Thursday, November 17, 2016

The Bridge Cafe

When it comes to great running jokes on the UK Apprentice*, nothing tops the Bridge Cafe. To non-viewers of the show….every week, the team that wins the challenge goes off on some opulent reward courtesy of Lord Sugar. The losing team has to slough off to this drab little cafe and moan over their loss while picking at their food and drinking weak coffee.

This has been going on for TWELVE SEASONS in the SAME CAFE. It absolutely slays me every time. I have to presume that Sugar himself owns the Bridge Cafe since surely no competent owner would agree to have his/her little shop portrayed as a loser's graveyard for so long. That being said, maybe it's actually brilliant marketing, since if I ever find myself in London, I'm a big enough fan of the show that I would totally seek out the Bridge Cafe for a bite. Damn you, reverse psychology!

* = Ok, so the cafe is the best running joke, but I've decided that second place goes to Lord Sugar's teasing of his former aide, Nick Hewer. Every time the candidates produce an advertisement/commercial/song/etc. that is in any way sexual, Sugar is sure to make some comment like, "This looks like one of your DVDs, Nick" or "Nick's not used to seeing stuff like this outside of his trips to Amsterdam." Hewer responds with either a small grin or a crunched-up face like he's just bitten into a lemon. My question is, what's the story here? Is this just good-natured joshing between two old friends? Is Hewer actually a real prude and Lord Sugar is reverse-teasing him? Or, is Nick Hewer secretly the biggest sexual deviant in all of England? That's saying something, given the royal family alone.

** = third-best running joke is more or less the entire concept of the show itself, and how it's essentially neck-and-neck with the Gervais Office for best representation of British cringeworthiness in business.  The other week when Samuel kept doing his exaggerated pantomime cycling demonstration, I couldn't stop laughing.  When he did it DURING THE PITCH TO VENDORS, I was almost on the floor.

No comments: