Ed Williamson

News, Reviews & Features
  • The Apprentice: season 15, episode 9 recap: "Urban Lucozade"

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 5th December 2019

    We're into the home straight and all of a sudden here's a task with an aspect that's quite interesting. It is of course juxtaposed by the task's other constituent parts, which are absurd and deliberately beyond the skillset of anyone involved, but you can't have everything.

  • The Apprentice: season 15, episode 7 recap: "Finn Tonne o' Tools"

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 20th November 2019

    When doing the just-about-iconic point, Lord Sugar's hand doesn't do what the Twitter emoji does, I've noticed. The latter extends the index finger in the same way but turns the back of its hand to face you, while the back of his hand faces skywards. Even the basics of The Apprentice's flimsy premise go uninterrogated, and yet still my demands for a DCMS select committee hearing go ignored.

  • Review: Last Christmas has everything she wants if you watch without prejudice

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 12th November 2019

    What's it going to be for George Michael, then? The Bohemian Rhapsody-style rock biopic? The Rocketman stylised musical? The Yesterday excuse to bump the songs up the list on Spotify a bit? Well, none of the above, really. Last Christmas is something a bit different: a festive romcom where his songs are there but largely non-diegetic, even though he himself is present in the form of posters on walls and in characters' conversation, so more of a tribute that informs a story. It's an affectionate and funny one too, and the kind that you recognise a fair bit is wrong with, but gosh-darn it, everyone's singing and having a lovely time, and it's Christmas, so just pour yourself a nice tall glass of mulled shut-the-hell up juice and go with it.

  • The Apprentice: season 15, episode 5 recap: "Ryan, Lion, Zion"

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 3rd November 2019

    This week I had a breakthrough: I realised that the one person I thought was called Riyonn-Mark is in fact two people, one called Riyonn and one called Ryan-Mark. Stay tuned to find out whether there's another one called Mark.

  • The Apprentice: season 15, episode 3 recap: "Toys Toys Toys, I'm Looking for a Good Time"

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 20th October 2019

    Ooh, a race row, this ought to give the whole thing a much-needed positivity shot in the arm.

  • The Apprentice: season 15, episode 1 recap: "The Cape of No Hope"

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 6th October 2019

    They're all here again, and again, and again. The token posh guy and girl; the cockney salesman who's the most self-aware and grounded but startlingly aggressive whenever he has to sell anyone something; the gold-star recruitment consultants who ironically have no understanding of the sort of personality likely to win over potential employers. I wish they weren't. I wish it would all stop.

  • Review: Yesterday: I saw a film today, oh boy

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 30th June 2019

    A common pub argument I have with a friend of mine is that the Beatles weren't as influential as everyone makes out. I tell him there weren't bands before the Beatles; just solo singers and backing groups. I tell him that artists didn't write their own songs before the Beatles. I tell him that the album wasn't an artistic endeavour before the Beatles; just a commercial ruse to package up a hit single or two with some filler and sell them again. He still won't have it. Obviously he is an idiot, but I hope to Christ he never sees Yesterday, because it'll only strengthen his wildly incorrect view. While it does have at its heart the idea that this was the most special collection of songs ever written, it overlooks that what the boys gave us all wasn't just the songs: it was far more than that.

  • Review: The Hustle is a like-for-like switcheroo

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 13th May 2019

    Now then, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was one of those I had on VHS off the telly and watched a lot as a kid, and believe it or not, I'm quite happy to allow a reboot without moaning on the internet about how my childhood has been stolen from me, as though MGM had coerced the 12-year-old me into confessing to a murder I didn't commit then used its corporate weight to lobby against my release and discredit the one witness who saw it all and could exonerate me, meaning I had to spend my teenage years in the big house, punctuated only by making recorded calls to the true crime podcast that was covering my case but whose final episode would end "Well, he's still in prison. Get 50% off your new mattress if you use the code DIAL-MGM-4-MURDER at checkout." I mean yeah, they haven't done that. What they've done is a bit weird though.

  • Review: After Life is not deft enough to avoid causing friendly fire

    TV Review | Ed Williamson | 22nd March 2019

    To promote his new Netflix show After Life, Ricky Gervais is out doing the podcast rounds, and telling anyone who'll listen why people who are offended by any of his jokes must have misunderstood them. He's probably right in some cases. But what he never considers, or at least never acknowledges, is that if a lot of people are misunderstanding your jokes, maybe it's because you aren't skilled enough at delivering them.

  • Leaving Neverland and our need for chaos

    TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 8th March 2019

    In the summer of 2002 Michael Jackson came to Exeter, my hometown, where I was living again having just finished university. In a series of events that are ludicrous in hindsight, some businessmen had bought Exeter City FC out of administration and installed Uri Geller as a co-chairman. Geller duly brought Jackson and David Blaine down for a public appearance, in which they drove round the pitch in an open-topped car with a load of children.

    I didn't go. But I do remember watching it on TV, noting that, despite the hit his image had taken from the Jordy Chandler trial, he was still surrounding himself with children wherever he went. And thinking: "No one in this guy's life ever pulls him aside and says, 'Listen, Mick: maybe ease up on the kids in public, eh?'"