Luke Owen on last night’s episode of The Apprentice 2012…
9 weeks in. ¾ of the way through. Only 3 weeks left. By now, we must only have the strong candidates left right?
I’ll pause while you stop laughing at my silly suggestion.
This week saw our candidates take on the world of English sparkling wine. As I feared last week, this meant we did get more of Tom acting like a pretentious git. Thankfully enough, he was not the man who stole this week’s show.
Before we get on to that, the teams had to pick project managers. For Team Phoenix, Tom was predictably picked as their Project Manager due to his “knowledge” in the field. However, I did think back to my first week review when I said that you should never claim to be an expert in something because it will backfire on you (fingers crossed). Over on Team Sterling, all 4 of them wanted to be project manager but with two votes (because Steven wasn’t allowed to vote for himself), Wrestler Ricky Martin got the role. I feel that Wrestler Ricky Martin has been getting a lot of unfair flak from the Apprentice viewers. He performed very well as PM on the exercise task and he’s never really put a foot wrong in any of the other tasks.
With PMs picked, Tom and Adam went to an English sparkling wine vineyard for a focus group and proceeded to get smashed while Nick and Jade focused on branding and the website – which was the lion’s share of the work. Over on the other team, Steven attempted to use casual racism in their brand name (“how about we call it Chink? As in the chink of glasses?”) before heading to do market research in Tescos. Yes, you read that right. One team went to a vineyard; the others went down to Tescos. Let’s just hope they picked up a Ginsters pasty on the way out so the trip wasn’t a total waste of time. We were also treated to a sauce task flash back as Steven came up with the brilliant idea of calling their English wine Grandeur – a French word. Not only is this man an utter snake that never blinks, he’s also rubbish at the English language.
The problems for both teams arose when it came to the website and advert. For Team Tom, he trusted the success of the website in the hands of IT businessman and One Direction reject Nick. Unfortunately, the website that they created didn’t really raise awareness of English sparkling wine and was more of a sales platform – which was not the point of the task. But while their website was wrong, their advert (while not brilliant) was a lot better than the one produced by Wrestler Ricky Martin’s team. Jenna and Steven were placed in charge of the videography with one simple goal – make it classy. Ricky Martin did state that he didn’t mind a bit of humour but the whole thing had to be classy. What they produced however was a tacky, cheesy and downright awful advert that had no class about it. The BBC must be total masochists because they made us watch this video at least 4 times throughout the episode and it just got worse every single time. And from a technical stand point, the cross fade they used at the end was atrocious and embarrassing. One thing we know for sure, Wrestler Ricky Martin was not a happy bunny about it.
The “risky video” as Jenna’s annoying voice put it, did lead to the downfall of their pitch. Everything was going well until they showed the video which undid every good thing they’d done. For Team Tom however, their pitch seemed to go okay, with the exception of that sales orientated website. Overall, neither pitch was particularly good and I’m amazed how many people can take a man seriously who starts off a pitch with, “good afternoon, my name is Ricky Martin”.
Back in the boardroom and it was a standard affair with Lord Sugar pointing out the massive flaws with each team’s attempts and managed to drop in a Carry On reference with regards to Jenna’s pants advert. Despite the wine experts telling Lord Sugar that Tom’s team should have lost, he gave them the win because the other team’s advert was that bad. In what seems like an Apprentice first, both teams appeared to lose. Tom’s team didn’t win because they were good, they won because they weren’t as rubbish as Ricky Martin’s team – which to me has been the overarching theme of this entire series.
While Team Tom spent time in a Jacuzzi in what looked like freezing cold weather, Ricky Martin and his merry band of losers took a trip to the Sad Face Café. While no one was quick to point the finger of blame at Jenna for the video, it was quite clear where this episode was heading. With the 4 of them now back in front of Lord Sugar, it became abundantly clear how annoying Steven is as he has this horrible habit of undermining people when they are trying to defend themselves. He accused “Gabby” of doing nothing for the task (which was incorrect) and then when she was telling Lord Sugar all the good things she’d done (which were correct) he kept quietly telling her to stay on track and to be specific with her answer. Had I been in Lord Sugar’s shoes, I’d have fired him on the spot for being such a git. Unsurprisingly Wrestler Ricky Martin brought back Steven and Jenna because the video they made was crap and it was the only reason they missed out on freezing cold Jacuzzi time.
While it was obvious that Jenna was going to get the finger point of doom, it did look for a while like it was going to be Steven. That was until he essentially made a bet with Lord Sugar that he will be the Project Manager for the next task and he guarantees he will win. So with that arrangement made, it was time for Jenna and her annoying voice to take the taxi ride of shame. Thank god.
Let’s face facts, aside from it being the correct reason to fire her; I don’t think I could stomach another week of her voice. Having said that, Steven is a very luck man to still be in this competition because he was equally as responsible for the failure of the task. I don’t think he’ll win next week and I am looking forward to seeing him buckle under the pressure. Wrestler Ricky Martin once again proved that he has what it takes with this task to at least make the final. Had his sub team made a decent advert, he would have had this task won. The only thing that can be said negatively about him is that he lost the exercise task for exactly the same reason which shows that he isn’t learning much…
Next week is the final week of tasks and with 7 candidates still remaining; I am predicating a double firing before the interview episode.
Apprentice Advice of the Week: Don’t put Steven in charge of branding. In fact, don’t have Steven on your team.
Quote of the Week:
Lord Sugar: Grandeur? That’s French isn’t it?
Steve: It has French connotations.
Nick: …It’s a French word.
Top Tweet of the Week: Gabrielle’s voice is reminiscent of a pissed girl choking back tears as she talks about her ex boyfriend in a pub toilet. #theapprentice – @maddoxhardcore
Luke Owen is a freelance copywriter working for Europe’s biggest golf holiday provider as their web content executive.
