Tom Beasley reviews the latest episode of The Apprentice in which almost all of the candidates proved utterly useless at manual work and Lord Sugar’s firing finger got a hell of a workout…
It’s no secret that Lord Sugar likes it when his potential business partners show that they can get their hands dirty. This week, he tasked the two teams with setting up their own handy man businesses. He had laid on two big, corporate jobs but other than that, he essentially forced the teams to run around asking random Londoners for a tenner to clean their windows. Sugar forced builder Brett and construction executive Elle into the project manager roles for their respective teams and warned each of them that he would be watching carefully to see how they fared in leadership roles similar to their day jobs.
Elle, in charge of Versatile, immediately began dithering in a way that recalled the dinghy debacle in week three. Her team missed the deadline to design some promotional flyers and so sub-team leader Mergim was forced to scribble the team’s name and a few vaguely DIY-related phrases onto some note paper to chuck in shop windows. Elle’s team secured one of Lord Sugar’s corporate contracts, doing a refurbishment of a London theatre, but lost out on a football stadium job when Brett and Connexus offered a price around £20 less.
Brett may have secured the football stadium job with his promises of professionalism, but his sub-team were worse than useless on the first day of the task. Vana had decided, bizarrely, that market research was “the key” to winning the task rather than actually doing any work. Mergim’s sub-team may have been running around London conducting work of near-slapstick levels of incompetence, but at least they were pulling in some money, albeit for the same wages as a Filipino child stitching wallets for a drug lord. Scott did luck his way into a gardening job with a well-heeled Londoner, but almost scuppered himself by seemingly promising to turn her untidy backyard into the Eden Project during the course of a single day.
The second day began with Brett arriving at the football stadium with Sam and Selina in tow. They both expressed distaste at the manual labour on offer, but mucked in admirably as Brett forced them to scrape chewing gum off the seats – a time-consuming service the customer had not requested. Over at the theatre, Elle basically gave up on her position and handed control of the job to Joseph, who was the one candidate on the entire task who seemed to have the first clue what he was doing. Both teams ran into problems, with Brett forced to slash his price after failing to complete the job and Versatile struggling after David got the measurements wrong on some clothing rails.
Thanks to some good work from Vana, Scott’s ridiculous gardening proposal was transformed into a simple clean and tidy that netted Connexus a considerable profit. Meanwhile, over at Versatile, Mergim continued to cement himself as the Mr. Bean of the construction world by basically throwing paint around like a sleepwalking Jackson Pollock. Their day culminated in both sub-teams desperately attempting to refurbish a shopfront in a project that April had negotiated for a price so rock bottom it may as well have been a handful of magic beans and the taxi ride out of the boardroom.
Unsurprisingly, when the numbers came in, Brett and Connexus had brought home more than double the profit of Versatile and went off to a bizarre massage parlour to be beaten up with twigs. Lord Sugar then decided he was going to shake things up and instigated a boardroom Red Wedding. He offered Joseph immunity from the boardroom process of a result of his solid performance in a team of imbeciles before unceremoniously binning project manager Elle prior to the final showdown.
This shake-up forced sub-team leader Mergim to choose two team members to come back for the final boardroom. April was brought in for her bonkers pricing structures and David was placed in the frame as a result of his cock-up with measurements. Mergim made an inspiring plea for an X Factor sob story with his tale of coming over to England as a refugee, but he was fired almost immediately by Sugar, who expressed regret at having to let him go for sheer incompetence. The firing finger wasn’t done just yet, though, with April getting herself booted out of the door for her desire to stand in the background after leading the losing team on the first task. He toyed with firing David as well, but instead sent him back to the house, presumably stained with the arterial spray of his fallen colleagues. This was The Apprentice as made by Quentin Tarantino.
With the excruciating stupidity of almost every candidate and a boardroom of Biblical violence, this was one of the best episodes of The Apprentice in a very long time. The show is at its best when it allows its audience to revel in the incompetence of people in suits spouting meaningless business speak being confronted by the real world.
Next week, the candidates will be tasked with setting up discount clothing stores up North.
Tom Beasley – Follow me on Twitter for movies, wrestling and jokes about David Cameron.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=lJSdv333_EI
