Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S10E1

 Sorry for the lack of content from me these last two days, I've been very panicky and anxious and generally ill.

 Hopefully I'll have an FF8 post ready for Thursday. For now, enjoy Murphy from Fission Mailure having a rant about the new series of the UK version of The Apprentice.

Aaaaaaaaa.

I do actually adore The Apprentice, because watching people who say absurd things like ‘I’m an alpha male, women are drawn to obey me,’ stumble around attempting to do business by angrily flapping their arms at whiteboards and screaming about how they can taste success on their teeth gives me a high not unlike hard drugs, with the same accompanying nausea and craving for sweet things.

This week, we were introduced to twenty new candidates, all vying for the attentions of working class avuncular figure Lord Alan Sugar, Baron of Clapton. The winner will become his business partner in a venture of their choice.

The challenge this week was a dirt simple selling one, with a range of products that they could sell, and by jove, did the candidates screw it up.

I knew it was going to be a painful affair when the leader of the women’s team - named Decadence and subsequently becoming the first team asked by Lord Sugar to change their name to something that makes a little more sense - announced that they would all have to dress in short skirts, high heels, and nice make-up so that they could ‘sell stuff to boys’. It was gratifying to notice that she was, in fact, the only member of that team who followed this edict, with several team members noting that it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard.

Her team would later try to sell animal-toxic bleach to a zoo, argue for twenty minutes about whether they should cut lemons in half before selling them (which the aforementioned team leader, Sarah, insisted would earn them ‘five hundred pounds’), and buy five hundred pounds worth of t-shirts with a hundred and fifty pounds worth of prints, before proceeding to sell all of them for sixty quid.

Decadence won. They won, specifically, because in the race to the bottom that was this contest, the boys (who named their team ‘Summit’) were definitely ahead. They too ordered five hundred pounds worth of t-shirts with a hundred and fifty pounds worth of prints - and then they left all of them at the printers.

They also bought sausages to cook and sell as hotdogs, and at the same time bought guacamole and cheese - at a premium price for what are already expensive products - to sell with them. Lord Sugar was rather keen to point out after they lost that they could have just sold the hotdogs plain.

To make it worse, when in the boardroom, the boys insistently attempted to scapegoat one member of the team - Steven, a black Canadian social worker with an irritating accent - despite the fact that he was the only one who had any good ideas (he was, they said, ‘disruptive’), leading to Lord Sugar gravely saying that if they didn’t stop, he would be very displeased with them.

It was torturous, guys.

There’s another episode tomorrow.

So torturous.

Definitely tuning in tomorrow. Such masochism. Wow.