The Apprentice...

It's no secret that I love The Apprentice. Whenever it's opening music comes on I sit there in anticaption like some Pavlovian dog salivating in preparation for the feast ahead.

Sadly, I know that what I should really do when the opening music comes on is press the off switch on the TV set and put on some Beethoven and try to work out why everyone else gets it and I don't... or read that book on cartography that I ordered to research a new play idea that I haven't got round to picking up yet... or find some 1970s pornography and masturbate furiously until there's nothing left of my manhood but a bloody, exhausted stump that will never function again without the aid of major surgery...

And that's because I know that pretty much anything else I could do to pass an hour would be morally and educationally better than watching this bilge. But it's my guilty pleasure...

So here's what I've learnt so far after episode one:

i) The candidates this year are really odd-looking. There's Anita, who got booted last night, and has the smallest mouth in the history of the world, which with the red lipstick she wore last night makes it look like a bottom hole after a hot curry. There's also a chap called Rocky who seems to have a shrinking head and a woman called Debra who seems to have an ever-expanding face. It's like a lunar landscape that just goes on and on and on...

ii) Alan Sugar has new scriptwriters. The Amstrad mogul opened the show last night by telling his wannabe business lackeys that 'You can't play me... I'm harder to play than a Stradivarius and you're easier to play than... bongo drums!'

iii) Sugar is becoming more and more like John Culshaw's impression of him with each passing series. I can now genuinely no longer tell the difference between the two.

iv) The business soundbite, utter cock-jockey detector nearly went off the scale last night with gems such as 'Business is the new rock 'n' roll and I'm Elvis Presley' and 'To me making money is better than sex!'

v) They've changed the voiceover on the opening titles boasting about the net value of Sugar's operation because it's obviously no longer worth anywhere near what it used to be.

vi) And the winner is... don't really care as they all seem equally hateful at the moment. Based on last night's evidence I wouldn't hire any of them to run an idiot-proof bath that only operated via an on-off button let alone a business.