Cyberclogs

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.