With the writers' strike still wiping out shows on a daily basis, television will soon rely completely on reality shows – and what's more realistic than a giant crazy-haired windbag jabbing his finger at people who are, at best, only semi-famous?
Basically, what we're saying is thank heavens for Celebrity Apprentice – the all-star version of the Donald Trump bellowing vehicle that's going to single-handedly save all of American television from imploding in on itself. Or at least that's what Celebrity Apprentice would do if, you know, it actually had any celebrities in it. The line-up for Celebrity Apprentice has been announced, and the two biggest names involved are Gene Simmons from obsolete rock band Kiss and Lennox Lewis from the RAC direct insurance adverts, with 12 other nonentities added to make up the numbers.
We hear the Celebrity Apprentice producers wanted to up the show's mean level of celebrity, but the old man who was in one episode of Casualty for three seconds with a broken finger in 1989 was too busy to take part.
Although it's British incarnation is still going strong thanks to it being exactly the same week after week and year after year, the original American version of The Apprentice fell on its arse a long time ago. People stopped watching sometime between Martha Stewart buggering it all up, Donald Trump firing his icy fembot sidekick and the show decamping to LA, where each week's losing team were forced to sleep in tents, and the show was axed – a shame, because it meant that Donald Trump and Mark Burnett never got round to debuting their 'losers must kill, disembowel and eat each week's fired candidate' gimmick.
However, thanks to the success of the British charity Celebrity Apprentice – where Rupert Everett pulled out midway through even though it was for charity, probably directly causing the deaths of up to 15 starving African orphans – Donald Trump was thrown a lifeline in July when NBC decided to make its own version of Celebrity Apprentice.
Finally, Donald Trump could get back on TV and stop hawking bits of meat and intimidating Scottish fishermen who don't want him to build a golf course on their house. And, although Rosie O'Donnell declined Trump's Celebrity Apprentice invite, good old Donald Trump has managed to get his hands on 14 of the most insanely famous megastars on the planet to take part on the show. Donald Trump himself says:
"This will be the most exciting season of The Apprentice yet—maybe even better than season one. Our 14 celebrity contestants are incredible individually, and as a group they will make The Celebrity Apprentice one of the hottest shows on television."
So who are these incredible contestants, these gods among men who variously inspire magisterial levels of subordination and outright lust in the general population just by the sound of their names alone? Well, the truth is we don't really know. None of the Celebrity Apprentice are really that famous, you see. But we're sure it was deliberate on Donald Trump's part – he probably turned down Madonna and Nelson Mandela and Tom Cruise and Ringo Starr and Princess Diana's ghost and whoever invented the Soulja Boy Dance in favour of the real Celebrity Apprentice contestants. And in case you were wondering, they happen to be:
Gene Simmons – Most famous for: discovering Lil' Chris
Stephen Baldwin – Most famous for: being Barney Rubble in The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas
Lennox Lewis – Most famous for: punching people for a living
Vincent Pastore – Most famous for: turning into a fish in The Sopranos
Piers Morgan – Most famous for: doing a vaguely unconvincing impression of Simon Cowell on America's Got Talent
Tiffany Fallon – Most famous for: her tits
Trace Adkins – Most famous for: singing songs about crop silos or something
Tito Ortiz – Most famous for: rolling around the floor with men in a homoerotic way
Carol Alt – Most famous for: her tits
Marilu Henner – Most famous for: being in a sitcom that hasn't been on TV for 24 years
Nadia Comaneci – Most famous for: being a Romanian gymnast
Nely Galan – Most famous for: hosting a three-year old reality TV show
Jennie Finch – Most famous for: playing softball. Softball
Omarosa – Most famous for: being on The Apprentice
You can see all of these A-listers get yelled at by Donald Trump when Celebrity Apprentice premieres on… oh, who cares. It's not as if you're actually going to watch Celebrity Apprentice, are you? Are you?
angie Cox says
Did anyone actually see the Rupert Everett “Apprentice? Becauses if they did then the bullying he was put through was gross. He has probably saved more Arfican orphans with charity work than they ever will with his Aids work. It’s been blown up into some sort of scandal when the scandal should be how he was treated.