A Better Title For That Post Would Have Been "Pulling Daisies"

Friz will doubtless be thrilled.

The episode of Pushing Daisies that ITV1 absurdly chose not to show will be screened after all: on their website. Well, clearly that's good enough.

I might even watch it. I watched the first one, and it was very good, but then I found out the second one wasn't going to be shown and didn't bother to tune in for the third. I want to see them in order -- there's enough good TV around at the moment I can afford to be picky. If they get round to re-running the show then I might watch from the third that way.

I don't know why TV companies go to such lengths to stop me watching their shows. Last night, I recorded The Apprentice and went out to see some live comedy, and when I got into work today, the BBC News website told me the result! Right there in the headline! I couldn't have avoided that if I'd wanted to.

Surely anyone who wants to know would want to find out by watching the show?

This Would be Liveblogging If We Didn't Have a Hard Disk TV Recorder

Kevin on the Apprentice just told Sir Alan Sugar,

The ciabattas sold like hot cakes!

Genius. Almost as good as Great British Menu the other day, when Jenny Bond, on a post-production voiceover, wondered how Angela Hartnett rated a meal out of ten, a musing which was followed by an apparently unrelated clip of Hartnett being critical of said meal, which itself was followed by Bond saying, "so, about two out of ten, then".

It's fantastic, watching the show and listening to Jenny Bond making stuff up to try to add layers of drama that don't even nearly exist. I never paid much attention to news about royalty, but if she ever had any credibility, it's long dead now. If she ever tells me how the Queen feels about something now, I think I shall assume she's made it up to add drama.

Having Worked Out How To Embed YouTube Videos, I Demonstrate My Mental Superiority Over All Sixteen Apprentice Candidates

Yes! The Apprentice is on again! Of course, in the first few weeks all the fun lies in poking fun at the inept attempts of the candidates to carry out even the most basic tasks. (In later weeks, all the fun lies in poking fun at the continued inept attempts of the candidates to carry out even the most basic tasks.)

Last week, they were challenged to run an industrial laundry. The men's team (Team Renaissance!) were disarmingly competent, especially after their woefully shoddy fishmongering skills in the first episode. The comedy came almost solely from the women's team (Team Alpha! Or something) who took incompetence to staggering new levels. While the men rang a proper laundry service to find out what they charge, the women decided to pluck a price point out of thin air and chose to charge a flat rate of £4.99 per item. Four pounds and ninety-nine pence per item of laundry. Their first task was to pitch for a contract from a hotel with a thousand sheets and pillowcases and towels to be washed, so they were looking to charge five thousand pounds. The hotel was unsurprisingly taken aback by this, expecting a price at least an order of magnitude lower.



To occupy my time, I have constructed a short list of proofs that they could have employed, without recourse to any actual research, to reach the realisation that this was not a plausible pricing strategy.

Some Proofs That £4.99 Per Item is Not a Sensible Price to Attempt to Charge a Hotel for Cleaning One Set of Laundry

1. Several of the items were pillowcases, and you must be able to buy a pillowcase for less than that. I mean, surely. At TK Maxx.
2. If the eight of them can earn £5,000 for less than one night's work, then they could do that for 200 nights a year and make one million pounds. Assuming you can rent and run the premises they were using for less than £100,000 (which obviously you can) this means the candidates can earn more than Alan Sugar is offering them just to clean sheets.
3. If a guest staying one night at a hotel generates one dirty sheet, two pillowcases and two towels, this would cost the hotel £25, which even in London is a fair proportion of what the hotel would be charging.
4. You can buy a lobster off Renaissance Fisheries for that price.

If anyone has their own proofs, please add them below.