We had doughnuts, I spilled hot chocolate on my hand, it was great.
After the dramatic triple-firing last week, this week looks like it might be a more relaxing one. I meant, what isn’t relaxing about twenty-five people from the general public trapped in buses with our teams?
Oh. Oh, I see.
The fact that this week was less overtly disastrous than last week is a minor miracle, but it had it its moments - and most of those moments were the result of James on one team and Felipe on another, with a heavy emphasis on James.
(That’s Assaulty James, if you’re wondering. He’s the one who keeps comparing himself to Lord Sugar and seems to think he’s the best businessman to ever live.)
The embarrassment from James started when he confidently announced that he was going to arrange entry to a historical attraction for ‘20% of the usual fee.’ I don’t think we ever see what the usual fee was, but he was warned in advance by the rest of his team that he was going to make a fool out of himself, and sure enough, he did.
It wasn’t even that he was asking for a ridiculously low price right off the bat, it was that he didn’t seem to have any idea who he was talking to, either in a general sense (the owner of a large historical attraction who has a bottom line to think about) or a specific sense (how many people that attraction gets daily). When she told him that they did do group rates, he sulkily told her that it was only a minor discount, and that he was bringing in twenty-five people, only to be shut down when she replied that, actually, twenty-five people wasn’t a massive number for her.
Yet still he persisted, pretty much openly acknowledging that it was pointless before continuing to push for an 80% discount. It was ridiculous, and even more so because he pulled a similar shenanigan with the owner of the trip’s second potential attraction, cutting in while one of his team members was negotiating in order to angrily tell a businesswoman that she should be eager to negotiate with them, because their single day bus trip was going to drastically improve her business’ prospects.
Things got worse from James when the trip started, as not only was he almost always trying to force merchandise onto his increasingly irritated punters, but when he wasn’t, he was invariably singing nursery rhymes at the top of his lungs. Why? It was a question everybody seemed to have but nobody seemed to be able to answer, including James. It’s like he has no idea of context - or, as Karen pointed out, that people literally yelling ‘this is torture’ is a cue to stop.
Felipe, meanwhile, managed to put several people literally to sleep by doing a speech on the minutiae of Oxford degrees. So that was - that happened.
In the end, it was Team Summit, the team James was on, that lost. While James was spared even having to go back into the boardroom, Lord Sugar warned him that he was dangerously close to being fired anyway, irrespective of if he was in the boardroom as one of the three on the chopping block or not.
Lord Sugar just seems absolutely done with all of these contestants. He hates them, and it’s not tough to see why when so many of them are just cartoonishly terrible. Interestingly, this also seems to be the first series of The Apprentice where the candidates haven’t had seemingly magical compartmentalising powers, as during the glimpses off their ‘off time’ having treats or chatting in their house, they still seem to be arguing and sniping at each other.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this series just ended without a winner, at this rate.
Further highlight: Jemma remarking to an entire tour group that she felt like Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn ‘grew apart.’ Did they, Jemma. Did they grow apart.
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