Cyberclogs

Oh yeah be meaning to write up about Public Enemy (or PE to their fans) who played ABC in Glasgow on Tuesday and after a ridiculously long wait (nearly 2 and a half hours!) for them to come on the stage they were utterly amazing. They played (and rapped) with the energy of about 100 bands combined and Chuck D and Flavor Flav were both superb on great form, with some good stage banter in between tracks (I liked Chuck D's conspiracy theory that the Queen killed Diana!). They did, rightly enough, get pissed off at all the beer that was thrown at the stage, assholes that do that shouldn't really be at gigs. My only complaint is of course they started way too late so we had to leave early before they finished to get home. Other than that though PE were awesome, go and see them, just make sure you go for a pint or three before you do as you will have one might long wait.

Onto the Apprentice episode 10, which was another fine one which finally saw the kicking of a certain extremely arrogant person out of the show. The task this time was to rent fast cars to people on the street for a few hours ride round London. This task was one of the toughest without a doubt, selling to anyone can't be easy but it was a real test of the stronger candidates to sell well. However Lucinda, who I have to say over the past two weeks has sadly averted back to her original self by being whiny and complaining about everything without even suggesting how to make things better. And on this task she was hopeless as she couldn't sell to save herself she needed team leader Lee, to hold her hand in order to even make a sale! Lee and Alex did manage alot better in their sales and they proved very capable. On the other team though Michael as project manager was totally useless, he had hit rock bottom and clearly had no enthusiasm for fast cars (or cars for that matter) he setup the car to be sold at Portobello Market where there are absolutely no affluent rich well to do people there!! When he did see a customer he had to resort to stalking him and ended up failing to secure a single sale. However Claire did manage a fair bit better and secured a few sales at a much better location I might add!
In the boardroom having found Lee's team won again and Michael's lost, Sir Alan finally let go of his soft spot for the young upstart and had him fired, and not at a moment too soon. Michael had long outstayed his welcome in the program, it was only his arrogant attitude and puppy dog eyes routine in the boardroom that kept him in the show. But he clearly didn't have enough talent for sales to stay in the show, even though he claimed he was best salesman in the show!!! Yeah with only one year's work experience. Pathetic. However I felt Helenne was equally useless on this show, over the past 10 weeks she has proved to be thoroughly inefficient, she basically does nothing but stand around idle and watch other people do things. In the boardroom she did justify herself fairly well enough to Sir Alan and put up a enough of a struggle to keep herself in, just barely. But I basically feel she is useless, her attitude is all wrong towards the other contestants as she clearly has no respect for any of them whatsoever (as she said "I can't stand being in a show with 15 gobshites!"). Well if she can't stand to work with these people then how can she expect to stand working in a team for Sir Alan?!! She is on borrowed time for sure and she will go first next week after the interview process, well either her or Lucinda. So my money is on Claire and Lee for the final, perhaps maybe Alex or Claire even, but I sincerely hope its Lee instead, he's far more animated and capable. Anyways the interview episode will be a real highlight next week so I can't wait to see it. It will be really interesting to see who will get through to the final.

I've not been able to fully write up about the 7th episode of the new series of Dr Who as the last time I did the friggin Internet cut out on me and it didn't save the post! So here goes...

I really enjoyed this episode where the Doctor and Donna meet up with Agatha Christie at a dinner party back in 1926 round about the same time as her mysterious real life dissappearance and this time they have to thwart off a big killer giant wasp as it kills off the inhabitants of a mansion one by one. So in fine super sleuth style, the Doctor and Agatha try to deduce who exactly was the murderer.

This episode was really enoyable from start to finish I liked the use of Agatha Christie's real life disappearance which was smartly woven into the storyline. The best scene occurred when the Doctor is poisoned and he describes to Donna while gasping for breath what he needs to expel the poison from his system, it was a real laugh. This is of course followed up by the obligatory kissing scene, added to every season, it must be a contractual thing for David Tennant that he has to get off with all of his campanions once! This is not too bad a thing as Russell T Davies always neatly uses the "kiss" for another reason altogether rather than just a bit of sexual tension.

But this was a really entertaining episode hopefully the next one Silence in the Library, which was postponed last Saturday because of the God awful Eurovision Song Contest, will be a good un, should be, its penned by Steven Moffatt, who has been rumoured to write the whole of the next new series of Who.

Well that's another bank holiday weekend over, and it was a rather nice one, as I went to the theatre for the first time in a little while and saw Drawer Boy with Scott (our main acting class organiser/thesp group actor) and it turned out to be pretty good although not quite as brilliant as everyone was saying it was. There seemed to be a lot of repetition in the script and there were times were I kind of lost attention but the actors were all excellent, especially Brian Pettifer, who's a veteran character actor who has been round for years (he started off I believe in Lindsay Anderson's If.....). The younger actor Brian Ferguson was also very good and he affected a rather unusual Canadian accent (to top it off with his wig he looked alot like Beck!).

On Sunday went to the Falls of Clyde in New Lanark with my cuz Dale and it was nice little day out, although I did pick up a midgie bite somewhere (on my face that is!) but scenery was stunning and the falls were lovely until you come across the rather ugly Scottish Power building and big reservoir pipes, which kind of put of a blight on the beauty of the site. After that we got a Lanark town curry which was excellent and then back to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I have to admit was rather disappointing overall, it was entertaining with some good action scenes, but the plot was really naff and it got bogged down in it too much. It was nice to see the return of Karen Allen in it though but she was largely sidelined and wasn't given a whole lot to do except smile at the camera and dodge things.

Anywayyyyyy that was the weekend tonight I shall being going to see Public Enemy at the ABC, so we'll see if we should believe the hype. Oh and I hope Sir Alan finally fires Michael tonight in The Apprentice (which is on tonight!) but I doubt it somehow but you can live in hope.

I haven't had much time to write up about my acting group lead under Iain McAleese's tuition (and direction) which as I've said before is really good and has been a bit more intense than any of the acting we've done so far. Our last night there featured a showcase from the group, which involved us in pairs doing scenes from either Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts or A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennesse Williams). My chosen scene was from Streetcar which I did with Judith, I played the downtrodden Mitch and Judith played the manipulative Blanche, and it was a really good scene, and thankfully I didn't manage to disgrace myself on the acting "physicality" side I managed to keep it together and Judith was terrific. Overall the class on the night were actually really great, especially one of younger members in our class, Gordon, who played a doddering drunken older character from Ghosts, and he was brilliant at it as he had so much dialogue to remember. Its great and refreshing to see in our class how many natural actors there are and that I am the best out the lot of them (as if!!! Big headed bullshit mode off). Nah. I jest, but seriously there are some really talented people in our group and I'm quite chuffed to be working with them. Iain wants to continue with the acting classes in a month's time, where he will aim to go a bit "deeper" than what we've already done, so it will be interesting to see how it goes...

So it was a great night and after we had some wine and nibbles (well OK i didn't take that many nibbles) followed by the pub and then a drunken wander towards a taxi rank, and I left the evening feeling rather chuffed (and slightly aroused! In short I kind of sort of got off with someone, and yes it was a female!).

So I look forward to the next acting classathon when it comes. In the meantime the Shakespeare in Practice classes have so far proved to be really good fun and our tutor Bill Wright is very good, who has a funny mixture of being laid back and intense at the same time (you might have seen him in small parts on Taggart! Well maybe). Righhhttt enough for noowww. I shall enjoy (or try to enjoy) the weekend. Going to see Drawer Boy at the Tron Theatre tomorrow so I may post a review of it here, if it floats the boat.

Episode 9 of The Apprentice was highly entertaining and was a nice step up from the dissaponting episode of the previous week. The two teams had to come up with a brand of tissues, film an add for it and then pitch to tissue companies and guess who would be watching the final product?

The two teams both had very different dynamics, as Raef's team seemed to get on well with one another as Raef and Michael worked together on the filming of the add while Claire and Helenne worked out the production of the box and the sales pitch. Claire excelled herself at the pitch in the presentation, however I must admit that Raef on this task did appear a bit too up his on arse and full of his own self importance. However at least they got on better than as a team than Alex's, who lead (or totally mislead) Lee and Lucinda with a bland of idea of presenting a family using the box of tissues. Alex and Lucinda almost right from the get go didn't get on, but Lucinda was right in what she thought about the choice for the tissues, the family idea was bland, the box was too garish to look at (someone blowing their noses!). However Lee turned out to be far more impressive on the task than Lucinda and Alex put together, who just squabbled mainly, he came up with the "Atishu" name and he also tried to refocus the team when they argued, but his pitch was somewhat poor, as he seemed pretty flustered by all the people in the presentation.

The result of Alex's team winning was a bit of a surprise as it was hard to pick a winner out of either of those two products. Alex's product looked hideous (might aswell have someone blowing snot out their noses!) their add was pretty tacky and naff. However Raef's add was better directed but it completely missed out the point of product, i.e. the tissues! In the boardroom though Raef was shockingly put in the firing line and went, Sir Alan dismissed him as being nothing but "hot air". Raef has far more integrity than Michael who was also brought back into the boardroom too, as Michael lied by saying that all the good things about the task were attributed entirely to him. What a load of bullshit! I can't fathom why Michael is still in this show? Does Sir Alan really see this guy as the next Apprentice? I would be seriously worried if he turned round and picked him to win. To be honest if anyone deserves to win its Lee, who is totally straight down the line hard working, dedicated and tries his best to get on with everyone. Michael is just a bullshitter who's running on borrowed time, but somehow he's still there! Claire I have to say though has come good through this whole show, I didn't like her at first but I'm beginning to warm up to her as she doesn't resort to backstabbing and bullshitting the others, she just speaks her mind, so hopefully she will make it to the final, but then again Sir Alan might have it in for her. I did love Sir Alan's comment about her just before she was going to be called back into the boardroom "Claire will no doubt get her 500 rounds of bullshit and load it into her AK-47!". Priceless.

So again I feel Sir Alan made the wrong choice with firing the debonair Raef, he's a decent all round guy, he even made good entertaining TV and he was really capable, a bit too pretentious maybe but he was a real diplomat. A shame. Achh well bring on the next one!

The 8th episode of the Apprentice was actually a bit of a letdown in comparison to the excellent previous episodes, which kept building up the momentum of the show. Possibly because now most of the snakes have been ejected from the house (although there's still the odd one in there!) there is less "good TV" drama to watch. Nonetheless it was watchable.

This week's task was to sell wedding dresses to prospective female buyers and the team who made the most profit will win. The teams were both headed by Lucinda and Helenne. Now for the warning: episode SPOILER:

Yes the team that won was in fact headed by Lucinda, funnily enough, this is the second time she has been team leader and also the second time she had gotten credit for it. Lucinda's main strengths actually seem to lie in delegation as she got Claire to go out and supervise the buying of the dresses and which designer of the dresses to go with, and she also mixed in Lee with the selling of the wedding accessories, which worked out successfully too. And yet again despite Helenne's so called efficiency she was anything but efficient as a team leader, she seemed to make the wrong choices in cakes and accessories, the dresses were well sold by Alex (who acquitted himself again this week by making some good sales for Helenne's team). Michael and Sara also were not very good this week either as they both tried to push for the hard sale with their customers, in fact most of the customers felt intimidated and put off by their sales techniques.

In the boardroom though Sir Alan finally had had enough of Sara and her refusal to listen to people in the team and poor communication, and he had her fired. I didn't entirely feel this wasn't justified as Sara didn't perform very well in the task, she did push and try for the hard sale a bit much towards the end. In the long run I don't Sara could have been a serious contender for the show, as she said herself she felt she doesn't get on well within a team, but I found it quite encouraging when she said she would go and work for herself in the future, good for her.

But to honest Michael was far worse, he practically intimidated a woman customer at one point into buying a cake, which just put the customer off even more! The fact Michael wasn't fired by Sir Alan shows he still must have a soft spot for this boy, after he pleaded to stay and to be made project manager again next week. But clearly Sir Alan was getting fed up with Michael's whole admittance to his mistakes and the "I'll never do it again" attitude, and I'm sincerely hoping that his number is up pretty soon, as I really don't want him to win, given the look Nick gave Sir Alan after he let him go, Sir Alan would be mad to let him away with it again! Which brings me to Helenne who I felt didn't justify herself at all well in the boardroom this week and to be honest I felt the failure of the task was based mostly on her poor decision making. She said to camera that she felt she would not like to work with these people in the real world and would have them all fired if they worked for her, to be honest I can't see her doing too well in the real world if she is anything like the way she is in this show!

So my money on those to be in the finale would be either Raef and Claire, although I would much like to see Lucinda in the final aswell as she has really been good since the halfway mark of this show and shown her skills as a team leader. Its hard to tell who will exactly stay in at this stage but it will be fun to find out.

Episode 6, Doctor's Daughter (of Dr Who), I have to say was thoroughly enjoyable, in fact a good candidate for one of the best episodes of the fourth season yet. The Doctor takes Donna and Martha on a forced journey (i.e. out of his control for a change) to an alient planet where they are soon captured and the Doctor is taken for a DNA sample and bingo... the result comes out of a big fancy machine, producing a rather beautiful young woman who turns out to be the Doctor's daughter, its amazing what a DNA sample can do in the future!! To top this off though, the humans that inhabit the world are fighting against a group of alien creatures called the Hath in a struggle for supremacy (or basically fighting until one of the species has been wiped out) and Martha is kidnapped by the Hath. But the Doctor with the help of Donna soon unravels what is going on.

This was a bit of a surprise this episode as I thought it would be a bit naff on paper, but in practice it was very entertaining. The idea of the Doctor having daughter when you think of it isn't too ludicrous, and he comes back to his "real" family who of course apparently died years ago, you realise he must have had family, a wife and children of his own many many years back. In fact it was a nice touch to see the Doctor react with fear towards his newly born DNA sampled daughter as it made him afraid that he would lose her like his family before. The episode also neatly poked fun at the format of the show as Donna in one scene mentions to Jenny (the Doc's daughter) that travelling with him is a lot of fun but there is a lot of running involved. It was about time they mentioned that!! It was kind of disappointing though to see Martha just go back home at the end but I guess she had found her home and place on Earth and settled in. But the ending also produced a nice little surprise which hopefully will pay off in future episodes.

Warning - This blog entry contains spoilers of this episode!

Last night's episode of The Apprentice was again totally riveting TV as the task for this week saw the remaining contestants being sent out to Marakesh where they had to barter with the local market dealers to get 10 items for cheap prices. This certainly doesn't sound easy as a task and it proved a real challenge for both teams, but they both got there in the end.

Along the way though I was quite shocked by the cheap manipulative and under-handed tactics of Jenny who deliberately tried to sabotage the efforts of the other team when they both ended up in a sports shop to purchase 2 tennis rackets. Jenny tried to bribe the shop assistants into delaying the production of the rackets so that way they wouldn't get them in time. This was really a low display from a low character, as Jenny went even further down in my estimation than before after that. Michael was no better who guilt-free went along with Jenny on this act of sabotage, in fact going back to my dislike for Michael, he proved it even more in another piece to the camera when he said "People say "you are arrogant" and I say "yes I'm a 100% arrogant! What are you going to do about it?". Shouldn't people really go up to him and say "yes and you are also a total asshole, what are you going to do about that?!".

Moving on to the outcome of the task, delightfully it was good to see the good team win, i.e. Lee's team consisting of Lucina, Sara, Helenne and Raef, all of whom performed very well under pressure, even though Lee kept repeating the same phrase "That's what I'm talking about!!" a 100 times. They also didn't subscribe to the same pathetic underhanded tactics of the other team, but it was revealed that Jenny and Michael never told the other team mates or Jennifer their project leader (i.e. cold but foxy Dubliner) about the incident either.

In the boardroom Sir Alan let rip on the losing team and much to my delight he overruled the decision of the team leader bringing 2 people back into the boardroom, he brought them all back in where they all had to state their case. And thankfully and finally Jenny was fired for her insubordinate act of trying to stall the rackets from being made for the other team as well as not purchasing a "Kosher" chicken (cos she didn't know what Kosher meant!). It was about time this snakey manipulative bitch got her commupence. Sir Alan accused her again of shifting the blame onto others which she once too often did throughout this contest, but even after she was fired, driving away in the taxi she still denied being in the wrong, as she lied about not knowing what Kosher meant and tried to blame Michael. Jennifer came the next victim of Sir Alan, which I think was fair because she really did struggle and fumble around as project manager. Ironically Lucinda actually turned out to be a far more effective project manager than Jennifer did after Jennifer berated her in week five!! Jennifer also tried to argue her case while spitting out venom at the other contestants and even at Sir Alan. Jennifer claimed to be honest and not a cheat but she was too much of an ice queen and a snake to work in that line of business.

I was kind of dissapointed though to see Michael get spared, as Sir Alan obviously has a soft spot for this boy, as he said he saw himself in him, imagining himself at his age of 25 being that arrogant and over-enthusiastic. But to be honest I sincerely hope this boy doesn't win The Apprentice as it would be a real travesty if he did, and it would also mean that Sir Alan would have too much of a sentimental streak for people who mirror his personality. At that point I think Nick and Margaret should take him into a white room and beat him up. But speaking of Margaret I was also rather annoyed at her comment about Edinburgh, as Nick said Michael's an educated boy from Edinburgh Uni and he should know what kosher means to which Mags said: "I don't think Edinburgh is what it used to be!". Cheeky bitch! Anyway that's quite enough for now.

Episode 5 Poison Sky of Doc Who was quite entertaining I have to say, it was a pretty good conclusion to the two part story involving the Sontarans (or Sontrans as Donna would say) where the Doctor, Donna and Martha, oh and a squad of soldiers all fight back against the rutheless potato heads.

The action was pretty good when we saw the sontarans storm the factory and wipe out the soldiers, with General Staal's second in command shouting out insults with glee as he zaps anyone within a two foot radius. I also liked Donna's takedown of a sontaran soldier and she did it quoting Alan Partridge ("Back of the neck!"). The end of the episode left me very curious about next week's installment as we are about to meet the Doctor's daughter (and she looks good!). I was sceptical about the notion of the Doctor's family being introduced but then again Susan was his granddaughter, which suggests he did have kids at some point, and we know so little about the Doctor as it is. Anyway bring on the next one.

On a separate note, in spite of the sunny weather I'm suffering from a bout of hayfever just now, so I'm sneezing away as I write this, damnit!! Oh yeah also I've not had a chance to write on my Shakespeare class yet, more on that later, but its been quite enjoyable so far, although we have been concentrating on the theory side of it so far, but I think Shakespeare warrants a fair bit of theory before leaping into the text. And last night's class was fun because we got to hurl some Shakesperian insults at one another in a kind of slanging match, you are nothing but a cloth-eared puss-ridden caxcomb! Etc etc. Anyway that's all for now.

I'm coming fairly close to the end to the acting classes I've doing with one of our previous Art of Acting tutors, Iain McAleese, as we have two more classes to go. Its been actually pretty good so far, we've had a fair spread of different things, improvisation, scenes from plays, warm ups, movement exercises etc. But I must admit there are times where I can get a little frustrated at Iain and the way he can direct his students, quite often when you do a scene or in the past I have done a monologue in front of the class, and he would quite often stop me in the middle of the scene to comment on my physicality and movement. Now this is fine, but in the classes we do we only get so much time, in fact only 2 hours in these classes, and 2 hrs 30 mins in the previous ones, so while I appreciated his feedback it quite often means I don't get a chance to complete my performance of the scene. But I guess that's just time is against us really, but it is a bit dissapointing we can't all get a chance to do our complete scenes. Ah wellie. But I don't mean to moan as it has been very good so far and Iain is a good director, and I think we have all been quite brave to take Iain's direction (he can be intimidating at times!) and the tough scenes he's given us to do. Its also good he's giving us more deeper and intense situations and scenes to play with as I guess we should all have a balance of the dark and light.

Moving on now to last night's episode of the Apprentice, which I thought was again one of the best ones yet. The task this time was to create a themed post card and pitch it to big companies such as Clifton cards and Tesco. Right off we could see that of the two teams, the one that would fall down was Kevin's team. Kevin (who looks like a younger Matt Lucas, of Little Britain etc) is another idiot with a vastly overvalued opinion of his own abilities who took it upon himself to do the pitch in front of the companies, despite the fact there were two people in his team, Jenny and Claire who were both far more qualified to do that than he was! That was his main mistake as he refused to listen to the rest of his team who urged to let Claire or Jenny pitch for him, if they did, they possibly could have if not won, then gained more sales. But their theme of posting a card to someone about saving the environment seemed a bit hypocritical as you are hardly saving the environment by sending one of these cards!

Michael's team on the other hand were more sure footed as was he as a team leader, but to be honest I really don't like this guy. In his piece to the camera at the start of the episode he said "there isn't anyone I wouldn't screw over to get to be The Apprentice" right then and there I knew this guy had zero moral integrity. Having people on like Michael definitely highlights what is wrong with the show as its displays more than anything that ruthless bastards can and will succeed in business. But should they?! I don't think so. Michael himself largely comes across a humourless, soulless asshole, who throughout this whole episode he barely smiled once not even when he won the task, rather than shout and smile jubilantly, he shouted like a thug at a football match, even then he was incapable of smiling!! For him it seemed like it just wasn't about winning but defeating the other team. In short he's a real prick.

And once again I do agree wholeheartedly with Sir Alan's decision to fire Kevin, he really was incompetent on this task, he did 3 terrible pitches, he didn't listen to anyone else for advice. He also picked the wrong person to go back in the boardroom, I felt he should have chosen Jenny instead of Claire (to be fair she bit her tongue a bit more since her last telling off) as the environment was her idea and it was a bad one, possibly then Jenny would have been fired. And that would have been great as Jenny is a really spiteful, nasty piece of work, her shifting the blame to Sara for lack of input on the task was somewhat pathetic as it wasn't her input that failed the task, it was Jenny's! (and Kevin's).

But the real shocking moment of the show was when Sara came back to the house and the others berated her for not pulling her weight in the task, especially Jenny, Alex and Lee. This was really out of order, and it made me realised what a bunch of snakes they really have put in this year, in fact there are too many of them, hopefully next year they can select less bastards and give us some decent hard working folk. I was dissappointed to see Lee rip into Sara especially as he's always seemed to be an OK guy, a grafter, but I did appreciated Raef's defence of Sara as he really stood up for her (and sir Alan's decision). If I were Sir Alan I would fire Jenny, Alex, and Michael altogether at once, the three of them are self serving backstabbing tossers.

Anyway enough ranting and raving, I can't wait for the next edition.