Beloved Hip Hop pioneer Tim ‘The Big Dawg’ Westwood hides in the back of a random strangers car and reports on their car journeys in his own inimitable style using the popular social networking site Twitter.

“Ethel Brown is turning her swag up to 11 and getting her game on. We off to Tesco for some fresco. We be taking Derby Road by storm! BOOOM!”

I CAN SEE FOR CHILES

Sad faced People’s Pundit Adrian Chiles points out objects of interest in the distance whilst grimacing intently.

“I think, I think that’s a post office…”

MAD ABOUT THE ROY

‘Catchphrase’ sensation Roy Walker takes an in depth look at celebrity stalking and the stalkers themselves, the show climaxes with a segment in which Roy is locked in a featureless, windowless room with a large man who has been stalking Roy for 27 years and refers to himself as Mr. Chips.

F###ING KITCHEN B###OCKS S###HEAD

Britain’s favourite sweary chef spends a day with an average ‘credit crunched’ family and ruthlessly tears apart their every meal. Wince as he drowns one of the children in their pathetic bowls of cereal at breakfast, laugh as Mum’s piss-poor ham sandwich lunch is set on fire and fired at her leg using a nail gun, whimper as Dad’s offensive Shepherd’s Pie is kicked around the house before Gordon beats the inferior cook to death using a selection of carefully selected kitchen implements.

Former TV Hypno-star Paul McKenna returns with the latest in his series of self help books. There was ‘I Can Make You Thin’, then ‘I Can Make You Rich’, and now ‘I Can Make You Feel Uncomfortable’.

This worryingly large book features page after page of photographs of McKenna staring intently out at the reader accompanied by a single sentence or word. Examples include “I’M IN YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW”, “I’M HYPNOTISING YOU”, “TOUCHING YOUR FACE AS YOU SLEEP”, and “FEAR”. Paul explains his ‘Scared Shitless’ programme in the blurb,

“THANK YOU FOR BUYING THIS BOOK MINION. I KNOW YOU ARE FEELING WORTHLESS, LONELY, AND UNLOVED. GOOD. I AM GOING TO FREAK YOU RIGHT OUT. READ THE BOOK, LOOK AT THE PICTURES. SEE WHERE THAT GETS YOU. IF YOU FEEL SCARED YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT WORRY ABOUT HOW AWFUL YOUR LIFE HAS GOT, YEAH?”

Thanks Paul. I am huge fan of McKenna’s previous self help masterpieces and so am disappointed to have to report that this one leaves a lot to be desired. Pages such as number 37, which features a close up image of an eye and the words ‘YOU ARE A MASSIVE FAILURE’, successfully failed to raise my spirits or even vaguely distract me from the woe filled exercise in futility that is my life.

All in all a crushing let down for this McKennoid (the general term for fans of the mind control guru) but I still have hope. He has announced a number of future titles including ‘I Can Make You Fly’, ‘Dig A Hole In 7 Days’, ‘Start Smoking Instantly’, and the already controversial ‘I Can Make You Die’. Let’s hope those books can return this once great man to his rightful place as King Of The Mindscrubbers.

For the last few Wednesday nights at around 9.50 pm on BBC 1, what looks like an angry-faced combination of various woodland animals in a suit verbally abuses some god-awful bundle of arrogance and attitude held together with hair gel/hair spray (delete as applicable) before ‘firing’ them in turn from a made up job they haven’t even got yet.

And it’s very entertaining.

No really. I should hate this show. The contestants are all loathsome bell ends (even more so in the recent series) with whom I have nothing in common; it’s full of ‘business speak’; and the main judges are a deluded little monkey man and his cloned henchmen Greybot 1 and Greybot 2. But somehow it just works.

Admittedly the main reason I enjoy it is that I really like shouting at the little people in my television and this provides plenty of opportunities for me to do just that. The desperados jostling for Siralun’s attention are truly despicable. They are all ‘born leaders’ and ‘gifted salespeople’ if you listen to the twaddle that flows effortlessly from their massive, jabbering mouths. They are easy to hate and I like things that are easy. This all means that their constant failures and cock-ups are great fun to watch. It’s funny. That’s the best way to watch it, as a comedy. Some kind of ‘Wall Street meets The Crystal Maze meets…um…Judge Judy’?

Anyway, this series has been great so far and this is due to the quality of the brainless mannequins they have as contestants.

Ben – a smug squirrel who nearly went to ‘Sandhurst’ and who uttered the ridiculous phrase “To me making money is better than sex” which I hope (and pray) will guarantee him a life without sex; James – the reincarnation of Tommy Cooper; Lorraine – Emma Thompson in Nanny McPhee; Phillip – TV’s Bob Mortimer disguised as an arrogant twerp; and Debra – a huge faced cyborg who listens to the inane chatter of the others whilst wearing an ice cold, somewhat bemused expression not dissimilar to that of a bird of prey surveying a crowd of squeaking mice.

And the tasks, oh the tasks. ‘Re-branding Margate’ was a favourite of mine, one team went for ‘See It Through A Child’s Eyes’ (which I wrongly assumed would be lots of photos of the town from a low angle) while the other group decided to market Margate to the gay community, consisting of pictures of men and women looking awkward surrounded by rainbow flags. The ‘Create a Breakfast Cereal’. which resulted in loud-mouth imbecile Phillip successfully pitching the character of ‘Pants Man’ to his team mates. It was a man, in his pants. High concept stuff. Tonight’s episode featured one of the classic regular humiliations, the ‘Shopping Channel’ task. Watching the cast of idiots attempting to sell Deep Fat Fryers, a multi-colored scarf, and a Gold Jacket that would shame MC Hammer all the while wearing rictus grins, brought a warm sneer to my face.

The boardroom climax of the show will nearly always end in a school-yard shout-fest as each of the candidates scramble over one another to put their case forward to jumped up Napoleon Siralun. Ben’s tactic was to shout “letmefinish” repeatedly even though in some cases no one else was talking.

Evil troll Lorraine seems to think that playing the victim is the way to go despite having the kind of personality that even the Dalai Llama would find maddening. And in the end, it comes down to the little man with the plan, SIR Alan Sugar, to decide who goes off to minimum fame and little fortune and who is absorbed into his business and never seen again.

In reality, of course, it has nothing to do with the actual business world and is simply another clever spin on reality TV. But what a clever little spin.

I admit it; My name is Martin Higgins, and I am addicted to The Apprentice.

Join me won’t you?

Martin Clunes stars as the latest in the BBC’s long line of comedy curmudgeons in this ‘re-imagining’ of the 70′s sit-com ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’. He plays Reggie Perrin, a man on the brink of a nervous break down, laughing yet? Now I don’t know the old series very well, I probably saw one or two repeats a long time ago, so I can’t do the whole ‘not as good as the original’ bollocks. I’m judging it as a separate entity, and I’m judging it as pretty crap.

It’s not necessarily Clunes that is the problem. I happen to find him quite inoffensive despite having a head that resembles a particularly unhappy plate of fried breakfast. I liked Men Behaving Badly because of his performance and…well..that’s the only thing I can remember watching him in apart from a likable interview on Jonathan Ross’s show recently. I’m still sure it’s not really him that makes this bad.

For starters there is the incredibly irritating 70′s style chirping theme music which keeps popping up like a budgie with tourettes every 5 minutes. If you are going to update an old show and want to avoid the inevitable ‘remake’ tag (I’ll stop putting things in ‘ ‘s now) then don’t give it the same bloody music!

Then there is the fantasy/daydream bits, another leftover from the original series. I understand the point of them but to me they are as useful as the ones found in ‘Diary of a Stick Figure’ or Ally McBeal as it was actually called. They are mainly acts of violence such as shooting the wife’s friend in the head, or sexual aggression like repeatedly kissing a sexy co-worker. This led to a HILARIOUS scene wherein old Reg accidentally acted on one of these impulses and forced his weird mouth on said co-worker with disastrous results.

Maybe it’s just me but I’m a bit bored with the ‘Grumpy Old Man’ syndrome being mined for sit-com plots. The yanks give us ‘Arrested Development’ and the like and we trot out more ‘Adventures of Young Victor Meldrew’. It’s just not bloody good enough! Oh christ, I actually sound like Perrin now. Right I’m off to walk into the sea…

I have decided to jump ship to WordPress. This is in order to kickstart my blogging again and also as a way to link my blog with the new venture that myself, the awesome Richard ‘Vivmondo’ Hirst, and the tremendous Jessie Doherty are undertaking. More on that later. Anyway, my old blog is here but from now on I shall be posting here. That’s the story so far.