The Apprentice was entertaining last night - the two teams both had to start up a free magazine from scratch and then sell advertising space to established media brokers - Both the teams did well in that they found two different niche markets where there seems to be a gap in the market - one team went for an up market 'lads mag' , their mistake was that they didn't keep it upmarket enough and had a semi-clad lady on the front page wearing a hard hat and a mobile phone attached to her ear, plus a page headed 'what would you blow your load on? which didn't go down well with the buyers - the other team decided to target the affluent over sixties - they had all the right ideas, about how sixty is the new forty and how much dispensable income this bracket have, plus the fact that there are no magazines out there for the 'lively' sixty year old - great idea except they called it... Hip replacement'!! They were trying to be clever and play on the word 'hip' meaning 'trendy' but it went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine. On the front cover they even had a well preserved older couple desperately clutching onto each other with silly grins and wearing grey cardigans. Oh dear. Needless to say they lost the task. Good TV though.
Today we had a tiny drop of rain but desperately need a lot more, the grass is very sparse and although the horses don't look too bad at the moment we will have to buy some hay in and start to feed in the field if the situation doesn't improve - unprecedented for this time of the year.
This afternoon I went to a matinee performance of 'Merchant of Venice' at Stratford - I have been meaning to go to the theatre for ages now that we are so much closer to Stratford. I ended up really enjoying it though I have to say that I was somewhat disconcerted to hear the Shakespearean language being spoken with a heavy American drawl, and the opening scene was set in what looked like the gambling houses of Las Vegas - bearing in mind America hadn't even been discovered when Shakespeare was writing his plays I found that rather amusing and possibly William would have turned in his grave if he had seen some of the costumes that were worn, and the fact that an Elvis Presley lookalike was singing along to some of the scenes, which also featured Batman and Robin....totally bizarre but very watchable and the language was unspoilt (apart from the American drawl!) and as it was written 400 plus years ago. It was also very un PC which is rather refreshing in this day and age and probably would not have been allowed if it had been written nowadays.