9 – A bunch more reasons to be terrified of caterpillars – Environmentalgraffiti

8 – Bear Grylls and Will Ferrell – a marriage made in… what? They’re not married? Fine – YouTube

7 - 20 flat-out amazing TV adverts for different sorts of Star Wars crap - Gunaxin

6 - Here’s that Cassetteboy/ Apprentice mash-up you’ve already seen a million times – YouTube

5 – Beating a man up with a live swan: cruel or awesome? Cruel, obviously. But, you know… - Spiegel

4 – Look at this quite nice picture of an iceberg – Flickr

3 – Here’s a disturbing video of a man in a dress rapping about why he doesn’t like long films – YouTube

2 – This just in: you are DIRTY – Nationalgeographic

1 - This man will be in the next James Bond film. Guaranteed…

We’re the best there is, ever was, and ever will be. In fact, we’re the Jesus of business and we’d kill every child ever used on a Huggies or Andrex advert to win, the cuter the deader.

That’s right, The Apprentice is back! Just in time too, as we need something to fill in the time between series of Dancing on Ice.

If you’ve ever watched this humility free reality show before then basically you’ve seen them all. There’s a bunch of contestants who are dead behind the eyes, all vying for a job at Sir Alan Sugar’s workhouse.

Each one of them is as devoid of character than the last, but they do provide an impressive amount of hyperbole and idioms to enjoy. It’s that which most likely keeps us returning to watch the series year after year.

The programme begins as normal with the candidates making ludicrous claims regarding their competency. Every one of them would have you believe that they are some sort of wheeler dealer Robocop who would burn their competitors’ eyes out with a spent match rather than face defeat. At this stage it becomes patently obvious that if beauty does indeed come from inside, these people would all be butt ugly.

This week’s challenge was to clean things in return for payment. The boys’ team, despite being a man down quickly managed to assign a faceless man called Howard to lead them, and picked the name ‘Empire’. Considering the historical ramifications of this word, it felt as if the choice of name could have been more sensitive considering the multi-cultural make up of the team.

The girls’ team was given the moniker Ignite. That’s a good name because it signifies burning things, no, because it represents light? Passion? Anyway, they were headed up by Mona (pronounced Monna), an incredibly outspoken and direct woman who repeatedly informed her customer that they were wrong during negotiations.

The tasks proceeded with the normal back-biting, bitching, and short term allegiances. That and the look of utter contempt on the team leader’s face when they are updated on the progress of their sub team via cellular telephone. Any sort of mistake apparently comes across as news that they’ve just defecated botulism-laced faeces into their lunchbox.

We won’t spoil the massive excitement and anticipation by telling you who won, but the trio of business superheroes who ended up in the boardroom were particularly sour-faced and provoked the feeling of intense satisfaction when Sir Alan gave them a big telling off.

Here’s a pick of some of our favourite phrases from episode 1:

“[I have a] rainbow of skills”
”at the end of the day”
“turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”
“[I’m a] rough tough cream puff”
“[you get the] complete package”
“I’m a one man business killing machine”
“I’ve got acumen coming out of my arse”
OK, we made up the last two. Feel free to add some better ones below (shouldn’t be hard).

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That’s right, Raymond Blanc is returning to judge nine couples who think that they can run an eatery because they once threw a successful dinner party so they can join him in restaurant running Disneyland. However this time Raymond says, “This year will be survival of the fittest. I am not looking for dreamers, I want to see couples with fresh ideas and a partnership that will flourish under pressure.” He says that every time, though, doesn’t he?

Helping Raymond put some emphasis onto the current economic bonanza we’re enjoying will be expert advisers Sarah Willingham and David Moore. It will be interesting to see if they inexplicably keep in the worst couple till the final again.

As far as we know, last year’s winners Michele and Russell who ran ‘The Cheerful Soul’ haven’t actually got their own restaurant yet despite winning the competition in October last year. But hey, who’s counting?

Applications are being accepted up until 31^st March, so get applying.

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Dead? No, of course he's not dead. But Sir Alan Sugar has stepped down as chairman of his company Amstrad after 40 years. That means that all those wonderful jokes about the crappy-looking, pointlessly impractical email telephones he hawked so mercilessly during the first few seasons of The Apprentice are all worthless now. Really, he may as well be dead.

Anyway, even though he's left Amstrad, Sir Alan Sugar's still going to be the terrifying boss figure on The Apprentice. However, there's bound to be some changes – those taking part in next year's Apprentice will now be battling for a prestigious £100k a year job keeping watch for the rozzers while Sir Alan flogs boxes of unsold email phones from the back of a van in an MFI car park.

Listen to the intro to The Apprentice long enough and you'll believe that Sir Alan Sugar is a genius. A stone cold genius so unashamedly geniusy that everyone he works with happily puts up with his bellowed insults and belligerent manner because they understand that he knows more about business than anyone else alive.

Sir Alan Sugar even has the ear of the Prime Minister, we're told. He literally has it. He tore it off during a heated conference about proportionate enterprise regulation procedure. The Prime Minister doesn't even mind, because Sir Alan Sugar is that much of a business genius.

And as a business genius, Sir Alan Sugar knows that the recession is affecting two things more than anything else – rising fuel prices and tumbling property prices. Which is why he's chosen now to step down as chairman of his electronics company Amstrad to build up his, um, property and private jet businesses. Whoops.

That's right – Alan Sugar is no longer in charge of Amstrad, the company that's been his life for 40 years. The Times reports:

Sir Alan Sugar, the multi-millionaire star of The Apprentice TV series, has stepped down as chairman of Amstrad, the company he founded aged just 21. Sir Alan insists he is not retiring but that it was the “right time” for him to step down from his role at the company, which he sold to broadcaster BSkyB for £125 million last year.

You know what that means, don't you? it means all those ghoulish Amstrad animatronic Alan Sugar toys will be going cheap! They're the perfect Christmas present for anyone you want to curse into a lifetime of petrified insomnia thanks to the latex cockney robot sat in the corner of their room constantly bellowing insults at them. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter that Alan Sugar has quit Amstrad, because he'll still be presenting The Apprentice and making appearances in all kinds of television commercials. However, let's just hope that his property and private jet interests hold up, because otherwise he'll have to change his catchphrase from "My fee from this ad is going to Great Ormond Street hospital" to "Up yours, sick kids – Daddy needs a hot tub."

Folded:

• Composer Michael Hunter (Soviet Connection – awesome tune. What next for this Scottish prodigy?)

• Pising in the Driving Seat (“Having lived life in the fast lane for well over a decade, it’s no surprise to me that my back hair’s begun to fall out”)

• Cadbury’s ‘Twisted’ (a Creme Egg in a bar. Better than a Twix anyway)

• Indiana Jones icons (so the new movie was a bit of a letdown, at least you can reminisce about the old ones with these pointless little desktop doobries)

• Lucinda (an annoying moaner really, but she knew how to dress)

Creased:

• House prices drop, rental prices go up (been to an estate agent recently? Congratulations, you can afford to live in a box)

• Summer of Big Brother idiots again (surely not one sane person over 15 years old actually looks forward to this ‘event’ anymore?)

• GTA IV Obsession (you can’t go around saying “If you don’t mind” all the time in real life, people don’t like it)

• Cheesy feet (then don’t wear shoes and no socks in or slippers in summer; don’t wear slippers at all in fact)

• Alex (he probably sleeps in a onesie at home. Big baby)

And this year the level of Apprentice awfulness seems to be higher than ever. So awful, in fact, that the first Apprentice reject Nicholas De Lacy-Brown claims to have received death threats from angry viewers.

Now, while we only have Nicholas De Lacy-Brown's word on this – and the man honestly seems like such a bimbling twat that he'd molest his own granny if it got him some headlines – we can't help but wish it was true. After all, if you're going to send death threats to someone, what better reason is there than because they briefly underestimated the wholesale price of lobster? We hear that that's how Salman Rushdie got his fatwa, too.

The Apprentice is the epitome of watercooler television, in that anyone with even the merest scrap of common sense would like nothing more than to burst into the boardroom with a full five-gallon bubbletop watercooler bottle strapped to each wrist so they can run around windwilling their arms about and indiscriminately bludgeoning every last gormless, self-satisfied face there into unconsciousness – except for Nick and Margaret, obviously. You'd need them to take notes on your performance.

This year's Apprentice is certainly no exception. In fact, this year's Apprentice candidates seem even more drastically unpleasant than their initial introductions suggested. Strutting, over-confident, given to making self-promotional statements so alarming that they make Tom Cruise look like the shivering dog from the Volkswagen Polo advert – the sort of people who'd look like dreadful failures if they only committed themselves 100% to a project rather than 110% or 150%.

And, since he was the first of this year's contestants to be fired from The Apprentice, that makes Nicholas De Lacy-Brown the biggest clown of the lot of them. On last week's The Apprentice Nicholas was ostensibly fired because he sold some lobsters cheaper than they should have been sold for. But that's probably not the real reason for his sacking, though.

No, in actual fact there were four real reasons why Nicholas De Lacy-Brown was fired from The Apprentice: 1) He's an unbearably overprivileged posho, and Alan Sugar hates them, 2) he doesn't like football and Alan Sugar does like football, 3) he has a shit little clump of facial hair perched under his bottom lip when Alan Sugar knows that a beard's only a beard when it covers two thirds of your face like an outbreak of grimy mildew and 4) people would generally rather an afternoon rolling around in herpes than talk to him. 

But although the first candidate to be fired from The Apprentice is usually forgotten about within minutes, Nicholas De Lacy-Brown seems to really caught the public's imagination. The public's imagination for sending terrifying death threats, that is. Digital Spy reports:

Apprentice star Nicholas De Lacy Brown has received death threats from fans of the show. "People have sent me messages saying they want to kill or injure me," Nicholas told the Daily Star Sunday. "One read something like: 'If I see you, I'll hurt you'." However, Nicholas has remained defiant and insisted that he will not be affected by the threatening messages. "The abuse I have had does not bother me," he said. "I have had some supportive emails too. I take it all as a compliment. They think they can push me down with this abuse but all it does is pump me up. I realised soon after the show started that it was not for me – it was just such hard work."

As scary as these alleged death threats are, Nicholas De Lacy-Brown probably shouldn't worry too much about them. After all, by Wednesday night everyone will be concentrating on whoever the next person to get fired from The Apprentice is and he can go back to being a thunderingly anonymous halfwit again.

But perhaps the death threat is the new way for Apprentice candidates to grade their worth. For instance, a few mealy-mouthed comments on the internet is OK, but not as good as actual face-to-face-death threats in the street. This way the winner of The Apprentice would be the person who had the most terrifying death threat made against them. The obvious problem with this is that Yoko Ono would win The Apprentice every year if that was the case, but we're sure there's a workaround.

Read more:

'Apprentice' reject receives death threats – Digital Spy

Or, to put it another way, Piers Morgan went to America looking for success, and America (and by America we mean Donald Trump) looked back at Piers Morgan and replied: "Sure, why not? You're a man with all the qualities required to succeed here. Your wish is our command".

What is wrong with America? It all started off so positively some 40,000 years ago when a bunch of wandering nomads from Asia decided to set up camp. They had a quaint little society going on, and for thousands of years everything was wonderful, but then in 1492 some Italian named Chris landed on the shore and it all turned to shit.

Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, then Will and Grace, and now this, the ultimate coup de grace – Piers Morgan – whose list of crimes include making people feel sympathy for Jeremy Clarkson, being editor of the News Of The World once, and having the name Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan. Commenting on Morgan's performance in the show, touped-twat Donald Trump told him:

"You're a vicious guy; I've seen it … You're tough, you're smart,
you're probably brilliant, I'm not sure. You're certainly not
diplomatic, but you did an amazing job and you beat the hell out of
everybody."

The final task on Thursday's finale was to hold a charity event and raise as much money as possible. Morgan's rival, country singer Trace Adkins, had the duty of babysitting The Backstreet Boys, while Piers was responsible for the auction and food.

Trace sold more tickets, but Stefan Pughe raised the most money, earning an additional $250,000 (£125,000) for his charity.

And what was Morgan's chosen charity? Why it was the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which provides support for families of U.S. military personnel who have died in the line of duty.

Which is all very well, but it just goes to prove that, no matter how much of an utter cunt you are, if you cheer loud enough in support of the troops, all will be forgiven, even if you had previously been sacked for publishing faked photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by British Army personnel.

Whatever, America, you can have him, but don't doubt for one moment that this is anything other than your Judgement Day. So long, it's been good to know ya.