It’s too easy to criticise The Apprentice. The show is pitched as the world’s toughest job interview, in which our brightest and best young business minds compete for a £100k job by demonstrating their superior managerial skills, financial acumen and commercial savvy. But despite the sombre music and dramatic shots of The City of London’s office blocks, the show isn’t really that much different from the benchmark of low-rent reality television, Big Brother.
Ultimately it’s a game-show in which a group of shrieking, self obsessed arses are thrown together and forced …

Guitar bands are over and girlie electro has triumphed. But dyed-in-the-wool indie-kid, Helen Sloan, finds this a cause for celebration, not commiseration.
Indie-rock is dead. The future, apparently, is lady-led electro-pop - Lady Gaga, Little Boots et al - together they form an invincible forcefield constructed entirely of glitter and hotpants that will keep the hordes of guitar bands at bay.
Not that the twitching corpse of your average indie band has any right to complain. They’ve all collapsed under their own weight; a mountain of mostly mediocre bands, all talk and …

Something has gone badly wrong with video games. Once the exclusive domain of geeky boys, gaming has become not just socially acceptable but, well, actually quite popular with normal people.
This sad state of affairs is the unfortunate consequence of a long-running de-nerdification of the video games industry:

1947 - The first ever video game, entitled Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, is invented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Ph.D. Due to the high cost of the experimental equipment required, the game can only be played by a handful of top-level government scientists.

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One of the big cultural fibs going around today is that this, uniquely, is the Age of the Celebrity; a time that is defined by our fascination with people who are famous, but we’re not entirely sure what for.
There’s actually a long tradition of this, but the difference with the old-style celebs is that we could never define why Peter Ustinov (for example) was famous, because he did so many things, not so few. Apart from the proper jobs (writer, director, actor, artist and so on) he was also good …