, just because John Lewis’ efforts were pitiful doesn’t mean you’re getting away with it. Sainsbury’s decided to copy John Lewis’ advert from earlier this year, the one with the school production, only they changed the song from Bohemian Rhapsody to the New Radicals’ You Get What You Give, which when you listen to the lyrics seems an interesting choice. It followed that pattern we saw in Love Actually and those dire Nativity films, where the school nativity becomes an amazing festival of music and amazing costumes that stirs the soul. In many ways it just seems mocking to actual parents who have to go to real nativity productions, which are inevitably just half an hour of four year olds with dish cloths on their head wandering about among other four year wearing bad cow suits and singing simple songs very quietly. To be fair, I’m only talking about the final number of the nativity in Love Actually where the girl comes out and sings All I Want for Christmas is You. The rest is more true to life, and the finale is played for comic effect. Just to be clear, I LIKE that film. My word, you’re unlikely to ever hear me say that in this column again.

Having said that, I actually don’t mind Tesco’s advert. It does what it needs to, shows lots of attractive food and just generally gives a sense of festive relaxation. It’s not a master class in film making, it isn’t going to shatter the earth, but it’s certainly the best offering so far. It does what was asked of it. Oh yes. You’ve seen it coming haven’t you. I’m getting ready. In less than one sentence I’m now going to segue into The Apprentice! The link of course being that Jackie and Khadija completely failed to do what was asked of them in the hairdresser’s courtyard during this week’s gardening task. Rather than jet wash the place as requested, they poured water on the floor and then brushed all of the dirt that had lifted from under the plant pots into the centre. It was not a good showing. They are ridiculously lucky that their team won. Khadija didn’t even seem to understand how a leaf blower works, and I don’t mean the mechanics of it, I mean that it blows leaves. I’ve no idea how long she spent in that courtyard blowing leaves around, but given that there was nowhere for the leaves to go, the fact that she tried at all indicates a condemnable fault in reason. Did she think that a leaf blower blew leaves out of existence? Then Jasmine and Sabrina claimed to have renovated a rooftop by painting odd planks of a bench yellow and dotting Homebase plants about in their sale pots. I hope they at least took the prices off.

To be honest, I don’t think that Kayode deserved to be fired. There were people on the other team who were far more deserving. However, he did dress up in a daffodil hood and call himself the sunflower guy, which is difficult to ignore, and he had a howler in the pitch last week, even though it wasn’t explicitly his fault. So farewell Kayode. You weren’t useless, but you were rubbish.

[leycaria-blog]

Come Die With Me

There’s a process called continental drift. It means that due to plate tectonics, all of the landmasses on the surface of the earth are drifting very, very slowing around, and have been for millions of years. Long ago, they were all one continent, a supercontinent containing all of the earth’s dry land. This super continent has been named Pangaea by scientists. Honestly, this is secondary school level stuff. It’s not complicated. Hell, Kurran knows what Pangaea is and he thinks swaying like a bulrush in the slipstream of a large dragonfly counts as acting. Pangaea is a good name for an airline, putting across the message that to you, the whole world in connected and accessible. It’s certainly a lot better than suggesting that if the pilot isn’t careful the plane might just explode mid-flight.

I like Jackie, I remember thinking a few weeks ago when she almost left that I wanted her to stay around for a bit longer. That said, this certainly wasn’t her week, and she took my telepathic communication that I wanted to see more of her in completely the wrong way. It was a remarkably poor showing all round, the task being to brand a new budget airline, with one team forgetting that they needed to stand out, and the other standing out so much they leapt out of the aeroplane. Part of the task involved both teams designing a uniform for the stewardesses, because male cabin crew weren’t allowed. The boring team Typhoon created… the Fly Emirates uniform, and Team Collaborative, or rather Team Hissy Fighty Scratch Scratch, created something technicolour which stopped about a centimetre above the nipple and was held up by a necklace. They were right, it did look like a party outfit, but it wasn’t exactly suitable for an aeroplane. Speaking of, Karren Brady had an issue with the costume too, and voiced it, suggesting it was wrong to expect a woman to wear it as a uniform. She’s right, of course, but it just seems a little hollow considering her current silence over the Philip Green scandal, where the company she works for stands accused of buying the silence of sexual abuse victims. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I misinterpreted the papers, but it seems to me that the baroness isn’t an excellent position from which to mount that particular high horse.

Anyway, let’s leave the part where I say something stupid that gets me sued behind and make fun of Kurran’s ludicrous advert, shall we? Oh, where to begin.  Officially it was Team Collaborative’s advert, but I call it Kurran’s because he silenced pretty much anyone’s attempts to contribute. Admittedly, Khadija proved a total ignorance of how cameras work and kept talking while they were trying to record, and just generally was all kinds of annoying, but Kurran didn’t listen to her and just kept driving his beach-that-was-actually-a-plane straight on into disaster. Highway To Hell would have been a far more appropriate anthem for Kurran’s advert, indeed his entire episode, but it would have denied us the fantastic sight of Kayode attempting to explain why a song he didn’t know was not entirely inappropriate for an airline advert. Honestly, what is going on here? Kayode doesn’t know Highway To Hell, Jackie’s never heard of Pangaea. I’m well aware of both of these and I’m younger than you both! It’s not like either are ‘young person’ things either. The ACDC track came out in 1979, and Pangaea broke apart about 175 million years ago. Shame on you both.

Oh Jackie, there was the outfit, then there was ‘Jetpop’ and then there was… that. I hate the word cringe. It’s overused. The modern world has ruined what was once a perfectly good word, but there are cases when nothing else will do. Jackie thought it would be a good idea to start off her pitch by giving a mock cabin announcement into an imaginary handset while dressed like a waitress at a tiki bar. The audience were uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable. I could practically feel my face screwing up and folding in on itself and was vaguely worried I’d end up spending the rest of my life with a balloon like pucker where my features ought to have been. She kept going though. Even as the assembled airline officials shrank back on their seats to get away and the entire public started shrieking and clawing at their faces to stop them slipping inward just to avoid having to watch, Jackie kept going. She later seemed surprised when everyone laughed at her demonstrating how her outfit could have the necklace bit taken off. Without that, it just looked like she’d fallen out of the shower onto a roll of blue wallpaper, got stuck to it and just decided to wear that instead of clothes.

I’ll have a passing snipe at Doctor Who on the way out. I liked the last two episodes. I thought that Rosa was excellent, treading a perfect line between being too insensitive or too preachy, and as a classic alien horror, Arachnids in the UK was a fine example, even if the ending was a bit weird. Last night though, they went for the horror angle again, but rather than utilising their new repeat foes the Stenza, Chibnall plumped for a strange mutant baby about as threatening as a duckling doing a poo, but equally disturbing. They also stuck to the theme of babies when naming it, going for a basic noise any human over 18 months can produce – Pting! Then there was the bizarre subplot with the pregnant man, which I’m sure was saying something philosophical about gender but I didn’t notice as I was too busy cowering behind my sofa in fear as the gooselike gobbling noise heralded the imminent appearance of the Pting thing.

It’s fascinating really, how similar different television shows in different areas can be. Both The Apprentice and Doctor Who this week featured a walking foetus which threatened to destroy everything, only one was named after the noise you get when you fire an elastic band at a bell, and the other had a stupid haircut and was called Kurran. So without further ado, goodbye Kurran. You were absolutely rubbish.

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Women’s Shoes, Neon Vomit and a Spurious Bucket of Horse Urine

Rahul won The Great British Bake Off. Kurran is still on The Apprentice. Strap down your turtles, it’s gonna be an angry one.

In what world, what alternative version of reality, is Kurran still a viable candidate on The Apprentice. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone quite so useless on the show before, it’s… surreal. I can’t think of anything that he’s actually achieved, his only claims to relevance being his entirely wooden acting and ability to break his own arm while arm wrestling. Who does that? How on earth is that possible? He spent this episode doing nothing but complaining unconstructively and making stupid statements like ‘I can see things others can’t.’ Probably through his magic bloody telescope, and he has to lean from side to side like some kind of organic metronome. The slinged wonder has added nothing to any task so far beside a moron with a stupid haircut floating aimlessly around the other contestants while they’re trying to get some work done. He’s a joke. He even walks around with his shirt collar undone and pulled open to reveal his chest and little golden medallion thing, which just makes him look like a bad cruise ship singer. I keep half expecting him to start jutting his lower jaw out and shouting “Do-do-do the barracuda!” At least then he’d actually be doing something rather than milling about and looking forlorn. He’s a useless, useless lump of tripe, and has no right to still be in the process.

Oh, thank goodness. I thought I was going to lose it for a moment there- wait. I have to talk about Alex now. Allow me to introduce exhibit B, Alex, last week’s firing who was just as useless as Kurran and certainly more offensive. There is a level of stupidity that cannot be forgiven, whatever else you do, and it was one that he certainly met last week as he kept complaining about not being ‘in the right place at the right time’, while trying to sell gym equipment at a bodybuilding convention. When moved to the spray tanning team he then resorted to old sex stereotypes, repeatedly describing it a solely a ‘female product’ in a desperate attempt to conceal the fact that he was about as effective at selling as a poster with the words ‘Our product is crap’ written on it in neon pink letters. He could have been replaced at any point with a cardboard cut-out of himself with his middle finger up and a tape recorder repeatedly playing “Tanning’s for girls!” and no one would have noticed. There’s stupidity, then there’s walking into a mosque in Saudi Arabia and snogging your same sex partner. I just, I can’t fathom how on earth he thought either of his comments were true. I don’t understand. He was just useless and abrasive and- oh for the love of all that’s holy, there’s another one.

RICK! RICKY RICKY SULKY RICKING WANK. Whatever act of providence put the celestial sandal deep up your backside and propelled you swiftly from the process to the bin of the terminally infuriating deserves all the praise it can be given. The useless manchild thought that a sauna was appropriate for an office, and started off a negotiation for prop hire by essentially saying he thought the props were a bit rubbish and overpriced. To the owner. I’m amazed she still let him hire them. Last week he put his hat in the ring for project manager despite having no experience in bodybuilding or event selling, then when no one voted for him he threw a strop and sulked until Kurran agreed to vote for him just to stop him making passive aggressive snipes at everyone else. I suppose Kurran was good for something, then. You can’t throw a tantrum in a business competition. It was like watching a four year old or pubescent teenager, raising his voice and throwing his little hands in the air when things didn’t go his way, then going over to some poor, unsuspecting women and asking them if they wanted to ‘get hot.’ He was aggressive and failed to sell anything for the last two weeks, looming over potential customers like the terminator with that bizarre fake smile and telling them that they can buy his product or he’ll go away and cry, which he probably did. It was pathetic, and entirely without any use at all. He’d have done better just walking up to camera and blithering “I’m so depressing” over and over again. That would have won him the competition. It certainly won it for Rahul.

I feel really cruel about this, as I really don’t have a problem with Rahul himself, but there is no way he should have won. None of the things I’m going to shout in blind fury about are actually his fault, he just happens to be the subject of them so he unfortunately gets the brunt of things. He should not have won. He shouldn’t even have been in the final. He was by far the worse baker in Danish week, and you could just see he wasn’t trying in the end. That should have been the end of his journey, when you cock up that badly and give up completely it ought to be the end of road. Instead, Paul and Prue sent Manon home because her bread was too French. Whatever helps you sleep at night. I had no problem with Rahul’s pessimistic, self-depreciating personality, I like that kind of humour. What I had a problem with was the fact that it seemed to excuse him all manner of baking sins. Upon starting watching the final I had a sinking feeling, and that was just compounded when his glass jar exploded. Yes, the judges were right to give him extra time, I’m just angry that it was enough to forgive the worst of three, admittedly pretty bad looking showstoppers. His ‘rock garden’ looked like he’d force fed a child three tons of skittles and buttercream then jumped on their stomach until they spewed the resulting technicolour bile all over the room, then applied pressure to their face until the neon sugar mixture came oozing from their pores in long threads. It was a mess, a sugary, greeny orangey, splodgy, vomity mess. Stupid decisions have been being made all week. Stupidity makes me angry.

So, rant gradually easing, I say goodbye to Ruby and Kim-joy, both of whom were more deserving winners, and Alex and Rick, who were so offensively rubbish I don’t have words. I look forward to banishing Kurran to the depths of oblivion next week, and with the aspiring actor having the acting skills of a dead fly in a bucket of horse urine, I have no doubt that’s where he’ll stay. Then we get to see the real power of his magic telescope. Goodbye to the lot of you, using a mean average, you were rubbish.

[leycaria-blog]

A Collaborative Typhoon

Ich bin ein Berliner. Nein! No, Ley, no. That was last week’s joke. You can’t just cobble together a quick article from whatever you had lying around; people notice when something that’s meant to be luxurious has been scrabbled into being in a blind panic. Wait. What was the treat on The Apprentice this week? Danke Gott, mir geht es gut. Usually, the winning team on The Apprentice gets a treat where they go and have a meal or do some activity lead by some expert. This week, they hired an ice rink, gave them some inflatable rubber rings and told them it was ‘human curling’. There wasn’t anyone there to run it or umpire the game, so it was just seven loons with an inflatable doughnut in an abandoned ice rink. High quality treat, milord. I’m thinking of opening a similar enterprise myself actually, called human golf. The price would be £100 an hour, and you get to curl up in a field while I hit you repeatedly with a 5 iron. ‘But that’s horrifically overpriced!’ You may be screaming, and you’d be right. However glorious my tee shot, no one wants to pay one hundred pounds to be abused for an hour, just as nobody in their right mind is going to pay five pounds for a BLOODY DOUGHNUT.

I thought myself to be relatively sheltered and middle class until I saw this week’s episode, where the candidates pranced around London flaunting five pound doughnuts like that’s a thing. Doughnuts cost a pound for five. They come in ring, jam and custard varieties, and if you’re lucky there’ll be a Homer Simpson style one with the icing and technicolour rabbit droppings that costs a pound. You can’t justify charging five pounds for what is essentially the same mixture as a Sainsbury’s custard blob with a Jammy Dodger stuck on top. I did the maths for this, and excluding energy costs but including oil for the friar, I could make a batch of doughnuts now for 24.62 pence a doughnut, and that’s with shop bought ingredients which would be much cheaper wholesale. Add thirty five pence for a Custard Cream, spout some tripe about British flavours and sell it for five quid, I’m looking at an eight hundred and thirty three per cent return. That’s no making a profit, that’s taking advantage of people stupid enough to buy from you.

The contestants had to make and market doughnuts this week, if you hadn’t already guessed from the rant about rising doughnut prices above. Some days I worry I’ll never get a little doughnut of my own, let alone a great big doughnut out in the country. Regardless, however offensive the task itself seemed to be, you can always rely on it to be eclipsed by the sheer stupidity of the people attempting to complete it. Camilla decided it was a good idea to garnish her British themed doughnuts with some Earl Grey tea straight from the tea bag. Delicious, the brown grit you get at the bottom of the cup when the bag splits. The other team elected to top some of their doughnuts with enough chili sauce to set a clergyman on fire, whether they had just drunk two litres of sunflower oil or not. Both wound up with a fairly pathetic looking end product, certainly neither were worth the five pounds they tried to sell them for. Team Collaborative did better and produced something vaguely presentable, but Typhoon’s offering looked vaguely as though a typhoon had ripped through a builder’s yard, scattering the place with broken biscuits, ripped tea bags and neon paint. It was a mess, I’m greatly impressed that they won.

Having said this, it seemed at a couple of times almost as though the candidates themselves wanted to distance themselves from the program. At one point one of the girls, I believe it was Sarah Ann, started cooing ‘they’re so golden!’ at the man showing her how to cook doughnuts like they do in the professional kitchen on Masterchef. Later, Frank had paddy about how his team’s doughnuts were under proved, like a Great British Bake Off contestant who didn’t expect to around for much longer. I don’t personally think that Frank did anything too bad, he was fired for the unfortunate reason that he didn’t do anything too well either. Game show contestants have got off with far worse this week. Oh come on, don’t look at me like that. I wasn’t going to mention it but I’ve brought it up now. What choice do I have? Frank’s transgressions were certainly far fewer than Rahul’s on The Great British Bake Off on Tuesday. I know everyone is going to have taken a shot at this, but when two judges take leave of their senses enough to send Manon home on a technicality when Rahul outright gave up on his showstopper, you have to say something. At this point you get the feeling that Rahul could have produced a sloppy blue glazed ring with half a Penguin biscuit balanced on top and still got away with it. Anyway, I feel a bit sorry for Frank, even if his greatest achievement in the competition was frying seven million pounds worth of infinity shaped doughnuts. So goodbye Frank. You were rubbish.

[leycaria-blog]

‘Wir haben ein Bild vom einem Croissant’

Last week I spent a while reading through my old articles, and while I rather enjoyed the aggressive and sadistic humour contained within, it occurred to me that something was missing. Today I’m going to attempt to rectify that and not only entertain, but educate. As such, I’ll be writing the rest of this post in German. Guten Tag meine Freunde! Heute habe ich den Fernseher gesehen. Ja, sah ich Den Lehring. Es war ziemlich gut, aber es macht mich immer genervt. Ist das richtig? Oh wait. Silly me, I tried to write in a language I actually know how to speak a bit of.

For the record, my German is pretty poor, but then I’m not trying to write a comic teaching children to speak it. No one in their right mind would try to write something educational about a language they don’t speak, would they? Khadija of The Apprentice would. It’s hard to make jokes about something so intrinsically absurd, it would be like trying to mock Mock The Week. If you didn’t see it, this week’s task involved the production and pitching of a new comic for eight to twelve year olds, complete with augmented reality cover. The boys came up with a fairly standard superhero adventure which, while about as original as the phrase ‘once upon an time’ and featuring a protagonist with the charisma of a flattened avocado, was a serviceable piece of children’s escapism. The girls, or should I say Khadija, went for something educational focussing on a rapping, gangster androgynous monkey who became a blob at some point when I wasn’t looking. The educational aspect was that their gender non-binary blob would be wandering around Paris learning French words, something rather hindered by the fact that the most any of them knew of French was ‘Croissant’, and they didn’t even know how to spell that. Once again, this issue could have been solved by five minutes on Google Translate, but that’s a rant for last week.

To be honest, both teams were a shambles, but the girls clearly won because they found the right trigger words rather than focussed on the story. As anyone who has ever attempted to write a novel, poem or short story will readily tell you, one afternoon is not nearly enough time to produce an original, engaging and coherent plot, unless of course you happen to be Ernest Hemmingway. As such, the boys were in trouble the minute they decided to do a standard comic story which is, fundamentally, narrative driven. Khadija’s decision to focus on the educational aspects is probably the main reason for their success. As the experts stated, it would appeal to the parents who actually buy the comics for their children. Given the appalling execution of the adventures of M.C GoGo, I’m struggling to be complimentary, but it has to be said that Khadija’s team showed a level of competence, not in languages obviously, that was remarkably absent in the other team. The rap they produced was surprisingly good, even if ‘C’est la Vie’ is a strange comment to end a happy ditty on. Also, Jackie has to be complimented on her incredible bluff in the pitch she lead, spouting some nonsense about culture to cover up the complete lack of French words in their French themed comic. Admittedly, she did follow that by abandoning all tact and attempting to convince the board to order her comic by staring at them and making demands like some kind of Jedi mind trick.

The boys’ team obviously cannot be forgiven for the moment they decided that it was playtime, put on some wigs and jumped on each other. They cut to Claude at that moment, showing the face of all reasonable people when faced with four grown men behaving like toddlers given access to the dress up cupboard. Speaking of children, we also got to see some of the worst consumer testing ever filmed, when the girls asked a series of increasingly leading questions to some school children. I was hardly surprised the response was extremely positive with such strenuous testing as the question ‘He’s quite cool, isn’t he?’ We know that people’s memory can be altered by the smallest difference, as little as changing the word ‘any’ to ‘the’ can have a significant impact on responses, so making a statement then asking a child to agree with it is hardly rigorous testing. While we’re on the subject, I’d like to point out that 10 out of 10 children tested said that Leycaria was their favourite nihilistic comedy blog in the universe. Admittedly, I did have their Teddies suspended above shredders at the time, and  big men with sticks blocking the exits to the nursery, but that doesn’t mean they’d just tell me what I wanted to hear. Nope, that’s a stat for the back of the compilation annual.

Regardless, I don’t think that David was the most deserving of firing this week. He did rather shoot himself in the foot though when he said that he wrote fantasy stories in his spare time, people rather expect creators to be able to generate original ideas instantly on demand, when it’s really a much longer process of development. He was a decent fellow, and the fact that he was condemned for the honest description of some possible flaws with the product doesn’t make him a poor businessman, it just make the others avaricious, insensitive prats. I think David falls under the same banner as Felipe and some of the other ones whose names I can’t remember, who were just too decent to do well in the process. Oh well, he wouldn’t have won anyway. Auf Wiedersehen David, du warst müll.

[leycaria-blog]

An Island in the Sea of Progress

I remember an episode of Have I Got News For You a little while back, in which Jo Brand rightly lambasted Quentin Letts for some rather patronising comments he made on the radio about Polly Toynbee, and his subsequent trivialisation of what were some very strange and vaguely misogynistic remarks. He expressed a desire to ‘pin her to the ground and tickle her’, then stated that she was ‘a big girl’ and could handle herself. This was back in 2016, and while it’s upsetting that people continue to act in such a way, it’s a good sign for progress that Letts was put in his place for that. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t been on the program since. However, while the world keeps turning and the media keeps improving, it’s interesting that one program holding a prime midweek slot on what is generally regarded as the most timid and PC of channels steadfastly refuses the call to progress. Of course, I’m talking about The Apprentice (BBC1).

While The Apprentice has never had issues representation wise, I find it very strange that the BBC producers still allow the stomach churning taxi sections in the first episode of every series to make it to air. For those unfamiliar, they generally comprise the new candidates of both genders sat in taxis with no knowledge of the task, being about as sexist as they can manage at that moment in time. Credit where it’s due, this year’s traditional Taxi Sexism was shorter than in the past, with only the male’s comments, that their female opposition would lose time in the task as they would be too busy putting on their make-up (be still my seething blood), slipping in. I don’t know if this is progress or not to be quite honest. Perhaps this year’s women managed not to be too offensive in the taxis. Perhaps the editor is a git who let the comment stay in because he agreed with it. I don’t know, I just hope that next year The Apprentice pulls its act together and cuts the whole segment. Maybe then I’ll make it through the first twenty minutes without wanting to commit bloody murder.

Anyway, let’s move past that and attack the show itself, for what a ripe target it was. The word research was used a lot this episode, how not enough research was done into what the items they were supposed to be buying were. This mainly regarded a piece of diving equipment called an octopus, for which one team went and bought an actual octopus, arms flapping everywhere. Now I don’t know about you, but in today’s world of advanced technology where almost any mobile phone can access the internet and the internet tells you almost anything you want to know, not to mention the fifteen best ways to wear trousers this summer, when someone tells me to find out what an item is I tend to go to the Google search bar. Candidates on The Apprentice do not. Despite this, and how endlessly entertaining the concept is, I still don’t imagine that Apprentice candidates are actually Edwardians who’ve spent the last week running around hitting televisions with spoons and screaming “Let the little people out!” after their time machine went horribly wrong, and are now being forced to compete each week to see who is pushed back into the time vortex and who eventually amasses enough temporal energy to stay in the glory that is twenty first century Britain. I just don’t think it’s true. As such, the only other possible explanation for their failure to use the internet is that the entrepreneurs are told not to. They’re told not to use a resource that is readily available to anyone in a developed country, and exists almost entirely for the purpose of telling you what things are. This is not a true test of business skills, as in any real business setting anyone could access internet at any time, surely? So why stop them from using it? For once, I’ll tell you why. It makes better television. Oh, and it allows Alan Sugar to get angry at the contestants for failing to discover what a specific word is, and that’s rich considering he only learnt what it was the night before the task when the producers were asking him for a list of items and he did a quick Google search of ‘Weird Maltese Stuff’. I swear, he wouldn’t do the show if they allowed the candidates to ever do well at a task. My word he’s a prick.

With all that ranting, I haven’t much time to have a go at the candidates. Oh well, I’m sure they’ll be equally offensive next week. I’ll just have a passing snipe at Sarah, our first casualty. Sarah’s strategy for getting a good price for a filigree boat was to ‘charm the pants off them’. To Sarah, charm appears to consist of shouting “A Boat! A Boat!” very loudly at some poor Maltese flower seller, then doing that fine thing all offensive English people (and Americans) do when conversing to someone who doesn’t speak their language, saying the same thing but louder, as if volume might help clear the fog from the poor idiotic savage’s brain. God we’re an arrogant culture. Oh, and she also thought that treating them like children might help, pursing her enormous lips and trying to explain honeycomb by shouting “Honeycomb! Tasty! Nom nom!” Quite frankly, she deserved to be fired for that showing alone. Goodbye Sarah. You were rubbish.

[leycaria-blog]

The Bionic Haircut

There is no joy like watching a complete culinary disaster, and I have seen no culinary disaster quite like Nick Hewer’s this week. For those who missed it, the Countdown host this week participated in The Great Stand Up to Cancer Bake Off, culminating with his attempt to produce a croquembouche. If you haven’t seen it, it certainly deserves a watch, if solely for the sight of Hewer squirting cream straight though a choux biscuit. I honestly cannot do this masterful piece of television justice. Thank you Nick, thank you. You waded into the kitchen like a wrecking ball, smashed your way through over twenty eggs and came out with a pile of crispy chocolate covered pancakes with wooden letters stuck to them. You made my week.

Speaking of wrecking balls, mention has to go to one woman demolition team Matilda, heroine or potentially villain of Friday’s Requiem. Requiem is apparently meant to be a spooky horror program, but completely fails to be spooky, and by far the most horrific part of the show is Matilda’s appalling wig. They didn’t even bother matching her hair colour to her eyebrows, and the fringe changes style from scene to scene, it is genuinely awful. Ignoring that, Matilda herself is pretty horrible, and has spent all series proving she has no concern for any person besides herself. She treats perpetual wet fish Hal like a slave, and seems annoyed that the dodgy Australian prick might be selling HIS OWN HOUSE that he allowed her to stay in for some reason. She takes no responsibility for her own actions at all, and would, if found waving a bloody knife over the corpse of a horrifically decapitated child, adamantly maintain that if was their own fault for getting in the way. Actually, she’d probably just scream “I’m Carys!” very loudly and then run off singing maniacally to herself.

The Bionic Haircut has single-handedly brought destruction to the welsh town she may or may not have grown up in, driven the mother of the missing girl she may or may not actually be to attempted suicide and potentially induced a fatal stroke in one of the only sensible people in the whole show. Oh, and on top of all this, there are rumours about that Requiem might be coming back for a second series, essentially giving the BBC another six months to attempt to tie together their appalling mess of a plot. I trusted them. I trusted them to deliver a dumb ghost story that would have one series then disappear back into the ether to be forgotten. Instead, they delivered a potentially self-perpetuating supply of tripe that fails outright to be remotely scary. I feel betrayed.

[leycaria-blog]

Blue Plants

“The presence of chlorophyll produces this colour.”

“Blue!”

Dear lord, forget chlorophyll, I could use some chloroform. Drug induced oblivion seemed remarkably tempting earlier as five agonisingly energetic girls bounced around the Futuristic zone, it was so incredibly painful that I had to bring it up. I hadn’t planned on talking about the crystal maze at all. Today’s competitors were so relentlessly cheery I had a very strong compulsion to reach through the television screen and batter them to death with the remote. They did alright in the challenges, save for the natural mistake that plants are blue. What was most impressive about them, aside from being young enough and happy enough to make me homicidal, was the fact that they gained considerably more crystals than last week’s furries, who went into the dome with only ten seconds on the clock, and then proceeded to gain only thirty gold tokens, considerably less than the furries. Jolly impressive. Anyway, today I wanted to talk about Back, the new comedy series starring Mitchell and Webb as… er, the same characters they played in Peep Show. Okay, maybe Webb is a little more competent than before, and maybe Mitchell is a little more domestic in his motivations, but they’re essentially the same. This begs the question, why not make another series of Peep Show? Who knows, it might have been better than this tripe. Simon Blackwell has obviously tried to write an amusing script, but it just fails on so many levels. It’s also shown that Channel 4’s head of comedy, Phil Clarke, is either an idiot or fiercely loyal to his channel, after describing Blackwell’s script as ‘very funny and clever’ in an interview with The Guardian. Back tries to be funny, but can’t seem to raise its head out of the gutter long enough to manage it. The first episode saw the audio from a porn video played out during a supposedly emotional conversation. It wasn’t funny. The second episode saw Mitchell’s Stephen standing guard outside a faeces filled caravan while his ex-wife went at it audibly with her new lover inside. That wasn’t funny either. Why not just play the bloody porn film while Mitchell rants in the background? It would achieve the same effect, but we’re obviously above using lust to draw in viewers, are we Channel 4? Cough Naked Attraction cough.

The jokes are too lewd to be funny a lot of the time, so it just seems like low budget smut interspersed by poor sections of Mitchell getting exasperated while his family act like pricks. If you were too busy failing to laugh at the words ‘Ahhh, you’re going to make me come’ playing over a wireless speaker to have got a firm grasp on the plot, I’ll outline it for you. Mitchell is Stephen, son of a constantly disapproving father, divorcee, and general incompetent. Webb is Andrew (I think), a successful knob-end who was fostered by Stephen’s family for six months during his childhood. Following the father’s death, a share of the family’s pub was given to Andrew (I think) so that he could get it back on its feet. Thus, Andrew returns home to adoration, while Stephen finds himself an outcast in his own family. It’s not complicated, and could have been funny if done well. It wasn’t and it isn’t. It’s a real pity because I know they can do better – there are scenes that show real promise. In the first episode they had a rather good scene about ‘the Toblerone Zone’, hinging around how differently Mitchell and Webb remember the same childhood. It wasn’t bad, the foster child remembering a joyous sharing of Toblerone before the father taking them to a theme park, while the biological child remembered miserably eating budget chocolate in his bedroom before his father comes in and chides him. I would have loved for them to have taken it further in the other episodes, they gave themselves the opportunity. The second episode showed one version of the pub filled with happy drinkers and another filled with coughing miseries, which got the point across, but wasn’t very funny. They should have gone wild - Webb’s version should have had a camel running through it, a disco ball, fairies and moonbeams, that sort of thing. Then only show a couple of seconds of Mitchell’s miserable version. It could have been funny if they’d been prepared to go a bit more abstract. Channel Green Wing for the fantasy sequences. It’s a pity that Back wasn’t any good, I’ve come to expect better from David Mitchell, but on a side note I discovered something mildly disturbing after the Crystal Maze finished this evening. Namely, Monty Don wishing a dead dog happy birthday on Gardener’s World. The man’s a lunatic.

[leycaria-blog]

Furries Can’t Count

Does anyone know the difference between a cosplayer and a furry? It’s a subtle difference, but quite important if you ever bump into either of them. Cosplayers are people who choose to display their love of a program, book, video game etcetera, by dressing up as one of the characters and going to conventions to discuss their passion. Some people buy costumes, but some put a huge amount of effort into creating bespoke pieces – there are some fantastic replica weapons you can find online. Furries, on the other hand, like to dress up as anthropomorphic animals and do… animal things. They are also linked very strongly to the darker and dirtier parts of the internet. I suppose that’s why Channel Four chose to present its latest Crystal Maze team as ‘The Cosplay Team’, despite them being quite obviously furries. Yes, we’re on The Crystal Maze, ready to deliver a scathing indictment that’s long overdue. I thought I’d start with tonight’s furries because they were the worst team so far. For a while, I genuinely thought they’d be going into the dome with only one crystal, but I’ll leave the digital assassination for later and just attack the show for now. Richard Ayoade is not a bad Maze Master, he’s quirky enough and informative, if sometimes a little too much so, but the library of different games is somewhat… limited. There aren’t that many at all. At this point, I’m fairly certain we’ve seen every game twice, and some more than that. The games aren’t that great either. I mean, the one with the spinning planets in the futuristic zone is almost identical to the one with the spinning hazard signs in the industrial zone. But I could put that aside. What makes me angry, what seems so blatantly insulting, what makes me really want to stick an electric whisk down someone’s throat and spin it until their entrails resemble tomato puree, are the ‘riddles’. Channel Four obviously doesn’t know what a riddle is. A riddle is clever, it is supposed to include words and be a little opaque, so one has to think in a certain way to understand. A riddle is not a primary school maths equation. Asking someone to divide twenty by four is not asking them a riddle. I’m half expecting the next riddle to be “If I have two brain-dead furries and I add another three, how many furries do I have?” The answer, by the way, is seven, I’m fairly sure the two brothers were pregnant. Honestly, there’s something wrong with your game show if it’s asking questions which would patronise a six year old, but I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give them some hints. Look up Raven, an old children’s television program involving a Scottish bloke prancing around in a forest saying “A brave effort!” every twenty seconds. Any one episode of Raven is almost guaranteed to have a riddle in it, and by that I mean a riddle written by someone who actually understands what a riddle is. Right, furry time. NO. I dread to think what that mean to any furries reading this. Ignore me, don’t uh… do anything on my account. Please. Anyway, the furries were without doubt the least successful team so far, and that’s including the celebrity editions, one of which included Scarlet Moffat, so they should be ASHAMED. I have to admit, when the furries completed their first task, the industrial zone button one, I thought they’d do quite well. No one has managed that one yet. But everything went downhill from there. The highlight was when one of the identical twin furries (biologically, not furrililliliy) had to crawl about in an enclosed space when he clearly didn’t like small spaces. Not to mention, he possessed a rather fine spare tractor tyre. He got locked in, but the team leader, an obnoxious prick with a beard, bought him out immediately, sacrificing one of two precious crystals for his release. They then went on to make the best piece of television of the week in the futuristic zone. The other twin furry, also of not inconsiderable size, had to do a task where the participant must climb across five brightly coloured planets suspended from the ceiling and back again. This chap only made it to the second planet, then came back again. Oh, but the fun was just starting. He got stuck making the final step from spinning planet to entry platform, he just kept spinning and nearly falling off and breathing really really heavily. You could see his mind beginning to snap, right there on the television. It was brilliant. Eventually, the time ran out while he kept spinning around like Tarzan of the overweight middle-aged furries. Upon the call of time, he fell off, sprawling like a starfish on the floor. He clambered onto the steps and just sat there panting, very possibly entering a permanent vegetative state. So he was bought out. And they failed lots more tasks and entered the crystal dome with two crystals, granting a total of ten seconds in which to catch over fifty gold tokens. In a twist of plot worthy of whoever wrote Saw, they didn’t manage it. They didn’t miss much though. I’ve seen people win before, and Ayoade isn’t joking when he says ‘middling prize’. I’m fairly certain one of them was a free trip to Legoland.

[leycaria-blog]

Victory for the advertisers

Well, the time for highly organised mess is upon us again! Yes, it’s time for our yearly dose of Celebrity Masterchef and dear god, they were boring. No one did anything overly stupid. No one had a disaster. They all did all right – no more, no less. Henri was amusing, and the episode overall was entertaining, but there isn’t really anything I can poke and laugh at. Oh, except for that bit where Greg turned into Mutley from the Wacky Races. Now, I’m going on to adverts. I like adverts, most of the time, but occasionally one comes along that makes me want to make meringue with someone’s eyeballs while they’re still in their head. Quite often, that person is James Corden. I don’t mind Mr James what-a-big-wallet-I’ve-got Corden when he’s acting. I don’t watch things with him in it and he just doesn’t register. But when he decides to invade my sphere by filling adverts with his inflating head, then I get angry. Have you seen those stupid adverts for Confused Dot Com? They star Corden driving around like a wanker, telling people to call him ‘Mister Green Light’ or ‘The Parking Master’ like a wanker, and skidding between two cars to park like a wanker. I don’t like it. The advert claims this would be a ‘driver win’, but I fail to see how parallel parking by doing doughnuts is a ‘win’, for anyone, what with the multiple car pile up it would cause on a normal London road. Corden is encouraging people to cause accidents – he has to be stopped! Someone, quick, clamp the karaoke car before he kills again! It has genuinely got to the point where I’m looking forward to the news story revealing that he’s pulverised his fat face on the dashboard after crashing the car whilst screeching at a celebrity, as he is prone to do. The Nationwide adverts are also infuriating. You know, the ones with the poems. I always had trouble with them, the idea of a bank/building society (I don’t know what the difference is - is there one?) caring about the people they police is beyond laughable to the point of being offensive, but until now they’ve been fairly harmless, cosy little pieces about family or house owning etcetera, etcetera. But now, now, they’ve chosen a poem that is of a poorer quality than one of Edward Lear’s limericks (trust me, they’re awful). Is it too much to ask for a little coherence in a poem? Evidently so, if the poet is the lady in the advert. She begins by mentioning how her grandmother used to turn carrier bags inside out so that people didn’t know she had been to a shop other than her local. Apparently this taught her a lesson in loyalty. Excuse me, but I don’t see how it could. She had still been disloyal, someone truly loyal would never have shopped anywhere else in the first place. Oh no, all her gran was teaching her was how to best hide one’s disloyalty from the aggrieved partner. I think we can all agree that it’s not the best message to be putting out that it’s okay to be disloyal as long as the betrayed don’t find out. Think of the affairs it would excuse, think what people could do if not bound by loyalty to morals or laws so long as no one finds out. It’s crap, it truly is. Then the poem descends further. She continues ‘I do exactly as she did, not the carrier bag thing’, which is the only thing she has explained that her gran did. Those two statements are directly contradictory, not in a juxta-posing, artistic sort of way, but just because whoever wrote the damn thing couldn’t be bothered to spend a decent amount of time on it. They wanted it to rhyme and put together any old nonsense with the word loyalty in it a few times. You can’t say that you acted in a certain way and then immediately say “Oh no! I didn’t do that!”. It’s poor writing and it’s poor storytelling. Quite frankly I don’t have much of an opinion on the other ‘Voices’ adverts as this one offends me so much. Not the poem in the advert of course, that would be silly after I’ve spent a paragraph explaining how much I dislike it. Doesn’t make any sense does it? No, neither does the advert. Meringue time!

[leycaria-blog]

Fumbi’s Divine Puddle

There are a few ground rules to taking part in MasterChef, guidelines to give one the best chance of success in the competition. One of these rules is that you don't cook something you've not cooked before in the 'Market Challenge'. Another is that when you have to showcase an ingredient, you need to have that ingredient in every component of your dish. Contestants have a habit of disregarding these rules. Last week, a bloke decided to cook something he'd never cooked before. He didn't make it very far. Anyway, I would speak more about last week, but that would take me far too long and I can more or less summarise with one sentence. John and Greg would have done better sending an aubergine through to knockout week. Speaking of bad chefs, this week viewers were treated to the sight of Selwyn, whose magnificent moustache more than makes up for his utter incompetence in the kitchen. When he cooked for the past winners, Selwyn managed to be considerably late, and produce raw lamb and courgettes as the key features of a lamb and courgette dish. This leads me to wonder what he was actually doing, in that he managed to take too long to not cook anything. Oh, and his plum tart wasn't cooked fully either. Forget plums, Selwyn produced a couple of raspberries. I'm not surprised that he didn't make it to the quarter final. I am surprised that Fumbi has made it so far when he keeps getting things wrong. Today, he fails to put sufficient gelatine in his cheesecake and instead produces a white slop with a splodge of red in the middle, looking rather like a fried egg. Apparently it tasted good though, as Greg called it a divine puddle and Fumbi survived to cook next week in the knockouts. Jim didn't, but when you forget to put the honey in ice cream you're making for a task about showcasing honey, you can't honestly expect to make it any further. To add to the line up, we have Brodie, who passed today with flying colours, despite only scraping through last episode. It seems he can only cook curry, as out of four dishes, he's made three curries. The episode ended with judge favourite Shauna saying that John 'carries a a lot of weight'. There's no need for that now, he disliked your food, that's no reason to insult his weight. All those poached pears weigh heavy on the hips you know. Now. I watched MasterChef on Friday, then I watched Have I Got News for You. Then, I had the misfortune of watching Hospital People, which showcases star Tom Binns four ways, much as the MasterChef contestants had to do with aubergine earlier. The comedy wasn't funny, and it's hard to say anything funny about it. The dialogue was stunted. The Office style mock documentary segments were unnecessary. Most of the attempted 'humour' came from the euphemisms spouted right, left and centre in the style of a Carry On Film, only this time they fail to be remotely amusing. Finally, I have to mention the female manager it seems to centre around, played, unfortunately, by Tom Binns. He cannot act for that part. Lines are delivered as though he is reading them phrase by phrase from the script, the poor first rehearsal of someone who cannot read without their glasses. He forgets how to walk as well. I'll watch next week, but I sincerely doubt it can no anything to salvage such a pitiful first episode.

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A Big Pile of Ash

Enough with the bloody ash already! Yes, it's MasterChef, and while last year's series posed the question 'to burn or not to burn', this year we receive an answer - char, sear and completely incinerate if it makes you sound pompous enough. Twice this week contestants produced dishes topped with ash, one of them had frazzled a leek into black dust and the other had burnt some... umm, hay. I'm not certain that qualifies as human food in its natural shape, let alone combusted, and while I hate to shatter the dreams of aspiring chefs, I have to admit that to me, all ash tastes the same whether from lettuce or broccoli. I am quite happy about the return of MasterChef, I should point out. For the last few months I've resorted to obscure American tripe on the Food Network, so some honest, home grown cookery presided over by an Australian whose eyes lead straight into the inferno and  a butterfly who woke up one day as a bald bloke is just what my customer order. Things are more or less the same, only even more pleased with itself than ever. One contestant managed to demonstrate this admirably when she made 'Russian sushi'. When john told her she was running out of time she said, and this I quote, "You cannot rush perfection". I’m not sure why that was relevant, John was obviously rushing HER. John then managed to be even more ridiculous by alluding to a program he's obviously never watched. "As they say on the Eurovision Song Contest, 9.5", he declared with confidence. As anyone who has ever watched Eurovision will know, a country can only be scored up to 8, then 10 or 12 points. Certainly not 9.5. Hell, not even nine - the man can't even get his mistakes right. And that's not the only reference John decided to drop this week, he commented on a cake by saying how Mary Berry would check for a soggy bottom. Now, I could give John the benefit of the doubt, but that sounded a little bit like bragging to me. One could almost believe he was only making the connection to point out that HIS show, was safely entrenched on the BBC still. I would not be surprised if by the end of the series we find him and Greg dancing about in Mel and Sue masks singing "We're still here! We're still here!". Anyway, I have to comment on one cake we saw this week which offended me greatly, as we were promised a layer cake. What we got was two slices of a flat plain sponge laid next to each other, which the lady then piped a long pink turd in between. Contestant wise, no one stands out particularly, everyone I mentioned so far is gone, as is Scottish Billy who has the misfortune to look a bit like James Cordon. My favourite is the doctor, who hasn't made any ash yet, but likes putting fruit everywhere. She put pineapple in a spring roll and topped it with jam for a starter. "I wish it was a dessert", commented Greg, but then he wishes everything was a desert. She put fruit in some of her other dishes as well. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd want her as a doctor as I'd be slightly worried that I'd come around after an operation to find she's replaced my liver with a dragon fruit. Mention also must be made of one of the chefs who made it through, Steve or Stuart or something. His winning dish was some peas. With some more peas. He cooked a frickin' lot of peas. I don't know what he did to make the dish not just a plate of peas, but he did it well. Changing direction again, very very quickly, I watched High Rise on Monday, and didn't have a clue what happened in it. Nothing made any sense. I would happily condemn it to the scrap heap of the overly sexual and slightly boring, but it gave me one of the beast scenes I've ever seen. There is something glorious about that bit in the supermarket where Tom Hiddlesbottom beats someone up over a can of Dulux. He tops it perfectly with a guttural scream of "ITS MY PAINT!". The film was rubbish, but well worth it just for that. Next week, more MasterChef, and complaints about the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. I liked Peter Capaldi, I'll be sad to see him go.

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Mor - gan a feeling

I didn’t see MasterChef this week. There, I said it - now you can hang or behead me as you see fit. Alternatively, you could let me tread water for another week and talk about the film I watched last night. Namely, Lucy. It was crap. Well, perhaps that’s a little strong. It was boring at least, and took itself far too seriously. To begin, Lucy abandoned one of the primary tenets of storytelling. When someone writes a book or makes a film or program, they have to have  conflict and tension arising from that conflict. What the makers of this film seemed to overlook is you can not build tension when your protagonist is omnipotent. The question ‘Are they going to make it?’, underlies the entire construction of a story. People only stick with something (aside from a comedy) for this, which is why tension and conflict are so important. Firstly, a viewer or reader has to want the character to make it, and secondly they have to be in some doubt that they will. Lucy achieves neither of these. The girl herself, who has unlocked more of her brain’s capacity by having a bag of drugs explode inside her, is not overly likable. She begins as a simpering idiot, and after ingesting 500 grams of super power powder becomes an amoral twat. It is impossible to work out her motives. At first, she seems to want revenge on the mobsters who put the drugs in her in the first place and breaks into their base. We’re doing all right so far. Then she lets the head honcho live and wanders off to speak with More Than Freeman. (I’m never going to let that advert go.) Lucy proceeds through the film for some reason, and would seem to be trying to get the rest of the drugs which will keep her alive for a bit longer. Okay, that works as a motive too. She drives in a hijacked police car to where the mobsters are extracting the last of her power powder from some unfortunates, causing multiple crashes and pile ups on the way and remaining completely indifferent to how many people she just killed. When she arrives, there’s a nice line of goons waiting for her, only instead of knocking them all out at once as she did with a room full of decent folk in the police station earlier, Lucy walks at them v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y, and makes them all rise up into the air when they try to punch her. So it’s okay to kill civilians, but mobsters deserve to live. Yeah, we share a moral compass. They can’t even get away with saying she had lost all her human morals when she became magic either, as it would have been easier just to kill them, but she decided not to. It makes so little sense. Then the film ends with the destruction of Lucy’s only other perceivable motive, survival, when she makes More Than Freeman a magic memory stick and blows herself into oblivion. For. Some. Reason. I certainly don’t know. So she’s dislikeable. That makes it hard to care whether she makes it or not, and without that there’s really no reason to watch any longer. But the makers didn’t stop at that. Every fight, every chance for tension, Lucy does nothing. She just stands there and uses her magic stuff to kill, or knock out if they’re a bad guy, whoever has a quarrel with her. There’s no risk, we know she’s going to survive before we even see what the obstacle is because her powers make her impervious to any danger. That’s why in a lot of fantasy tales magic always has a price, otherwise your mages or wizards would just be invulnerable to everything and you wouldn’t have a story. The protagonist has to be in danger or no one cares. Lucy was dislikeable and essentially immortal, which makes it very difficult to care about what happens to her. Well, that’s the protagonist dissected, let’s move on to More Than Freeman's character. In short, he doesn’t have one. He’s there to provide a second big name to complement Scarlett Johansson. Freeman plays a professor at a university speaking about what he thinks would happen if we unlocked more than ten percent of our brain’s capacity. That’s al- wait, wait, roll back a second. I haven’t mentioned this until now, but they had the audacity to have a person pretending to be a lecturer mention the brain capacity thing so I’m wading in. it’s a myth, people. You should know that. Science has for years, hell, Mythbusters covered it in 2010. That’s what, four years before Lucy came out? Get it together and stop spouting crap please. Or if you’re going to, don’t pretend to be clever while you’re doing it. The voice over they had More Than Freeman do wants so desperately to be something intelligent, it’s doing everything in its power to appear so, but the whole illusion collapses when you see Johansson with her god powers. So, Lucy is based on a myth, takes itself to seriously, has an unlikable protagonist and no tension. I will certainly not be watching it again. Next week, MasterChef, I promise.

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Abraham Lincoln, Quality Slayer

What keeps the world turning? Bad films if their frequency is anything to go by. If I dissected all four of the monstrosities I’ve watched recently then we’d be here all week, so let’s just go for the latest. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is an exceptional pile of male cow droppings. As we heard from the president at the end, ‘History will only remember a fragment of the truth", and I’ll be damned if they’re not going to make up the rest. That said, I can’t question the historical accuracy of the film, as I wasn’t alive during the time of the american civil war and from my cosy outlook on the other side of the Atlantic have never had to learn about the details of the Gettysburg Address (is that right?). I’m sure it is entirely possible that the civil war had not so much to do with slavery as stopping the rise of a vampire world order. I’m sure it’s entirely posssible that Lincoln’s son was bitten by a vampire, and so his wife lead thousands of peasants south with a cargo of concealed silver bullets and bayonets south to the front lines. I’m sure it’s entirely possible that Lincoln used a silver tipped axe to defend a locmotive full of rocks from the vampire hoard while - . Okay, it’s all crap. I would comment on the film as a story in itself, but it’s rather difficult to ignore the fatc that it’s shamelessly dessecrating one of the proudest parts of American history, or at least the part I would be most proud of. Yes, we have some interesting animated fight sequences with an actor who looks nothing like the pictures of Lincoln I’ve seen swings an axe around like a nutjob while someone else jumps about and throws people across the room. The problem is that the animators got a little carried away with their environment effects. For quite a lot of the time, the smoke or mist or whatever is floating around wherever Lincoln’s wandered this time obscures the actual fight. The final battle scene (on a train, on a bridge, on fire) is just a massive cloud of red smog with cinders floating with it. Occassionally they show you Lincoln’s axe, just to give the impression that there was a fight still going on. However, even this was better than the three perspectives a second of Taken 3. It was entertaining enough, if you’ve a perchant for the ridiculous. There’s a subplot like thing where the vampire king tries to get Abraham to kill the vampire who trained him, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s like the end of the third Star Wars when the emperor tells Luke to join the dark side and he says no. And that’s that. It just ends, so one wonders why anyone decided to include it in the first place. Now, I know I haven’t talked about any of the other films I’m about to list, but i thought i might as well. Here is my ranking of the five bad films I’ve seen in the last few weeks, I could use a decent one by now to be honest. Rio 2 comes at the bottom, for it’s startling originality more than anything, then we have Jack and the Beanstalk, the 2009 version, which tried to be quirkily amusing and failed. At third comes How To Train Your Dragon 2, which is nothing to books and fails to be entertaining as a film in it’s own right as well, a twofold failure. In prestigious second place is Monsters University, which is also completely predictable, but not so offensicely so. Bear in mind that this doen’t make it good. Then, surprisingly enough, our good friend Lincoln makes it to the top of the list. It’s amusing, so don’t turn down the opportunity to laugh scornfully at a bloke in a top hat cutting vampire’s heads off. Finally, totally unconnected to anything else, I have to mention that I was in Hastings last week and happened upon the Fifty Shades of Grey board game in a shop. It didn’t end there either, next to it was the Red Room expansion pack. Really this is ridiculous, if you think about it. You don’t need a board game to channel the Fifty Shades experience, all one requires is a partner with low self esteem and a stick. I should know I spend most of my time sitting listening to the exploits of a bunch of seventeen year olds, and if the happy Hasbro men can come up with anything worse than that, well I’ll try on a nipple clamp. (Many thanks for the nipple clamp knowledge to Phillip Schofield, I had no idea these existed until he tried one on on This Morning.)

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Chasing Planes in Cars

And now for something completely different - today we're talking about films. Today I join the exclusive club of those who stuck with the Taken franchise long enough to watch Taken 3. Only two years late to the party eh? Anyway, I watched excitedly as Liam Neeson dragged us all into the cinematic renaissance. Of all the approaches to art to adopt though, I have to say that cubism was a strange choice. To those unfamiliar, cubism takes an image and fragments it, hopefully portraying the subject from multiple perspectives at once. The end result is just a load of incomprehensible colours and squiggles. (To be fair, this is considerably better than the majority of modern art, which takes visual nonsense into the third dimension. How does a blank canvas suspended on the wall count as art? Honestly, I'd like to know.) This same fragmentation principle seems to have been applied to every action sequence in Taken 3, as the brutal combat of America's unluckiest splintered family is shown from all three hundred and sixty degrees of perspective independently in the space of thirty seconds. The camera jumps about so much it's almost impossible to follow what actually happened, and did lead me to wonder whether the cameramen started having some kind of simultaneous fit whenever Liam punched someone. Halfway through the brain just gives up and everything is replaced with the comforting knowledge 'Liam wins in the end'. There's an absurd car chase sequence early on which demonstrates this beautifully, but I'll get to that later.

Now, if there's one thing we've learnt from Takens 1 and 2, it's that Liam Neeson will find you, and that he will kill you (that bit at the end is a nice touch, but I'll not spoil it), and he's willing to blow up a lot of people on the way. In this installment, Liam's very particular set of skills seems to include being able to escape from any number of police officers, provided they arrest him first. If he's free and has a gun he stands no chance, but handcuff him in a car in the middle of a police convoy and he will conquer. Again, this is in the car chase, but I'll deal with this later still. That the police still feel the need to waggle guns in his face and get surprised when he escapes is testament to their frankly stunning optimism, with the only vaguely sensible one being Forest Whittaker. Whittaker, however, possesses the impressive ability to be nowhere near where Liam is at any one time. Whenever the police charge the current location of their prime suspect, bagel man (watch the film and you'll get it) manages to be on the other side of town and comes charging over to have his sergeant tell him that Bryan Mills escaped half an hour ago and evr since they've just been standing about like Matthew Mcfadyen. This is unsurprising, perhaps, when the only competant officer is elsewhere eating his bodyweight in fresh, warm bagels.

Now for the car chase. This was the worst part of the film, and I had no concept of what was happening. Somehow a lorry ended up wedged sideways across a motorway, then its cargo, some kind of shipping container, launched through the air and bounced off merrily down the road crushing and maiming indiscriminantly as it went. Maybe, had a single camera angle lasted for more than two seconds, I might have understood where the lorry came into things in the first place. Hmm. Maybe. Nevertheless, Liam escpaes in his car, having killed who knows how many people in a display of highway mayhem which didn't scratch him at all, and then drives into some multi-story car park. This is where it gets ridiculous. Somehow, Northern Ireland's finest super soldier reverses a car several stories down a lift shaft. It then explodes, filling the shaft with fire. You might expect him to be  hurt by this - but no. Liam climbs from the wreckage and casually flicks his single broken nail into the mess of torn and molten metal which was once a car.

Anyway, the plot holds together and is entertaining enough, the cubist action is absurd and just becomes random visual stimulus after a while, and that chase sequence gets my vote for the annual What-The-Hell-Is-Going-On Award. It was a decent enough action film, although it's clear the script writer is more at home writing Bond-style insults and put downs than familial dramas. The domestic conversations in the first scenes were jarring, the topic changing so fast without any prompting that even the actors didn't seem to know what to do with it. They all just sort of delivered the lines, unsure what was going through the characters heads or how to behave as the writer clearly had no clue either. Liam Neeson muddles his way though by nodding and saying "right...", in the style of someone who hasn't quite heard what the other has said but doesn't want to seem rude by asking them to repeat it. But why did she need to be pregnant? It added nothing to the plot aside from some laughter at the thought that Liam had unknowingly poisoned his unborn grandchild.

Oh, and at the end he takes on a plane at take off speed in a hatchback. This tears the front wheel off while the car is unharmed. The man is made of freakin' adamantium.