DVD: The Apprentice – The Best Of Series 1-4

Self-styled as The Job Interview From Hell (and spoken at a volume that makes you wonder if you haven’t accidentally found Masterchef instead), The Apprentice is one of Auntie’s few success stories of the last few years. From its humble beginnings as cult favourite on BBC2 to its prime time explosion on BBC1 (complete with a post-game spin-off on the latter to keep everyone happy), the show is now five series’ strong and shows no sign of the declining popularity afflicting its Stateside predecessor, presided over by Donald Trump, a man whose hair threatens to defy all the known laws of physics.

In his place, Sir Alan Sugar (the business empresario behind Amstrad) and a healthy dose of brittle English greed. The whole production is in sharp contrast to the zip edit gold-washed frenzy of Trump’s US version. Instead, it’s all muted greys and blues and a boardroom decked out in Ikea’s premier range. Not for the UK Trump’s oil-slick charm. Sirallun (as he is known now in the collective conscience) is gruff, foreboding and quite clearly enjoying every bloody minute.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, here’s how it goes: Sirallun sets two teams made up of hapless wannabe Richard Branson’s and reality tv miscreants an entrepreneurial task with the winning team being the one that has managed to turn the most profit.

The losers return to the boardroom amid sweeping aeriel shots of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin to give the impression that all the firing (and eventual hiring) takes place in London’s glittering business districts when in fact they’re only trooping back to a warehouse in Essex. Sirallun’s aides Margaret and Nick under whose auspices the task is carried out generally sit looking smug before Sirallun yells at the stupidity of the losing team (even when they’ve fallen victim to bad luck or faced impossible odds) and delivers his zeitgeist-friendly catchphrase, ‘You’re fired!’ to that task’s weakest link. Repeat x 12 weeks all in the name of a £100,000 a year job in one of Sirallun’s organisations.

And it works. Oh god, it pains me to say this but it works. It works so well, the format has remained unchanged for five years now. While the US version has spun itself silly reinventing the wheel, the UK edition knows what works, sticks religiously to it and lets the contestants do their worst. Huge ratings ensue.

This DVD (or ‘Sirallun’s Greatest Hits’) revisits Series 1 to 4 and it’s interesting to note not only how psychologically damaged the contestants have increasingly become (the prize should surely now by default include one month’s psychiatric therapy) but also how the show has started making more use of the rapid-fire editing from America that puts expressions alongside actions that clearly don’t belong together.

The biggest negative is that this DVD lacks any of the dramatic tension, manufactured or otherwise, that the series has so much of. It’s all too easy to forget that when The Apprentice begins each year, it usually takes four to six weeks before you can distinguish one candidate from another. Until then, they’re very much one amorphous blob of monetary parasite.

The Apprentice is high-grade disposable reality tv, designed as such. It’s not there to be revisited, replayed or analysed in anything other than weekly doses before it’s on to the next episode. If you’re an Apprentice Super Fan who knows just how many hairs are in Sirallun’s beard (Answer: They’re not hairs but the residual energy from the souls of the candidates he eviscerates each week) or it’s Christmas (when this sort of DVD gets played once on Boxing Day and never again), this is mana from heaven. Otherwise, this is very much for completists only.

The Apprentice: The Best of Series 1-4 is out now. Get your mits on a copy by clicking here.

STAGE: High School Musical – Live

Dave Scullion went to see High School Musical: Live On Stage, so you don’t have to.

It was a TV film, it upgraded to the cinema, it had a best-selling album, then a sequel, an ice show, a live concert and now a full-blown stage show. This is the phenomenon of High School Musical – a Disney cash cow that will be gloriously milked until it’s dead and dry, and currently it’s still full of milk. Sadly, however, the milk tastes very, very sour.

Some would say “why bother going?”, simply because the entire franchise is known to be shallow and clichéd pointlessness, as deep as a thimble and half as intelligent, but sometimes you can be surprised by even the worst thought-of theatre. This is not one of those times. Not in any way. My presence at this show was an ironic birthday gift from a reviewer friend of mine, and for the first time in my life I got to utter the words “I wish I’d never been born”. In July, anyway.

The premise is so unoriginal it’s hardly worth mentioning – new girl (Gabriella) is a genius geek who is also gorgeous, who falls for effete basketball jock (Troy), but their classmates immediately oppose this horrendous love-match until the entire school simultaneously decides “actually, sod it, why not?” and they all live happily ever after.

It’s so repugnantly optimistic that every character gets together with their opposite number from jock & geek to basketball coach & lunatic drama teacher. But – pinch yourself – is that a gay teenager over there? Possibly, but he doesn’t end up with anyone and instead gets to dance around in sequined trousers and be mostly ignored. This avoidance of any form of edge (no bullying, no sexual relations, not even any real anger) makes it impossible to empathize with any characters. It is an idealistic world without threat, and the pre high-school demographic are in for a horrible shock come age eleven when their new school isn’t full of cheesy-faced idiots whose idea of bullying is “gentle persuasion”. Instead it’s genuinely cruel-hearted fools and a massive punch in the scrotum. But this is Disney after all, and boy do we know it.

The entire experience is an exploitative vampire puppeteered by Disney, from the £5 High School Musical pens to the shameless in-show plugs for previous Disney pieces (someone sings an excerpt from the Lion King and one guy wears a Little Mermaid t-shirt… and somehow doesn’t get bullied). The shocking surprise is how cheap the set and costumes look, dispensing with the usual plush evocative settings of most Disney shows and replacing them with cold and boring school walls and lockers. Yet this show isn’t about believability or emotional depth, it’s about… well, here’s the stumbling block. On one hand it tries to evoke a sense of righteousness in doing whatever your passion is regardless of general opinion, but then the other throws this idea out of the window if you aren’t important enough to have a speaking role. As refreshing an idea as the song Stick To The Status Quo is (where kids in stereotypical cliques admit they want to be something other than a skater, a geek or a jock), this revelation is completely ignored and the characters remain the same throughout, reverting back to their respective stereotypes and only altering slightly at the end when everyone suddenly loves theatre. And I mean literally everyone, including the basketball coach who utterly changes character and suddenly loves the fact his son prefers drama to sport. Billy Elliot, this isn’t.

So is the music or the script or the cast or even the source material to blame for this inane cavalcade of garishness? Oddly, the source material is so much better than the play. The film is much tighter, much funnier and surprisingly watchable. As embarrassing as it is to admit that I voluntarily watched a sizeable chunk of High School Musical: The Film, it does give me a unique vantage point from which to understand where the theatre version went crucially wrong. The script and music has not been well converted to stage, providing lines like: “Thank you for showing me your top secret hiding place” – a line even a seven year old would baulk at if they weren’t so busy clapping or screaming. It’s a cliché-ridden amalgamation of all things expected. Letitia Dean’s Ms Darbus even says to Coach Bolton: “Never in all my years in the theatre have I seen such small minded, simple subterfuge”. Welcome to Disney, Ms Darbus, welcome to Disney.

High School Musical: Live On Stage lacks the focus of the film, and at times so much action is happening across the stage that you wilfully ignore important dialogue and exposition in favour of watching a man in a hoodie pretending to be a kid pretending to be a caterpillar. Entire chunks of the flaccid plot are lost forever, leaving you in bewilderment as to how the school board allowed a major basketball tournament to happen at the same time as the science decathlon and the school play’s final recalls. This leaves anyone who isn’t solely interested in the music and spectacle utterly perplexed, and this misery is compounded when the first act is fifty minutes long and the second is an excruciating sixty. By the time the song Get Your Head in The Game came on I wanted to get my head in an oven and explore Sylvia Plath’s unique exit strategy… and that’s about twenty minutes in, although the song is generously repeated throughout the show for an audience clearly blessed with a memory of a dead goldfish and a severe hatred of originality.

Yet maybe this is too harsh for something aimed at children. This theatre piece is more akin to a pantomime than a musical, with audience members screaming and yelling for no apparent reason during potentially poignant moments. When Gabriella finds Troy in his “top secret hiding place” (a greenhouse, in case you cared) and they sing sweetly to each other, the audience started randomly clapping to a non-existent rhythm like a bunch of drunks at a music festival. Is this the fault of the audience or perhaps the fault of the play, unable to effectively convey the correct emotion to the audience?

Perhaps because of this lack of cohesion between actor’s intention and audience reaction the actors in High School Musical: Live On Stage never seem to really put their all into the sequences between songs, knowing their words don’t really matter too much. This seems especially so with Letitia Dean, who at times appears embarrassed and uncomfortable bumbling around like a desperate pantomime dame. Only Michael Pickering (Ryan) seemed to genuinely get into his role, but his character was the aforementioned (and unmentionable) gay guy, so any hope of exploring him was quashed as soon as he first flounced onto stage.

Finally, I must mention the venue. The Hammersmith Apollo is in desperate need of a revamp, in the same way the show needs to be smashed to pieces and rebuilt. The interior is literally falling apart, with missing seat and row numbers, carpets which are more chewing gum than carpet, and seats almost as flimsy as High School Musical’s plot. The Apollo’s aging sound system and poor acoustics meant words and songs were incomprehensible, making it even harder to accept the singing basketball team as they danced around the court.

Overall the experience was a garish and unpleasant one, where the audience’s senses were repeatedly assaulted with Disney’s worst kind of optimism which reinforces stereotypes instead of breaking them down. An embarrassing, torturous affair for anyone who’s not a child, and for those parents whose children have forcefully manipulated them into seeing this, it’s time to rewrite your will and exclude them from it forever.

DVD: Mad Men Season 1

When a programme is billed as ‘the next Sopranos’ then it’s setting itself up for a fall, and although Mad Men doesn’t reach the heady heights of David Chase’s epic series, it’s still one of the best dramas of the decade. Other critics have given it some stick for not comparing to the mobster drama, but it’s like criticising Amelie for not being The Shawshank Redemption – they’re both great, but completely different.

This remarkable and multi-layered show is set in a late-50s/early-60s New York advertising agency, and deals with the lives of the ad men, their wives, mistresses and their secretaries.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was a producer and writer on The Sopranos, and as you’d expect he has populated his new project with authentic characters who deliver smart dialogue and the plotlines that thread their way through the series are entirely believable. Even a normally inconceivable stolen identity angle rings true, thanks to the brilliant scripting and top-notch performances.

As the series progresses, we see more and more of the main players, and dig underneath the phoniness and surface pretensions. Not only does this give everything more depth, but the people we’re exposed to open up a whole realm of possibilities for the show if the writers choose to move away from the current leading role. Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is a war veteran with a shadowy past – one that even his wife (the luminescent January Jones) doesn’t have access to.

A conflicted, complicated man, with one foot in the past and one in the fast-approaching, Don is an advertising genius shaping the way Americans think and act. Yes, he messes about with other women and keeps secrets from his nearest and dearest, but in Don Draper, Mad Men has introduced another love-hate leading man in the mould of Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey. The guy’s a first class shit, but he’s just so damn cool with it.

Something else which is almost unassailably cool is the intro and theme music. Seriously, check it out:

The research and detail that has gone into recreating mid-20th century New York is astonishing, and it all contributes to making the end result so very slick and gripping.

Funny, without needing obvious jokes, Mad Men exists in a world before political correctness. Sexual banter isn’t harrassment yet. Jews do their thing. Gays keep their heads down. Racial divides are something that just are. You might not like it, but it is commendable that Mad Men doesn’t downplay this side of life.

Commendably subtle, utterly gripping, gorgeous to look at, insanely well scripted and impeccably acted – Mad Men is a must-see for anyone who takes their TV drama seriously.

Buy it here.

WWE: Raw @ O2 Arena

Welcome to the greatest show on Earth!

Oh it’s easy to turn your nose up at the WWE. It’s easy to say ‘but it’s for kids/it’s not real/they learn how to fall’, but unless you’ve put the time in watching sports entertainment, your opinion is about as valuable as a degree in media studies… from the internet. And furthermore, as much of a fan as you might be, until you’ve been to a live show, absolutely nothing can prepare you for the pure intensity of what you’re about to experience.

Who cares if the results of matches are decided beforehand? So is the new Indiana Jones movie, but you’re still going to go and watch it. Plus, Harrison Ford isn’t there in front of you, sweating, bleeding and risking serious injury with the sole intention of entertaining you.

And hell, the WWE knows exactly how to entertain you. No-one works a crowd better. Current Raw general manager William Regal is one of only a few Brits in the WWE, so it’s only natural that he should form a large part of this evening’s proceedings. His appearance on the enormous Titantron (a fantastically huge TV screen) elicits a ridiculous cheer from the crowd, matched only by his ring entrance later on in the evening when he takes on champion Randy Orton.

No matter who is wrestling, the atmosphere crackles with energy. When Shawn Michaels makes an unscheduled appearance, it feels like the O2 dome is hovering in mid-air, powered by the buzz of invisible energy coming off the thousands of screaming HBK fans. When HHH stalks his way to the ring, not a single person is left sitting down – if there were walls, we’d be bouncing off them.

It’s not solely a male-orientated event though. Although outweighed in terms of exposure, the WWE has a roster of female stars (Divas) who are just as entertaining as their male counterparts. When fan-favourite, the insanely perky Mickie James, snatches the women’s belt from Glamazon Beth Phoenix, the amount of goodwill in the air is enough to make Sir Alan Sugar smile.

WWE Raw (and I daresay it’s rival franchise Smackdown) is the friendliest group-experience you’ll encounter all year. Forget football matches or music festivals, here everyone is on the same side. No one has set out to cause trouble. No one is drinking themselves into oblivion or trying to buy dodgy substances from even dodgier people. We know who the good guys are, and we’re on their side. Hell, even if you find yourself next to someone chanting for the heel, it’s all good natured. This is entertainment, pure and simple, and you won’t find anything else like it in the world. Groups of twenty-somethings cheer alongside kids who haven’t even hit double-figures yet; their parents, suckered into paying out for tickets, have found themselves having a better time than their progeny. Girlfriends, only there in an effort to spend time with their boyfriends, go mental when HHH makes his entrance. It’s hard not to. Every single match is like a rock-concert in miniature – the combatants greeted like Elvis fronting The Beatles on a tour of Japan.

Stand in the crowd as Shawn Michaels walks down the aisle, and I guarantee you’ll get chills. Try not to join the cacophony of boos when head-bastard JBL rolls into town. Feel the crackle of electricity in the air when the ring announcer tells you that you are being broadcast live around the world. Get swept away in the moment as the Raw theme bursts out from speakers around the auditorium and is almost drowned out by the thousands of people singing along even though they don’t know the words but know the right noises to make. I dare you not to join in. I dare you not to shout and cheer and high-five your buddies when the pyro goes off and flames and sparks explode above your head.

If the hairs on the back of your neck don’t stand up as 20,000 people go batshit crazy around you, get yourself to the morgue – you’re clinically dead.

Next time someone pulls a face and asks you why you like wrestling, point them in the direction of a live WWE event. You wanna know why we like it? Because it’s a stupendously loud, fast, frenzied, violent pantomime. With fireworks.

.

The WWE is back in the UK later this year. Click here to find out when and where.