The Apprentice: hired, baby

The final of The Apprentice was a contest between Eyes and Teeth. The dark, intense, borderline scary eyes of Yasmina Siadatan, and the Simon Cowell-esque pearly whites of Kate Walsh.

The task was to create a new brand of chocolates. Yasmina showed once again (as in Nibbles Week) that, as a restaurant owner, she’s prepared to sacrifice quality and edibility in the name of profit (I bet bookings for her restaurant are shooting up). Her brand, Cocoa Electric (or Shockachocs as I couldn’t help thinking of them) boasted flavours such as strawberry and basil, enrobed in the cheapest chocolate available and on a shelf near you for a very affordable £6. The fact that they tasted so horrible that the actors filming the commercial for them couldn’t bear to actually swallow them was neither here nor there.

Meanwhile, Kate had opted to go for a his’n'hers sharing box called Choc d’Amour. She’d gone for quality, and a high price point of £13, for 18 chocolates. Just think how many family bags of peanut M&Ms you could get for that. To give Kate credit, though, she rescued what was going to be a very naff TV commercial by giving it a bit of a Haagen Dazs bondage twist at the end (the lady’s not for sharing).

I think Sralan had already made his mind up. Yasmina seemed like a good enough sort, and made the most of her closing remarks in the boardroom by describing just how much she’s learned and how she’s very willing to learn more. Kate continued in the same robotic corporate-speak as always, delivered in a voice that sounds like a Birmingham call centre worker who has ideas above her station.

So it’s Yasmina who scoops the star prize – the chance to turn up for work every weekday to some lock-up in Loughton  or wherever. But at least she got to have a ride in Sralan’s car first.

Big Brother: I’d walk across broken glass to get in that house

Was I alone in feeling a bit squeamish about the moment the other night when “special forces” apparently stormed the Big Brother house and began to subject the non-housemates to the sort of disorienting abuse that goes in in many of the more scary countries of the world? Big Brother had bellowed “this is a task, this is a task,” just before the black-masked figures burst through the doors, but still… it was scary and a bit too real.

Not that real, though. When they ask for volunteers to “walk on broken glass” in order to earn the right to be housemates, you somehow have the feeling that it’s not going to be real glass. Can you imagine the hoo-hah if Channel 4 broadcast scenes of people having the soles of their feet ripped to shreds in the name of entertainment? Ain’t going to happen, so there wasn’t anything all that brave about Single Mum Thingy and Token Geordie Charlie crunching their way along a pit full of sugar glass.

And Offcom would be in like a shot if anyone really drove a motorbike across the bony pelvis of Fearne Cotton lookalike Carly, so she was never in any real danger either. “You just have to tense your muscles,” she told her admiring new housemates, describing how the motorbike had completely driven over her. She’d been blindfolded, and hadn’t seen that it was only a bloke holding a tyre adjacent to her. But Big Brother must be congratulated on using twisted mind-control techniques previously only seen in Spooks.

Posh Freddie and The Other Blonde have also gained admittance to the house by “changing their names by deed poll” to Halfwit and Dogface respectively. They are henceforth to be known by these titles, and very apt they are, too. But again, I’m tending to the opinion that the “legal documents” they signed were about as real as the broken glass.

Meanwhile, in the luxury of the Big Brother bedroom, the real suffering has only just begun. Freddie (sorry, Halfwit) fancies himself as a jazz singer. He would do well to remember what happened to Belinda Belinda Belinda last year.