The Showbiz Blog - The Apprentice & X Factor

Where have all the wannabe Apprenticeses?

Meanwhile, over on The Apprentice it’s starting to look like Bill Cullen could run out of candidates prepared to take the big job, with Shane Davey becoming the second contestant in three weeks to rule himself out of the show by unorthodox means and the third in total (cheating Joanna and ‘Bill Junior’ Mark being the others)

It’s starting to look as though the producers broke the golden rule of Apprentice cast selection by failing to pick people desperate enough to put up with all the nonsense it takes to win. Even so, there was something uniquely Irish about his ‘you probably won’t pick me so I’m quitting first’ line of thinking from Shane, who had, incidentally, been one of the show’s more likeable contestants. He certainly didn’t deserve a character assassination from the rather malevolent Orla every time a camera was pointed her way.

Calm, competent Brenda still looks the most likely to win – who certainly seems to have more to offer than glasses wearer of the year wannabe Nikki, who’s love for the word ‘experience’ has as yet shown no sign of slowing down, or the aforementioned Orla. That said, who would bet against Brenda saying ‘thanks, but no thanks’ if the prize were offered with the way things are going?

To protect himself, Bill may have to hire the one man who will definitely take the job and lap up the great man’s every word with relish to boot – that being the ever eager Stuart, who has nicked the ‘Bill Cullen Junior’ mantle from Mark (the first of The Apprentice quitters).

If learning about business really is the aim of the game, what odds that Lesson One will be ‘selecting and knotting your own tie - ‘step one: do up the top button’?

X-Factor Judges – Robbie Williams?

Surely not…. Ever noticed how things get bigger and bigger like they might never stop before suddenly getting smaller? No, this isn’t more tedious economy talk – it’s the X-Factor of course.

That was ‘world class’ say the judges, as if singing covers is a bit like doing the 100 metres. You are ‘arguably* the most fantastic singer ever’. ‘That was remarkable’. ‘If you had been in charge, Iraq would be a fully functioning constitutional democracy by now’.

Strangely, this season’s greatest moment of hyperbole so far wasn’t wasted on one of the contestants, it went to Mariah Carey, whose ever so weird meetings with the contestants were in fact quite the lowlight.

‘You are the biggest star in the world’ said Simon Cowell in his latest taunt of the unintentional irony Gods who, yet again, failed to smite him with a thunderbolt emblazoned with the words ‘argghhh!’. There’s always next week (they must have wanted to find out who was in the bottom two).

Meanwhile, at the other end of the celebrity index of star bigness, one person who definitely isn’t being praised for being fantastic all the time is poor old Dannii Minogue. In fairness, that’s mainly because she isn’t.

Why they got her, we’ll never know and after two below par seasons the talk is that Simon is going to replace her with Robbie Williams (hopefully that will turn out to be a fake ‘pre-rumour’ rumour).

“But”, say her defenders, “why should picking the wrong songs every week, the wrong singers in the first place, barely being able to string a sentence together or get anyone to listen to her cost anyone their job as an X-Factor jud…..oh yes, erm”.

All of which means that a certain Mayo showbiz Leprechaun has managed to scramble his way up from the bottom rung of judges into third place, with his replacement by Mr State-The-Obvious himself Brian Friedman now a distant memory.

High-pitched ‘hee-hees’ all round.

* Has anyone ever actually argued one of these points with Simon?

Brendan Cole