I'll have a bowl of the Primal Soup, please

NB – if you haven’t seen Jurassic World, then this has all manner of spoilers. If you have seen JW, then a heads up – it’s the least concise review in the world. Grab your branded T-Rex lunch box and let’s get stuck in!

So, last weekend, I saw Jurassic World (which, along with binge-watching series 5 of Game of Thrones meant I was all about giant make-believe lizards.) It’s a great popcorn film (especially when seen in 3D, on an IMAX screen) – ie massive, loud, shouty, bloody and kill-y, with all the dinosaurs, and, indeed the action and characters, turned up to, to borrow Mark Kermode’s brilliant phrase for such a scale, ‘eleventy-stupid’.

The main problem when trying to reboot a franchise, is how much you throw back to the originals. Star Wars went for an origin story and made the bold move of taking all the fun and adventure out of it, concentrating, plot-wise, largely on intergalactic taxation, and introduced the most annoying film character in recorded history, in the form of Jar Jar Binks. Star Trek also went for an origin story, whilst making all the participants (other than Scotty), unfeasibly buff, with some in-jokes for fans. Batman kicked all that campy Tim Burton stuff into touch and went Dark. Superman just went for enormous shoulders and the two main protagonists throwing each other into buildings for the last half hour. Oh, and didn’t they wildly mis-cast Russell Crowe as Superman’s dad? If Russell Crowe were my dad, I’d try to leave the planet too. The upcoming Ghostbusters is going for gender inversion, so we’ll see how that pans out.

And so we come to Jurassic World. Jurassic Park, when it was first released, blew my mind. I have vivid memories of sitting in the cinema gasping in amazement at the T-Rex as it thundered into view in the middle of a massive rainstorm, then proceeded to try to eat everyone in sight. There are so many great set-pieces (the car crashing down through the tree branches; the moment when you realise that one of the kids might be about to be electrocuted because they’re about to switch the fence back on; Laura Dern scrabbling madly to get into the shed where the junction box is, pursued by the Velociraptors. OMG, THE BIT WITH THE VELOCIRAPTORS IN THE KITCHEN. Also, everything that Jeff Goldblum says.)  It was terrifying, it was thrilling and the effects and animatronics mostly still hold up now.

I’ve seen it countless times since, and other than Richard Attenborough’s supremely annoying park keeper, I still love it. It’s brilliantly constructed with great characters; the supporting cast are ace (Bob Peck! [‘Clever girl’]; Samuel L Jackson! The guy who plays Dennis the fat, greedy nerd!) They are killed off in satisfying ways that add to the drama. The kids are a bit annoying, but largely fine – and hey, it’s the girl who knows how to re-boot the computers (‘It's a UNIX system! I know this!’). And all the dinosaurs are female, so: Feminism.

Despite it being an action-packed blockbuster, Spielberg left enough room for some quieter bits, cleverness and fun – the glass of water shuddering to herald the T-Rex’s approach; the ‘veggiesaurus’ sneezing over Lex; the ‘objects in the mirror are closer than they appear’ visual gag and Goldblum’s inimitable, ‘Must. Go. Faster’ line. Back then, there was a shonky jeep and he had no weaponry to help him out. You really did wonder if any of them were going to make it through.

Also, you never quite know who’s going to save everyone. Obviously, the fat guy’s going to bite it. And the lawyer. But won’t wise-cracking Dr Ian Malcolm save the day? ‘Well. Uh. Yes. I would, uh, have loved to save the day. But. As you can see. Life has found a way to keep me in a bunker. With a busted leg. So I shall have to, ah, just sit this one out. Largely with my shirt off.’ Bob Peck, the only man who really knows his way around a shotgun, is, of course, hunted down. John Hammond’s just hiding. Our two palaeontologists aren’t very Indiana Jones (I know, archaeologist, but hey, dusting off ancient objects in the sand? Pretty similar.) Of course, as it turns out, none of the humans solves the problem of the dinosaurs wanting to scoff them all in the final encounter, which was a satisfying twist.

So, expectations were high for Jurassic World. We’re in a world where nearly everyone has forgotten that the first iteration of the park did not go well. JW is a safari park on steroids. Everything is bigger, but crucially, I found, not necessarily that much scarier, because everything has to move so fast, and in the process we’ve sacrificed any subtlety, all of the humour and, seemingly, any idea that women can be well-rounded characters. I’m obviously one of very many who were pissed off that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character (Career Bitch Claire) is so cardboard and one dimensional, you could make a whole Moonpig’s worth of birthday cards out of her.

When I was watching it, most of my brain cells were being ridden roughshod by CGI, pounding music, bellowing ’saurs and flinching every time a pterodactyl came towards me out of the screen via 3D. So I was kind of going along with CBC without getting too Fourth Wave Feminism about it (other than The Shoes, which every woman in the audience picked up on immediately). But then the instant I was out of my seat as the credits rolled, I was booted back to an ancient semiotics module at uni and started to wonder whether the writers had had an actual brainstorm to come up with all the sexist signifiers and signifieds.

Viz: She has a really precision-cut bob! (‘I am a controlling bitch’). She wears all-white clothes, despite the fact she works in a wildlife park in the middle of South America, where it is super-humid! (‘I have no idea about the real world; also, I wear my white blazer like a cape for quite a lot of the running time, so I don’t even know how sleeves work’). She’s wearing ridiculous 4-inch nude stilettos, which she insists on wearing even past the point where someone could have given her some PRACTICAL FOOTWEAR, GIVEN THAT WE’RE ALL RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES, HALF THE TIME THROUGH JUNGLE, WITH A TON OF MUD. (‘I am a stupid woman who insists on maintaining her power wardrobe at all costs. Even when it is, literally, crippling me and I have to outrun a T-Rex. Through dead bodies and rubble. In the dark.’). She’s hopeless with children, to the extent that she doesn’t even know her nephews’ ages! (‘Why would I care about people who aren’t me? Children would stand in the way of my glorious and oh-so-fulfilling career! I probably need a hunky, capable man who is Good with Kids to make me see the light, teach me how to Care and correct my evil, non-breeding ways.’)

So even though she eventually (kind of ) saves the day, you’re still going, ‘but, LOUBOUTINS? That don’t break?’. It’s so distracting; all it would’ve taken is one line of dialogue, when the shit starts hitting the fan, where she jokingly says, ‘I think it’s time for these’ and whips a pair of flats/trainers out from under a desk somewhere. Because as the friend who I was with, who works in a pretty corporate environment, said, ‘Everyone has several pairs of shoes at work, and you spend quite a lot of your day changing in and out of them.’

Her character development is signified by her unbuttoning her impractical white shirt and knotting it jauntily under her ribcage, and finally ditching the GHDs and letting her hair go wavy (‘I’m not rigid any more!’) Plus, some driving, and presumably now that she no longer has a job (worst day for an appraisal ever) decides that a life with Hunky Saviour Chris Pratt, who is much admired by children, and thinks of Velociraptors as, really, just very fierce dogs with more teeth at their disposal, is a much better option.

The other women in the film are badly mis-served too – the boys’ mum is a whiny bitch who just keeps phoning CBC to chew her out for a/ not having children and b/ prioritising doing her job of running a multi-billion dollar enterprise, which she is seemingly in sole charge of, over nannying her two nephews around what is presumed by all to be an uber-safe theme park. On the face of it, the worst that’s going to happen to them is that they get drenched, courtesy of the mosasaur thing, or have to wait in line. (They don’t, CBC has got them VIP wristbands. Because she’s organised like that.) The only other significant woman is CBC’s PA, who is British, to reinforce the idea that CBC loves being uptight so much that she’s employed a woman who is more uptight than she is. The PA is understandably quite pissed off at being tasked with watching two boys who are perfectly capable of steering themselves around a theme park (don’t forget: they have VIP wristbands), 24/7. I’m sure she has a LOT of other stuff to sort out (Powerpoint presentations on the profitability margins of the new uber-dinosaur and the like). She is portrayed as a massive baddy, and given a death that I found unnecessarily protracted, gruesome and graphic. I was surprised it got past the 12A certification. (It’s not just me that’s picked upon this.) Even the actual baddy’s death is shown off-screen, with just a splatter of blood on the lab’s glass window.

Ah, so who is our Big Bad this time? Jurassic World has the least-believable villainous plot ever, viz: the Army (or a shady, one-man version of the Army), despairing of the backlash against drones as an effective way of war-mongering, decides that it would be ace if you could train and use Velociraptors to kill people instead. Umm, dude, several problems here: 1/ This would be very expensive in terms of production/training costs. Not to mention, transportation issues. You can just fly a drone where you want it, park it, and it’s ready to rock. Velociraptors, not so much. 2/ In terms of a ‘hearts and minds’ operation, V’raptors are a massive fail. They really will just kill everything in sight, including children. Children are sort of like the starters for a Velociraptor all-you-can-eat Battle Buffet. At least with a drone, you can go in for precision killing. 3/ Your main issue, however, is that unless you somehow breed them with bullet-proof skin, they are going to get shot the minute they hove into view. Or blown up by an IED. You know, like regular soldiers do. Although, the idea of a little Velociraptor flak-jacket-and-helmet combo is now pleasing me greatly.

So, all the characters, and, in fact, the plot, have been written on the back of a napkin, with room to spare.

The problem Jurassic World has is made explicit by the park’s own problem: we are only wowed these days by things being bigger, louder, smashier (but not nicier, of course), with bigger teeth which can eat more people. So that’s both the dinosaur, and the film, that they’ve had to create. It almost works as a meta-critique on the concept of our limited attention spans and the blasé short-termist nature of consumerism, not to mention product placement (I wasn’t sure if the clunkiness of that was satirical; I suspect not.) But I wish there’d been a way of making a clever point without making a dumbed-down version of Jurassic Park.

The main thing that’s interesting after a viewing is seeing how they’ve tried to recreate all the characters and beats (much as Ridley Scott did with the howlingly dull Prometheus), but also why this version doesn’t work nearly as effectively:

Who’s the barking mad billionaire who owns the park?

JP: Crazily naïve and excitable John Hammond. We know he’s crazy because he’s got a really wonky Scottish accent. And he looks like Father Christmas in a linen shirt. And he basically goes, ‘Yes, yes, yes. Pffft’ when all the experts point out all the massive flaws in his parky plan. Ruefully comes to his senses once a few people have been killed by rage-filled effects.

JW: Crazily cynical and unexcitable Masrani Global Corporation's CEO Simon Masrani . He is all about the numbers and is a honking dipshit who refuses to kill the ProfitsWillsaur when it starts off on its rampage, because of all the investment dollars they’ve sunk into it. The introduction of the helicopter he is ill-advisedly flying himself is much like Chekov’s maxim about guns. (‘One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.’) You know that helicopter is going to kill him. You’ll never know if he comes to his senses once a lot of people have been killed by rage-fuelled effects. One suspects not – he doesn’t seem big on the concept of ‘bad PR’.

Who’s the evil guy who wants to make money with an off-island breeding plan?

JP: Dennis Nedry. He’s a fat computer geek whose attempt to get cryogenically-frozen embryos off the island gets thwarted by rain, mud, wearing glasses, and assuming an ancient frilled lizard isn’t that dangerous. He gets the blood-splat-against-glass ending that’s transferred to Hoskins, JW’s baddie.

JW: Geneticist Dr Henry Wu. We know he’s evil because he’s wearing a black poloneck rather than a lab coat. This man means business. Big business. He’s also being veeery shifty about revealing exactly what’s gone into the Enormosaur. By rights, he should be chomped to death, but they let him get away to, what, create a Jurassic/Godzilla mash up for 2017?

Who are our experts?

JP: Two palaeontologists (a man and a woman, both equally capable, yay, but the man really dislikes kids, so: character arc) and a chaos theoretician. Who is ace at looking cool and making quips.

JW: Umm, Chris Pratt, I guess? He’s trying to train some Velociraptors for no real reason that’s ever explained. Does he want to spice up Cirque du Soleil in Vegas, perhaps? He can drive very fast, but takes on JP’s Dr Ellie Sattler moment of stroking a dying dinosaur in a field to demonstrate that he may be ex-US Navy, but in fact he is ALL HEART. Right, Claire? Chris Pratt is there to melt your frozen ovaries. Start thawing, lady.

Who are our imperilled kids?

JP: Super-keen on dinosaurs Tim and his sister Lex. Both turn out to be pretty brave, resourceful and, as mentioned above, useful in a tech crisis.

JW: There is a teenage boy who spends the first third perving wordlessly at girls. Which wouldn’t be quite as bad (is he shy and not good at actual speaking?) if you hadn’t shown us he’s got a girlfriend. He thinks his brother is a pain in the ass. His brother is a super-keen dino-nerd with a haircut that even a modern boybander would deem ‘a bit much’. Not going to age well, that haircut. He eventually freaks out so badly that the older brother is forced to tell him it’ll all be OK and give him a hug. Neither of them are in any way resourceful or useful in a tech crisis. Although they do fix a jeep which would, in the real world after 20 years, in no way run. I wanted at least one of them to bust a leg in homage to Dr Ian Malcolm. Though not with their shirt off, obviously.

Who are our hate figures?

JP: A slimy lawyer who memorably gets bitten in half whilst cowering on a loo. MUCH CHEERING. Dennis, for being a greedy geek who gets half the island killed by shutting off the electric fencing.

JW: A female PA, whom there is no valid reason to think of as a hate figure, despite the fact she’s set up, and dispatched as, one. Dr Henry Wu. We’re not really given enough to go on here, other than the fact he’s keen on money and a bit carefree when it comes to gene-splicing. But then again, as he himself explains, he was only doing what he was told to. Hoskins, the least convincing military advisor EVS. I wanted him to have a more flashy death, frankly.

Who are the monsters?

JP: Clever Girl pack of Velociraptors. Massive, angry, stompy T-Rex, used as Dinosaur Ex-Machina.

JW: Massive, angry, stompy, under-socialised Mega-Rex. Which can also make itself invisible (it’s seen Predator) and wants to play around with a glass gyroscope. So is basically a gene-spliced version of your cat with a Christmas bauble.

Pack of Velociraptors which we’re now supposed to like, because they seem like they’re kind of on our side? Or at least, being ladies, they all fancy Chris Pratt, so they don’t want to kill him.

The T-Rex is now there to save us instead of eat us. Yay! So, the Mosasaur is now our Dinosaur Ex-Machina.

Were Health & Safety not consulted on this at all?

JP: All the fences go down. There’s no back-up, so all your dinosaurs are running around freely, and most of your vehicles don’t work. Actually, your dinos can breed. Tropical conditions will cause all sorts of problems. Turns out, an opposable claw is ace with the right kind of door handles. Try swapping them out for doorknobs you have to turn?

JW: The gyroscopes have no over-ride function, allowing them to be automatically recalled. You’re running a park with 20,000 visitors a day, but you have spotty mobile reception which keeps cutting out? Really? No-one’s complained about this? Your CEO thinks it’s fine to fly a helicopter, despite the fact that he looks like a drunk child in charge of an X-Box. Your aviary full of killer pterodactyls – have you made that kind of like a big conservatory, that you could just smash through? You have? Oh, good choice.Your head of operations doesn’t know how shoes work.

Who’s changed over the running time?

JP: Dr Alan Grant still has a job, and decides that aww, kids aren’t so bad after all, once you’ve spent an hour and a half repeatedly stopping two of them from getting killed.

JW: Claire Dearing has, definitively, lost her job, so  decides that aww, kids aren’t so bad after all, once you’ve spent an hour and a half repeatedly stopping two of them from getting killed. And she and Chris Pratt are now seemingly totes compatible.

What have we all learned?

JP: Bringing back dinosaurs will not end well. And Steven Spielburg is a genius.

JW: Making even bigger dinosaurs? Yeah, that’s still not going to end well. And perhaps we get the blockbusters we deserve. It’s breaking all kinds of box office records, so I’m sure this is merely the beginning of the second Jurassic evolution. However, in three months' time, I'm betting I'll remember pretty much nothing about the plot and action of JW. But I will still be annoyed by those bloody shoes.

Question Time! (No, Not That One)

Anyone who knows me is well acquainted with the fact that a/ I love a pub quiz and b/ I am BRUTALLY competitive when it comes to said knowledge competitions. I passively-aggressively grab the pen and paper and start smugly scribbling down the answers whilst my team-mates are still arguing over what the answers might be. Especially if there's an 80s pop music round. I'm not having anyone asking me, 'are you sure? That does sound a bit like Clare Grogan' if the answer is clearly 'Strawberry Switchblade'. I don't massively care what the team name is, but obviously I'd prefer it if it's a pun that I've suggested.

Perish the pub quiz, though, which is too tricky and where we're languishing in the bottom quarter after the first two rounds. If I've got no hope of winning, then what's the point in doing it at all? Then I essentially just 'get a face on' and go all mopey and, like, sure, you can put Clare Grogan down if you like, but it's not right. I go totally teenage. I don't really know why I'm such a freak about pub quizzes, but I'd guess that having been awful at all sport at school, and never having a hope of being picked for a team, never mind winning anything, that 'knowing stuff' was the only way I was ever going to win a prize. Especially as one of my key skills seems to be collecting the most random bits of information and retaining them. I couldn't tell you who the current Foreign Secretary is, but I've been able to correctly name a proboscis monkey, based on a really grainy black and white, stamp-sized photo in a pub quiz. (Thanks mainly to a lifetime of watching David Attenborough documentaries. Truly the best teacher I've ever had.)

So it came to pass that a friend emailed the other day asking if I wanted to go to a Literary Quiz. Ooh, tricky one, this. Because of course, working in publishing, everyone thinks you're going to ace the Literary Quiz. But the last LQ I went to was part of a literary festival in Battersea and was so alarmingly intellectual even Jeremy Paxman might have suggested throwing in 'a few easier ones'. All the questions seemed to be about historical novels from the 1780s written by politicians of the time under pseudonyms. We were a whole team of publishing types, including an actual man (very rare in publishing circles) and so we thought we were in with a shot. Turned out everyone else taking part appeared to be over 70 and had spent all their working lives in a library nearby. I think the most recent book there was a question on was published in 1996. I essentially offered up the answer 'Disraeli?' to about 40% of the questions and a massive, huffy shrug for the rest. It was very dispiriting.

But this one looked more my bag. For a start, it was being hosted by Grazia! Wasn't likely to be that dauntingly clever, even if it was to promote the Baileys Prize shortlist. Ooh, now, this is sounding like my perfect evening - likely to get a goody bag with a free mag (nothing I like more than hate-reading Grazia when I haven't actually paid for it myself); some free Baileys (don't judge me, but I ruddy love Baileys. Have you tried the chocolate one? It's like blancmange. Ace); possibly a free book. I didn't anticipate any questions on pseudonymous historical novels from centuries ago. I was in. I was very much in.

We turned up at the venue (another clue as to the likely standards of the questions: All Bar One on New Oxford Street) half an hour before the alloted time. We tried to force our way upstairs, past a guy giving out wristbands who didn't seem to know what was going on. We darted past him up the stairs, to be met by a gaggle of alarmed-looking Grazia staffers. I think they mistook our, 'we don't want to miss out on any of the canapes' faces for 'we want to start answering literary questions immediately' faces. We were hastily ushered back downstairs whilst they carried on plonking branded pencils and answer sheets onto the tables and taking thousands of photographs of different drinks featuring Baileys for their Twitter feed.

We grouched around downstairs, being rude about this week's issue of Stylist, which apparently seems to think that 'Why thoughtful women are falling back in love with make-up' is a statement that makes any sense, and sees fit to put it on the cover featuring a woman's face covered in mad disco holographic eyeshadow and shiny red lipgloss. Finding content every week for a women's magazine must be a trying business, is all I can say. Sometimes, you must just be in an editorial meeting and find yourself muttering, 'how can we fuse FEMINISM and MAKE-UP? We know that our readers are interested in both, there must be a way of bringing these two elements together in one article.' 'Why thoughtful women are saying it's fine to love make-up?' 'YES! Sarah, you are a genius. Call Sali Hughes and ask her for 1,000 words, and call in some of that Mac "Simone de Beauvoir" lipgloss.'

Anyway, we were eventually granted access to the Quizzatorium. We bagged a table and one of our number was despatched to the bar to pick up free drinks. (On our first foray upstairs, one of the Grazia Gals had, on seeing we'd bought a drink, told us not to buy any more, as it was all free. God, d'you know what you're letting yourself in for here? A load of bookish geeks being offered free booze all night? Could get messy, even if it is a Tuesday.)

I, obviously, started to noodle my way through the 'pull-out' section of the quiz, which had tempting amuse-bouche questions (anagrams of book titles; book jackets with the titles and the authors blocked out; riddles. The riddles had the authors' names in them, which seemed to be kind of cheating. The book jackets were of the level of We Need to Talk about Kevin and To Kill a Mockingbird. We fell down on a Joan Didion. Haven't we all?)

There was much discussion of a team name (get more than two women together, and coming up with a team name becomes very fraught.) We spent quite a lot of time trying to cobble something together based on our mutual love for Jilly Cooper (man, we're highbrow). Eventually I suggested 'Donna's Tartts' (literary but still a bit smutty) and we were off. The prize for the best name of the evening might have to go to the three girls who called themselves, 'Well Read & Good in Bed'.

Baileys and Grazia had done the sensible thing of ploughing most of the money for the evening into food, in an attempt to stop us all getting blind drunk within the first hour. I've never seen so many canapes in my entire life. We had quite the picnic table going on. Especially when one of the waitresses, seeing just how bloody awesome we thought halloumi on a stick was, offered to leave an entire plateful with us. We accepted with alacrity.

Having spotted a photobooth in the corner, and thought, 'Oh God, really?', there was a break in the proceedings when of course we had to have a 'team photo'. Everyone immediately regresses to being four years old, then shrieks when shown the result. 'Oh my God, I look like a sweaty ghost!' howled one of my team-mates, who'd drawn the short straw of being nearest to the camera and the flash, and is a natural ginger and thus quite pale. We spent about fifteen minutes going, 'just one more go!', trying to get an arrangement of four people where we all looked sane, if not necessarily 100% attractive.

But, back to the nail-biting excitement of the quiz, I hear you cry! Round one - we were up near the top. Round two - we were leading, but by a solitary point. This could go either way. I was nearly gnawing the table I was feeling so adrenaline-fuelled. (Well, that, plus the Baileys cocktail and two glasses of red. And the excitement of a branded canvas bag and a free copy of Grazia with 30% off at Gap this week). Damn! Why do I not know George Eliot's real name, despite having done an English degree? Thankfully, I knew the answer to a multiple choice question on which was the longest of three books, because a friend had helpfully emailed the day before to say he was still ploughing through the 1,000-page belter that is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged after about six months.

The results table was being announced. Crikey, this was more exciting than Election Night! (I presume; I didn't stay up for any of that, and so was genuinely flummoxed when I turned on the radio the next morning to find that the Tories had had a landslide win. What the hell went wrong with all those polls, then?) We were in the top two. There were two points separating us. We tried out a variety of 'f*cking hell, we've lost by two points' sore loser faces (this seemed like fun - there were a lot of men wielding film cameras and cameras with proper-looking lenses - where on earth was this stuff going to end up?) Only to find that, yes, WE HAD WON. Donna's Tartts had beaten a load of other geeks in glasses - particularly the bunch at the table next to us, who we were determined to take down. They kept objecting to stuff, and one of them failed a 'spot prize' question on the correct order of the Harry Potter books, despite looking really, really confident about it. I neglected to flag to anyone that we hadn't managed to get the actual Donna Tartt question right, which was a bit of a low.

We were summoned to the bar to collect our winnings (bottle of Baileys each, another free cocktail - this time decorated with pansies - flashy - and a huge stack of the Baileys shortlist. I'd assumed we'd be splitting the six books, [typical publisher - 'You want to give away HOW many?'] but no, it was all of them, for each of us). And many, many photos. I finally worked out why Caitlin Moran gurns like she's been on a 3-day bender every time someone points a camera at her. Having your photo taken for a mag/Twitter feed is mortifying. Especially when you haven't had time to put on any lipstick and have been doing a lot of 'ironic' fist-pumping when it was announced that you'd won. Hadn't really factored that in, when I'd been hell-bent on winning. I looked like some mad child that had overdosed on Haribo, then been given a load of hefty hardbacks to hold, to try to stop them bouncing off the walls.

Anyway, it was all really good fun, my only disappointment being how many questions there were about JK Rowling. Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of hers (both as an author and as a person). It just seemed a shame that over 6 rounds, there seemed to be so few female authors or books that the question-setters assumed we'd have (mostly) all heard of and could answer questions on. (Gone with the Wind featured quite heavily too.) But then I'm inclined to believe that the two points we won by were afforded by:

1. Knowing the name of Nancy Drew's boyfriend
2. Me being old enough to recognise a clip of The Cure's 'Charlotte Sometimes'

Can't all be intellectual giants...

Tans and Tango, Sequins and Samba

The nights are drawing in and the shops have been full of Christmas shit for at least a month. My local 'department' store put in their Christmas window display before they'd even done Hallowe'en or Bonfire Night. Madness. I'm trying to ignore it (whilst working in the West End - good luck with that). But on the bright side, it means we are in FULL Strictly Come Dancing flow. Which means my Saturday and Sunday nights have televisual entertainment on tap if I'm staying in. Plus I also indulge in all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans by catching up with It Takes Two on a nightly basis. By the end of each series, I feel like I could genuinely do actual dancing, as I have absorbed so much technical knowledge. Then I find myself at the office Christmas party and acknowledge that I still have two left feet and very little rhythm and go back to gazing, slack-jawed, at the telly, where people can segue from a samba to a waltz without tripping over their own ankles. Whilst remembering what they're supposed to be doing with their arms.

So, for fun, as per my Bake Off blog, how did I fare on my predictions as to who’s on Strictly this year?

1/ Really old one who’ll get a sympathy vote for 3 weeks then go – [previously: Johnny Ball, David Dickinson, Dennis Taylor, Paul Daniels, Tony Jacklin]

Bargain Hunt’s Tim Wonnacott was bravely steered around the dancefloor by a beaming Natalie, who looked genuinely thrilled to have him as her partner. Perhaps because she acknowledges the fact that only being in it for 3 weeks affords you (presumably) the same fee, but guarantees a massive amount of free time the moment you’re out. *Lie-in face*

Take note, Aliona, who looked absolutely gutted to be paired with Gregg Wallace (as well she might, he’s always struck me as totally unbearable). She promptly choreographed their first dance to involve as little physical contact as possible whilst staying within the rules, and topped off her outfit with a pair of elbow-length gloves just to make sure. Even though he wasn’t, by a long shot, the worst dancer, Gregg got the boot first.

2/Really overweight one who will either be so disastrous the nation will keep them in for an unnecessarily long time, for a laugh, or who will be surprisingly good – [previously: Lisa Riley, Mark Benton, Russell Grant,  John Sergeant, Ann Widdicombe]

Unlike the year before last’s Lisa Riley, who I thought was a good dancer, Alison Hammond was actually pretty shit (incredibly flat footed), but has seven peoples’ personality wedged into one body, and was dancing with Beaming Supremo Aljaz, which takes everyone’s minds off what’s going on below her waistline.

I think everyone was voting for him; he’s very handsome, works some alarmingly tight trousers, and, as mentioned, is constantly grinning his head off in a very winning way. I love him. Even though I was bored of her, I’d have preferred her to ‘go to BLACKPOOL’, rather than Judy. I also found out, via It Takes Two (yup, as mentioned, I’m a proper geek for this shit) that Beaming Aljaz is TWENTY FOUR. Seriously? I thought he was in his early 30s! He should’ve been paired with Caroline Flack, she loves a younger chap. Twenty. Four. God. 

3/ Young woman you’ve probably never heard of if you don’t watch soaps, who used to be on Hollyoaks/Emmerdale/Eastenders/Corrie – [previously: Ali Bastian, Louisa Lytton, Dani Harmer, Natalie Cassidy, Tina O’Brien, Chelsee Healey]

I don’t think I can really plump for Sunetra Sarker (Holby City) for this spot (possibly because even though I don’t watch HC, I’ve seen her in other things; the usual soap lovelies they get are very young and have risen to fame through the one show that they’re on.) So it’s going to have to be the double whammy of ‘Pop Princess’ (URRRRGH) Pixie Lott and The Saturdays’ Frankie. Who seems to be introduced as ‘From the Saturdays, Frankie Bridge!’ rather than having to be a Pop Princess. Maybe there’s only room for one PP. Plus, Frankie’s married to a footballer, and has a small child, which clearly makes her more of a laydee than Pixie. At any rate, I’ve never been able to stand Pixie Lott (stupid name, looks like a spoilt brat) and she’s been dancing since she was about 5, so none of it seems particularly tricky for her. As I know I’d find it near impossible to do even the simplest step on Strictly, my favourites are always the ones who are a bit shonky at the beginning, then suddenly become ace.

Having said that, even though I think Frankie is a tiny bit bland, she’s great at dancing and is with the lovely Kevin From Grimsby (whose surname is ‘Clifton’ – which has led me to believe that the production team wanted to get a ‘Clifton Bridge’ naming gag going, but no one else seems to have taken this up). I love KFG too and have decided that when I am randomly famous, and allowed to go on the show, I’d like him to be my teacher, please. He seems unfailingly patient and smiley. Plus: unexpectedly foxy when wearing specs, as he’s more slight than most of the others, giving him a bit of a nerdy vibe.  I’d have to be paired with him, rather than any of the more conventionally handsome pros, as otherwise I’d just spend all day blushing furiously, rather than managing to do any actual dancing.

4/ Person who is famous for literally one thing – mainly being in a Bond film/married to someone more famous but who refused to do it – [previously: Colin Salmon, Fiona Fullerton, Penny Lancaster, Jo Wood, Nancy Dell’Olio and I’m going to stick Pamela Stephenson in there too, as they constantly banged on about Billy Connolly, despite the fact she’s got a career of her own.]

I reckon Judy Murray can claim this slot. She does have a career in her own right, but she’s mainly known to The Viewing Public for being Andy Murray’s mum. The only way this could’ve been a better booking is if they’d got Andy’s girlfriend, Kim Sears on instead, of whom people know even less. She’s like a WAG Sphinx, is our Kim. Judy was inexplicably still in the running till BLACKPOOL, despite the double whammy of being partnered by Boredom-on-a-Stick Anton du Beke, and dancing as though she was encased in slowly drying concrete. She seemed, however, on my viewings of It Takes Two, to be loving it all, gamely admitting that she’s a rubbish dancer, and shrugging off the judges’ criticism with a big smile each week.

I think she might be the person who, weirdly, has got the most out of it. She seemed like she was doing it because she was a huge fan of the show, and she thought it’d be fun. I’ve certainly always thought she looked really stern, with no sense of humour (although God knows, Andy Murray has a sense of humour that’s drier than the Kalahari, he must’ve got it from somewhere), so I’m pleased that she’s kind of a quiet hoot. Hats off to her, can’t be easy going out every week knowing that you’re going to be bottom of the leader board and having to take it with good grace. I’d be in floods of angsty, frustrated tears.

5/ Man/woman who is currently on BBC Breakfast/ITV equivalent and thus has to do nearly 3 days’ work every day with the training, whilst promoting Strictly every morning – [previously Natasha Kaplinsky, Bill Turnbull, Kate Garraway, Susannah Reid, Chris Hollins, Christine Bleakley, Matt Baker. Matt gets extra props for being on both The One Show and Countryfile, so having to fit in LOCATION WORK and chatting up farmers, as well as everything else.]

I’m giving this to Scott Mills. Arguably being on the radio is less taxing than being on BBC Breakfast/The One Show, but as he’s still on Radio 1, I’m assuming that pretending to care about Young People’s Music is taxing in and of itself. (I’ve just Googled him – HE IS FORTY. Weren’t they culling anyone over thirty when they got rid of Chris Moyles a few years back? How did he escape the net? Put in a call to the head of Radio 2, Scott, you’ll feel ten years younger.)

For some reason, when I did listen to Radio 1, I always liked him. And even though he was all kinds of dis-aaaa-strous at this, I liked him on Strictly too. Scott not only danced like he had two left feet, but as though they’d both been put on backwards. He managed the extraordinary feat of being a DJ with no discernible sense of rhythm. Sometimes, these types of dancers are literally going through the motions to pick up the paycheque (I’m looking at you, Jerry Hall, and you, Nancy Dell’Olio). But Scott really did seem like he was trying, and putting in as many hours as possible to train. I’m glad he’s out, as it was becoming more and more painful watching him get a kicking from the judges each week (he didn’t have the knack of laughing it off that Judy has), but as my old personal trainer used to say, ‘God loves a trier’, so I hope he enjoyed it at least a bit.

There is also an annual Random Sports Guy – [previously Mark Ramprakash, Matt Dawson, Louis Smith, Ben Cohen, Colin Jackson, Darren Gough, Robbie Savage]

Once they’ve got over the embarrassment of fake tan, oceans of spangled, very tightly fitting shirts and trousers and having to fling their hips around, the RSGs often go on to win. I suspect because they are used to being coached, putting in hours of repetitive training, pretty single minded and highly competitive. It also helps that they’re generally muscle-bound, thus gaining the ‘gays ‘n’ gals’ votes and can manage the lifts, and start off having never done any dancing, so tick the ‘journey’ box as well.

There are a few of them, though, who are a tad lacking on the personality front, which is, I think, what did for this year’s RSG, Rugby Thom. He was, in theory, ridiculously handsome. But unfortunately he seemed to be only marginally more interesting than Dancing Wardrobe Gavin Henson from a few years back, and remained resolutely unsexy throughout, even though he was paired up with Human Firework Iveta. He got kicked into touch and sent for an early bath surprisingly early on (ha! See what I did there? SPORTS REFERENCES.)

So, even though I’ve forgotten about the first tranche of people to be binned already (Jennifer Gibney, anyone?), it still seems like there are loads of them in the mix. Who’s waltzing to a win or tangoing to the top so far? As per the show, in no particular order:

Caroline Flack. Thought I’d hate her (telly presenter most famous for going out with teen click-bait Harry Styles – this still perplexes me; wasn’t he pretty close to being an actual child at the time?) But she’s a really good dancer, has amazing legs and it doesn’t hurt that she’s paired up with Pasha (swoon). What can I say, she just seems nice and like you’d have a good time if you went to the pub with her.

‘Clifton Bridge’ (I’m going to make this a thing, dammit). As above, nailing the dancing, and is the kind of girl that because she’s just ‘nice’, people tend to vote for. As per last year’s winner, Abbey Clancy. Couldn’t see why everyone loved her, personally, as her voice sounded like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard, but technically she was very good. And: ALJAZ.

Mark Wright. Oh, I know. Believe me, I know. I don’t watch TOWIE, so I don’t know why I’m supposed to hate him (just because he’s probably not very bright? That’s half the people on TV these days). It’s not like I suddenly fancy him, or would vote for him, he’s just surprisingly good at dancing. Points based on that alone.

Jake Wood. I don’t watch Eastenders, so had no idea who he was. He’s sort of bald and gingery, so didn’t look immediately promising. But lord almighty, he is bloody brilliant. He’s the one I actually look forward to seeing every week. He seems quite bewildered by the idea that he’s good, and is generally almost monosyllabic in the VTs and interviews, but not in a dislikeable way. He just seems like a quiet, modest bloke who’s not going to get all excitable because the producers want him to. I’d love to see him in the final, and if he can pull a ‘Chris Hollins’ (ie bang on about how much he wants to win for the sake of his partner), then he’ll probably win.

He’s also being very understated about the ‘OMG, my life is so hard’ aspects of having to learn lines, film all day, learn how to dance, pole up for It Takes Two once a week, get fitted for costumes, etc and be a dad. I do have a slight worry that as he’s really good, but is also so non-jazz hands, that he’ll be a shock ‘bottom two’ at some stage. Hope I’m wrong on that. It’d be nice for another chap to win, and he ticks a lot of the usual Strictly voting boxes: he’s working, essentially, two full-time jobs, has never danced before, seems a nice man, has a family he can wheel out (very cute kids). Go, Jake, do it for the gingery bald blokes! But really, as long as the Midwich Cuckoos pairing of Pixie and Trent don’t win (she’s been dancing since she was five – boooo! They look like they’re brother and sister, so it’s creepy when they have to do ‘sexy’), I’ll be happy whatever the result.

My Business Idea for SurAlan: The Hatewatch Generator

Sweeping vistas of London's shiny, phallic buildings. Vaguely imposing classical music. An angry gnome with a pointy finger. The sound and smell-o-vision of a hundredweight of total and utter bullshit. Yes, hurrah, deck out your sitting room in business bunting, for The Apprentice is back!

It's the tenth series. We have been watching idiots shouting at each other, running around and competing for the chance to win a non-specific job in a backroom somewhere for £100k (and latterly the chance to launch a business with LordSurAlanSugar) for a decade. This year, we're promised, there will be 'differences'. The main one appears to be that, because of the World Cup taking the usual Apprentice slot on the schedule, it was filmed during the summer. So now the firees get to leave in their Redundancy Cab in broad daylight. Yet, so far, perplexingly still wearing enormous coats and vast scarves, which must've added to their discomfort.

LordSurA also claimed that he wanted to do things, 'a bit differently'. In episode one, this consisted of just bringing in an extra four business botherers after the initial 16 had awkwardly arranged themselves in the boardroom. After a year's worth of WWI centenary programming, the phrase 'cannon fodder' was the one that sprang most readily to mind.

Having TWENTY Apprentii means that for the first four weeks, it's going to be nigh-on impossible to get to grips with anyone's names except the PMs and whoever's self-elected to be the week's Major Moron. There are, however, some distinguishing features, with a variety of accents (there's a Canadian, a Colombian and an Australian called Mark Wright. Because having one idiot called Mark Wright on TV wasn't thought to be enough, apparently). There was also Enormously Tall Robert, who professed not to 'give a shit' if people think his clothes are ridiculous. Which is a good thing, as before week one was out, he'd paraded around in a blazer seemingly nicked from Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins and had made me shriek when I caught a glimpse of his sockless ankles and sand-coloured suede slip-ons. LordSurA, of course, instantly dismissed him as, effectively, a 'Shoreditch Twat' and sacked him for refusing to be PM in week two, when he had expressly told him he was the man for the job. He wasn't even chosen by his PM for the final three in a boardroom grilling; LSA just flipped him the firing finger with no warning. See – cannon fodder.

So. Many. Differences. I can hardly keep up!

Distinguishing themselves so far on the girls' team are Roisin, a tallish blonde Irish woman who I think looks like a cut-price Cameron Diaz; a blonde woman with a bob and 'serious' glasses who looks like a cartoon (Jemma? She doesn't seem to have contributed anything, even, now, four episodes in); a woman whose forehead would give Tyra Banks a run for her money (still haven't worked out her name) and SARAH. Ah, Sarah. Brought in as one of the 'extras', Sarah immediately put herself forward to be PM in week one, just so we could get the full measure of how utterly appalling she is. When faced with selling the most random assortment of stuff from previous Apprentice series (spuds, hot dog sausages, mad balloons, lemons, flowers and T-shirts), Sarah spent ten minutes repeatedly suggesting that they should 'chop up the lemons'.

I wanted one of the girls to stop shouting, 'NOOOOOOO!' at her for just a second to say, 'Sarah, when have you ever bought a slice of lemon?' Unless you are selling them pre-sliced to a cocktail bar (they'd dry out, so you couldn't even do that). Sarah has watched too many box-sets of Mad Men. Her instruction to her team of Business Wimmin was to wear really short skirts and pile on the make-up. Sarah seems to think that the key to Apprentice success is to channel an air hostess from the 1960s. I'd be marginally less offended by this tactic if she were any good at applying her own make up. Learn the art of blending, dear and stop putting on bronzer that looks like mud. She looks like a mad tranny. She seems so moronic one can only assume she's a plant, put there to wind everyone up. Job done so far. She was very lucky the boys made the executive decision to leave all their 'added value, high mark-up' T-shirts at the printers', or she'd have definitely gone first.

Another difference? LSA finally telling one of the teams that their team name is just too ludicrous to stomach. The girls came up with two options, 'Summit' or 'Decadence'. Have they never watched this show before? Surely, on day one, the main thing you come armed with (other than a CV that requires a 2:1 in Disbelief Suspension) is a bunch of whizzy-sounding team names that sit perilously on the fence of 'sounds like a business' and 'sounds like a bunch of tossers'. Try for some Latin, maybe? Team Carpe Diem, perhaps – don't think that’s ever been used. It would also be amusing to make LordSurA say it every week: Car-paaay Deee-'em. But no, the girls decided on Decadence, because, according to Sarah, it sounded 'more feminine and classy'. Christ, you might as well have gone with Team Rosewater or Team LadyMary from Downton Abbey. Brilliantly, half of them (including the girl who suggested it) didn't actually know what it meant.

This resulted in possibly the Apprentice speech of the decade, as Nick, channelling his Countdown alter-ego, gave them a million etymological reasons for it being the worst name in business history. He finished up by using the phrase 'moral turpitude'. Which, given the girls didn't even know the meaning of decadence, is pretty awesome. They should've gone with Moral Turpitude as the new team name. Or Shrieking Harridans. They’ve in fact gone for ‘Tenacity’, which has led to one of the Guardian Liveblog commenters re-dubbing the team The Tena City Ladies.

LordSurAlan has gone a bit schizo, task-wise, going from inventing 'wearable tech' (ooh, someone on the production team's seen a press release for Google Glass) to flooding the market with Airwick Fresheners. Sorry, 'home fragrances' (ie candles and reed diffusers). A woman who professed herself 'obsessed' with how her house smelled headed up one team, despite the fact she'd openly admitted to buying Glade Plug-ins. The fumes from those are probably the reason why she decided (as per every other series) to ignore the 'market research' which said to make the candles out of soy wax and on no account to faff about with colouring them. Paraffin and custard-coloured candles shot off the production line.

The other team's product and packaging were better, but their approach to business was 'set a price then panic', plumping for a very literal 'slash and burn' method of throwing all their diffusers at a nifty gifty store for £8 a go, when they had a firm sale lined up with a poncey members club for literally three times that if they'd only hung on for a few hours.

I was disappointed that there wasn't a cedarwood/sandalwood epic cock-up, which I was fully expecting. Custard Candles Inc won the day, by less than the RRP of one of the candles. The theme for this series seems to be winning by the narrowest of margins, or 'who can fail least?' Poor Swimming Lindsay got as close as one can on the Apprentice to a resignation - what on earth was she doing there in the first place? She looked like she'd got to week 3 and thought, 'was this really the show I was supposed to apply for? I think there's been a huge admin error.' Credit to her for basically giving a massive shrug and going, 'yeah, I was properly hopeless' rather than the usual, 'I am the one you want, LordSurAlan - I've got drive, I've got ambition [I've got delusions of being something other than just 'adequate at my job'], giving it 110%' pitch, which was what Nurun went for. Which went as well as that usually does.

We'll leave aside what on earth was the point of this week's task (trying to make viral videos on YouTube, which made me want to construct a huge neon sign depicting the phrase, 'OH, THE HUMANITY', to stick over the revolving door at the front of Broadcasting House.) Both teams' concept was utterly unintelligible. One team had two identical brunette women in it whom I had literally never seen before. (And a camera person who looked as though they were wearing an ironic '118 118' ginger wig 'n' headband combo. No-one seemed to comment on this.)

It didn't matter what the task was. They could've been competitive sheep shearing or trying to flog burgers made out of pigeons to Belgians. The entire point of the episode, was to have THE MOST EPIC FIRING IN APPRENTICE HISTORY. The three boardroom burnouts were team leader Ella Jade (business idea: a TV production company. Because the world of business definitely needs another one of those). She'd failed utterly to make a convincing mini telly programme. And seemed never to have seen anything on YouTube, despite the fact that that's how half of us now consume TV. (I wanted to bamboozle her by shouting 'NETFLIX!!' in her face till she begged me to stop and tell her what it was.) Canadian Steven, whose chief talent was speaking the English language as though he were simultaneously translating it from a Cantonese business manual written in the late '80s. Why they allowed him to do a pitch to a bemused team from Buzzfeed is anyone's idea; he couldn't even manage it in the taxi on the way over. (Business idea: something to do with care homes). And, oh glory be, SARAH. Sarah, whose previous career included being a PA and a hypnotist (presumably not at the same time, but who knows) had been so annoying that they'd given her the entirely made-up job of 'timings'.

This led, somehow, to it being her fault that the sub-team had neglected to give their video either a name or any kind of description before uploading it. Seriously, do these people live in caves somewhere, like troglodytes? How have they seemingly never seen a YouTube video and what's on it? How did they expect anyone to find their god-awful offerings?

The Eye of Sauron (sorry, SurAlan), fell first on Steven, who went down in a screaming hissy fit audible only to bats of denials and begging to be next week's PM (you are being fired, you delusional idiot. There is no next week for you. Also, it would have taken you all of the two allotted days to decide on a sub-team leader, never mind actually get anything done).

By this time, I was thinking, 'can’t you fire all of them? They're all abysmal.'

Sarah, what’s your business plan, then? 'I want to start up a really unique dating site'. OH. MY. GOD. Is it called WearAShortSkirt.com, or SurrenderedWives.co.uk or FuckFeminismINeedaHusband.net? Dating websites was even a task a couple of series back, and I’m still getting flashbacks. LordSurAlan, with his wearable tech and his determination to surf the online zeitgeist, is working hard at appearing MODERN, and thus having none of Mad Men (or Mad for Men) Sarah. Deciding that she is clearly another lawsuit-in-waiting, he boots her. Which leaves Ella Jade with nowhere to hide. Will she be allowed to go home to change into her sweatpants and laugh it up with relief? No, she will not. She's still begging to be given another chance, even as LordSurAlan is getting RSI from pointing his firing finger so many times in one episode. He has to basically fire her four times. He nearly has to instruct Karren and Nick to grab an arm and a leg each to haul her out, while she hangs on to the boardroom table. It's actually awful. Especially as for once the winning team have got a decent prize, lolling around in volcanic springs in Iceland (actual country, not cut-price shopping emporium; which, given the first week's prize was a trip in the London Eye, was worth celebrating).  

So far, I think Solomon is my favourite - non-shouty, and appears to have an actual brain, as well as luxuriant hair. I still can't believe that all of these people have a business that they want to launch. James, for example, who looks like a TOWIE escapee and who is billed as being a 'multiple business owner' (does that mean he runs a Costco?) What's his big idea? Wouldn't it be less humiliating to just go on Dragon's Den? At least then you only have a panel of people telling you you're a moron for what amounts to ten minutes on TV, rather than twelve weeks.

Anyway, I'll carry on watching; partly out of habit, and partly because, with the winter nights drawing in, the fires of rage stoked by the contestants' weekly idiocy are keeping me warm, thus reducing my heating bills. Perhaps that's the business idea I should pitch for next year? Hook yourself up to a Hatewatch Generator for all your energy needs. You can start watching this year's X-Factor if  things get really bad and snow threatens before Christmas.

Ready, Set, BAKE!

So, it's been a dog's age since I posted on here. I hope that anyone who used to keep up with this has been living a happy and fruitful life in my absence. I had quite an eventful time of it - I sold a flat and bought a new one (quite a story - I may yet post that experience up for posterity, so that when my new flat inevitably plummets in price 18 months after I bought it at the height of the market, just as I've spent £15k doing it up, as the last one did, I can look back and go, 'ahh, but it was worth a small fortune, once. Maybe it will be again').

I have also taken another step up the Ladder of Adulthood and I'm now an Aunt! My niece has just turned one, and is adorable. Which is a relief, given that I'm generally pretty rubbish with babies. Weirdly, she looks exactly like I did when I was her age (blonde, blue eyes), rather than anything like either of her parents, who both have dark hair. My mum delights in teaching her a crazy new face to pull each week, which she takes to with alacrity. It's often a challenge trying to feed her because she is making me laugh so much. I'm looking forward to when she starts talking, as I think she's going to be even more hilarious. 

But enough of all that big, important stuff, because it's my favourite time of year - fire off a confetti cannon, and hoist the bunting, it's the return of COMPETITIVE REALITY TV. The nights are about to get a whole lot colder and darker (I don't care that it's not even September yet, I've already been sneakily putting on the electric blanket before bed. Don't judge me. I'm a spinster. I live alone. I have nothing to keep me warm at night apart from the electric blanket. Nothing, I tell you.) They're already trailing Strictly, but for the moment, the nation is gripped by the Great British Bake Off. Which, owing to its massive popularity, has been moved from the incredibly-challenging-to-find BBC2 onto the hey-it's-at-the-top-of-the-channels-list BBC1. 

I have no idea why they do this. Wouldn't it be better for BBC2 to have a super-popular show which might then result in people remaining tuned in to whatever's on afterwards, thus boosting the channel's ratings? Do they really think that viewers think of BBC2 as, what, hopelessly elitist and too intellectually challenging? It's a programme about cake, leavened with massive measures of innuendo, for heaven's sake. Anyway, this year, I've joined in the office sweepstake for added excitement and am now avoiding any social engagements on a Wednesday. Here are my thoughts so far.

Week 1

It is always fun seeing which ‘characters’ have been drafted in, who mirror the most popular/controversial ones from yesteryear. Strictly tends to do this as well (‘really old one who’ll get a sympathy vote for 3 weeks then go’; ‘really overweight one who will either be so disastrous the nation will keep them in for an unnecessarily long time, for a laugh, or who will be surprisingly good’; ‘young woman who used to be on Hollyoaks/Emmerdale/Eastenders/Corrie’; ‘person who is famous for literally one thing – mainly being in a Bond film/married to someone more famous but who refused to do it’; ‘man/woman who is currently on BBC Breakfast and thus has to do nearly 3 days’ work every day with the training, whilst promoting Strictly every morning’, etc).

So, we have:

This year's Ruby: Martha. She's only 17 (she should just be the oldest one on Junior GBBO, surely? It's practically child labour). She is unnervingly good. She's less obviously gorgeous than Ruby last year, so hopefully should avoid any Twitchfork mobs online accusing her of flirting with Paul.

This year's Brendan: a Scottish man called Norman, who is excellent. (I think he keeps bees; expect everything to have honey in it, even in Pork Pie week).

This year's clear winner (whom I have in our sweepstake - YES): Nancy. She came prepared with a cake guillotine which her husband had fashioned for her. She is the Marie Antoinette of baking.

This year's token weirdo: Jordan. A man who is so ugly he makes my eyes hurt. Yet, inexplicably, he HAS A GIRLFRIEND. He was sporting a shirt that was uncannily like a duvet cover I had in the 1980s. He looks like God collected all the different sorts of teeth and decided to jam them all in one person’s mouth. Entirely haphazardly. He has a cackly nervous laugh, which he deploys after saying anything at all. In summary: URGH, get him off my telly. He should've left first. His mini cakes looked as though he'd taken on board the nation's efforts to commemorate the First World War and created a homage to the Battle of the Somme in sponge.

This year's potentially most annoying woman: Kate-from-Brighton, who apparently refuses to weigh anything and has, I think, slightly wacky curly hair (looks to have pink streaks in it). She's very, very thin, which always makes me mistrustful in a baker. She looks a bit like Kate Garraway.

This year's 'oh, I suppose I'll have to fancy him, there's no-one else': Iain. Who originally hails from Belfast (and so sounds exactly like my erstwhile trainer, Cheerful James), but now lives in London, and so has an alarming ginger hipster beard, a mustard cardigan, tight trousers and gravity-defying hair. He was also revealed to be, when the camera pulled back for the 'group hug' shot at the end, as tall as the Shard. Depending on how next week goes, he might make it to week 3.

There was, however, a (funny to me) cut directly from Lovely Richard (who is a builder), who is only about 38 but bald in a way that looks physically painful, to Iain's luxuriant bouffant. Cruel, but amusing.

What, if anything, has changed, in the switch from BBC2 (cult audience of millions) to BBC1 (mainstream audience of millions)? There’s still an abundance of puns. Squirrels have been replaced by black lambs (diversity edict, now they've moved to BBC1?) The Rain of Judgement dutifully cascaded onto the tent halfway through, drenching the bunting. The incidental music was cranked up very high for an opening episode. The 'technical challenge' was cherry cake, which seemed a bit basic. Someone CRIED OVER A SWISS ROLL. Which, for week 1, was a bit X-Factor.

Week 2 & Week 3

Biscuits vs Bread. Neither was particularly dramatic (and I’ve never made either, so both are a bit lost on me), but high/low points were:

Norman heroically eschewing any kind of flavour in anything he makes. He proclaimed pesto, which the average middle-class two year-old these days consumes by the bucket-load, ‘exotic’ and literally didn’t add anything to his savoury biscuits other than the ingredients to make them technically ‘biscuits’ (flour, butter and lard. Yuck). I’m not sure if the producers have put him in just to see how much he can rile Paul and Mary by cooking food that is so plain it’s indicative that he’s not only Scottish, but also has some kind of digestive condition that’s led him to a really extreme exclusion diet. A bit like being at the Mayr Clinic, where the only thing you’re given to eat for a week is dry bread, which you have to chew about 100 times per mouthful.

Nancy produced a second baking gizmo made by her husband, which was kind of like a tiny Iron Maiden (torture device, not metal group) for pricking holes in biscuits. She is morphing from Marie Antoinette to the Marquis de Sade. I was surprised she hadn’t commissioned him to make her a biscuit jigsaw, given that most of the others were making tiny horses, and even a Biscuit St George and the Dragon, which were actually slotted together.

Enwezor got booted out just as a Guardian Liveblog commenter had finally revealed who he sounded exactly like: Moss from The IT Crowd. Dammit, that’d been bugging me. He got binned for using shop-bought fondant. Mary’s expression when he ‘fessed up to that could’ve created its own sourdough starter.

Kate is growing on me. There seems to be little evidence for this idea that she doesn’t weigh anything or use recipes, and my worry that she was going to be ‘whacky’ seems to be unfounded. Apologies for being knee-jerkingly judgy, just because you have curly hair with some pink in it, Kate.

Someone should, however, tell Iain that if he’s going to get really hot (he will, there are ovens blasting away for hours on end in a fairly enclosed space in the middle of summer) and thus go quite a violent shade of red all over, he shouldn’t wear a scarlet cardi. Which also clashes with his ginger beard. Also, is he doing a bit of a Samson thing with his hair/beard and refusing to trim either for fear that it’ll be his downfall? We reached Peak Beard some time ago now, and I can’t help thinking that under that lot is a really handsome man. Liberate your chin from its ginger hair-prison, Iain!

Jordan decided that for a bread showstopper, he’d fuse a cheesecake with a loaf, and then stick what looked like a whole jar of strawberry jam into it. Um, even I can tell you that’s going to give you a soggy bottom, and is going to look like something Carrie would’ve baked for her GCSE Home Ec assessment. Mary could take no more: bye, Jordan!  

Week 4

Week 4 will henceforth be known as Alaska-gate. It was Pudding Week, and the showstoppers were Baked Alaska. A pudding which even I and my friend Dawn, who are hardcore sweettooths, have never actually eaten, and we’re both children of the '70s. It seems like it’s only there to be difficult; why would you try to bake something that has ice cream in it? If I really had to make one, then I reckon I’d just buy a Swiss Roll and stick a Viennetta on top of it, then crumble a meringue nest over the top. Ta-da!

Anyway, to add to the impossibility of the task, it was the Hottest Day of the Year when they were filming (in June, so about 25 degrees. Feel free to laugh, people who live anywhere other than Scotland or, er, actual Alaska). Though, having been in a marquee on a really hot day a few weeks back for a wedding, I can certify that the temperature inside, especially if you add in a load of hot ovens, would’ve been appreciably higher than that. You might even have been able to fry an egg just on the demonstration table.

Things were Not Going Well. No-one was allowed to use an ice-cream maker, even though quite a lot of ‘home cooks’ have them. Probably more than have a ‘proving drawer’, which the cooks are provided with, at any rate. Everyone was running around like headless chickens, trying to do fancy sponges and get their ice-cream to freeze (with seemingly one freezer too few – is it like musical chairs, GBBO – every time a contestant leaves, they take away two freezers?), whilst also panicking about then having to blow-torch a meringue on top of it. Really, this is the world’s most ridiculous pudding. Richard should’ve been at an advantage, as his was a Tiramisu version, and the technical the day before was a Tiramisu cake, but he was worrying that he was going to be marked down for essentially doing the same thing twice. (Don’t see why, it wasn’t his fault that’s what the technical was; although maybe he should’ve done better on that, given he’d essentially been practising making it all week.) Chetna was clearly wondering how to get mango chutney into hers (she puts it in everything), whilst Norman was wondering if he could get away with my Swiss Roll/Viennetta idea (a vanilla one, no exotic mint choc chip aberrations here, thanks very much.) He seems still not to be in receipt of the memo that Bake Off is about flair as well as technical baking ability. Iain, on the other hand, was making ice cream with a paste of black sesame seeds, which looked more like tapenade.

Tempers, and possibly bunting, were fraying, when Diana embarked on an act of sabotage so grievous that in days gone by she’d be stoned in the middle of the village for being a witch. She took Iain’s cake’n’ice-cream-combo out of the freezer. And left it on the side. According to Twitter, which nearly broke under the Avalanche of Alaskan outrage afterwards, Iain’s not-so-icey-cream was only out of the freezer for 40 seconds. But 1/ I don’t believe it’s possible for something to be that ruddy liquid if left on a counter for less than a minute, even in the extreme heat of the Bake Off tent on The Hottest Day of the Year and 2/ even if it is true, if you take someone else’s shit out of a freezer, you surely CALL THEM OVER and say, ‘hey, Iain, is it OK if I move your stuff out of the freezer? I think you were originally using some other freezer, is that right?’ Rather than, when your fellow contestant has a (rightful) freak-out that his Santorini ice-cream has gone all lava-like, blithely telling him that he should’ve been using ‘his’ freezer.

Iain went mental, lobbed it all in a bin and strode off across a field. Probably to have a spliff or something to try to calm down and avoid decking Diana. I did think he was a tad hasty, chucking it in the bin, although, being a dramatic and flouncy type myself when something goes wrong, I’d have done exactly the same thing, whilst screaming ‘FUCK IT!!’ into a waiting boom-operator’s mike at close range. But if I hadn’t been swelteringly hot, in a tent and stressed to hell, I might’ve thought, ‘well, I’ll scrape the ice-cream off, shove on some meringue and serve the ice-cream as a sauce, in a kind of inversion of a Baked Alaska’ (which, given no-one was actually ‘baking’ theirs, merely blasting them with blowtorches, like something out of Alien, wouldn’t have been such a major deal. Spin it as a Heston Blumenthal idea, Iain! Tell Mary you’ve ‘deconstructed’ it!)

Major props to him for not dobbing in Diana, though – he is a man with way more honour than I could’ve possessed. Also, the air would’ve turned blue if that’d been my sh*t she’d messed with. Did she really not apologise to him at all, or was that editing? I’d like to think if that was me, I’d have defended him and spoken up about it, and, if I’d had the wherewithal to make an appeal to the judges, reminded them of the time 2 years ago when John cut half his hand off and was given a free pass on the judging when he couldn’t produce anything because he was bleeding profusely into a KitchenAid...

Whoever’s paying the string section on that show really got their money’s worth, though, the Violins of Doom were going mental. I was shrieking at the telly and my heart-rate didn’t go down for about an hour afterwards! Poor Iain, Norman should’ve gone (someone on the Guardian blog or Twitter, can’t remember which, posted the most hilarious comment, saying ‘if Norman gets any more basic, next week he’ll be presenting a bag of flour with a smiley face drawn on it.’)

I’m hoping next week they’ll have a ‘double eviction’ and get rid of Norman and Diana. A Baked Alaska Swan FFS. Surely only the Queen can eat that? Also, Martha should’ve been star baker, not Richard. And Nancy needs to get her husband to produce more S&M baking gadgets; she’s slipping down the ranks, and my £24 sweepstake money is looking in danger. I think Richard and Kate may be battling it out in the final. Possibly with Luis.

Farewell, then, the Russet Gandalf – you’d only just earned a nickname, and now you are gone. But at least you’ve guaranteed an audience for Friday’s rubbish Bake Off spin-off show, and made sure EVERYONE is talking about it. I also liked Mary’s comment that, re: the ill-advised binning, thus giving them nothing to judge, ‘It’s a moment of madness in your life, that you’ll just want to forget about’. Um, yes, Mary, it’s on national telly, and about 7 million people have just had the entire thing seared into their memories and are taking to social media to spread the word even further. The morality of ‘a woman taking a thing out of a freezer’ will be debated across acres of newsprint and online for the next 3 days. Make friends with the editors on your show, Mary, they clearly wield more power than Pol Pot and Stalin put together.

Is next week's pie-fest going to turn Sweeney Todd, as the contestants all round on Diana? Or will she compound her villainy by surrepticiously turning down Norman's oven or lobbing a handful of Scotch Bonnet chilies into his steak and kidney when he's not looking?