Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E11+12 (Final)

So, let’s just get this out of a way first: The interview episode was, as always, a complete and utter shambles. People were screaming, things caught fire, loads of people were caught out in lies.

None were more shambolic than Richard and Gary’s interviews, though.

Gary, whose business idea was ‘Celebration Disco’, a mobile disco, yes you read that one right, was caught in several lies right off the bat. First, he said he had been in charge of a one-billion pound budget, which was actually totally untrue, and he said he’d been in charge of a team of six-hundred people, when his team actually only had three people in it.

Worse, when caught in these lies, he didn’t just own up to them. He tried to hedge, saying that he’d been de facto in charge of these things, but nobody fell for it. As one of the interviewers pointed out, Gary liked to exaggerate his importance, and also his business idea was absurd.

Richard may well have done even worse. His business idea was basically a marketing agency, but he wrote his business plan in flowery, purple prose that nobody could understand. Claude said it read like a ‘1980s marketing manual.’

Worse still, he was caught in a bigger lie than Gary: Having said his idea was entirely unique, it turned out that it was an identical copy of another business he owned. A business that would be in competition with the won he’d have with Lord Sugar.

Also, everyone - everyone - hates Richard. The other candidates were talking about how he was an inveterate liar and would definitely come back and say that he’d aced his interview even though it wasn’t true, and they were right. That is literally exactly what happened.

By the end of the interviews, he had just been beaten down. He had no fight left in him.

Vana’s business idea was an online dating app involving games, and while that sounds like my idea of hell, the main problem the interviewers had with it was that dating apps having massive start-up costs and don’t turn profits for a very long time.

It was a problem that Vana didn’t really have an answer to, which is a shame, since she’s otherwise a pretty credible businessperson.

Charleine had much the same problem: As a businessperson, she’s fine, but her business idea - a franchise of haircare salons - was immediately called out as being impractical. All of the interviewers did like her, however.

Joseph, meanwhile, also had a franchise idea, of plumbing and heating businesses. This fell flat almost immediately when one of the interviewers pointed out that any franchised business would lose money because of it.

In general, that was the viewpoint of many of the interviewers: Joseph was considered a credible businessman, but the franchising model was generally seen as doomed to failure in this instance.

Surprisingly, Joseph was all set up to get caught in a lie (“I’ve read Alan Sugar’s autobiography three times, it’s really inspired me, he’s my idol,”) only for one of the interviewers to try to catch him out with a quiz on Lord Sugar’s life and fail. Joseph answered every question correctly. He really is that much of a Lord Sugar fanboy.

In a rather sad moment, he talked about how you had to ‘sacrifice your youth to be successful’, which is just - really sad.

In the end, Richard, Gary, and Charleine were fired, leaving Vana and Richard to go on to the final.

The finale opened on an interesting note, with Vana claiming that her business idea was inherently more morally worthwhile than Joseph’s, which seems a bit of an odd claim, given that there’s no shortage of dating apps, really anywhere.

As ever, the challenge was to create a pitch for their business idea, using a team of former contestants. Vana picked Richard, Charleine, Ruth, and Natalie, while Joseph picked Gary, Brett, Elle and Mergim.

In Vana’s team, the brutal snark against Richard was out in full force, with Vana immediately noting that while he was good at marketing, she didn’t like Richard as a person. It only got worse when they were making the television advert, where Charleine outright said that Richard was the perfect casting choice for a ‘lonely old man’, before remarking that it’d take ‘all of [her] acting ability’ to pretend she was in love with him.

I actually really enjoyed watching Charleine in this episode. She was doing her best to help Vana win, but it was also totally clear that she was delighting in the chaos around her.

Vana’s business plan ran into many of the same ideas it did in the interviews - namely, the owner of the biggest dating app in the world saying it would never work, at least not for turning a profit or even breaking even quickly, and her at first deciding to ignore him, and then trying to find other ideas for funding to cover up this problem, thinking it would spare her from awkward questions.

Needless to say, it did not.

Joseph’s team, meanwhile, was terrible, because he picked people he liked rather than people who were good at their jobs.

In a strange parody of Vana’s problems, all of the experts thought that Joseph’s idea could very easily be massively successful, and they thought he was pretty personable to boot. Even better, Joseph took the time to give them his card, get their cards, and generally network with them, which will be invaluable.

But rather than focusing on his unique selling point - the most important part of the task - Joseph instead had an almost laser focus on things like logo, television adverts, et cetera, all of which turned out pretty poorly.

Part of that is that none of his team are any good at advertising, and part of that is that Mergim is almost cartoonishly terrible at acting, and was cast in the television advert nevertheless.

Nevertheless, in the boardroom, Joseph won, and I’m not even sure it was that close, either. Vana’s idea was - and is - kind of a non-starter.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E10

This week, we had a health snack challenge - it’s a lot like every other challenge where the contestants have to make a product and then pitch it, except in this instance, they’re making a product for a niche market. Also, a market that is at least fifty percent tosspots.

Charleine was made project manager of Connexus, while Brett was made project manager of Versatile, and the game was on. In this case, it seemed to be a game of ‘who could screw up what isn’t, actually, a tremendously complicated challenge the most.’

Versatile decided to make energy bars, called ‘Rejuvenate Bars’, which is a solid idea, actually. I’m not even a big health food nut, and I still buy Nakd bars and Trek bars whenever I can, because they are legitimately delicious. They then quickly decided to have a superfoods focus, which is where things got frustrating.

Let us be entirely clear here: Superfoods aren’t a thing. Not a single reputable scientific source backs up the idea of ‘superfoods’ being a meaningful term, because most of the supposed health benefits are total bullshit. Acai berries, for example, are not actually better for you than blackberries, but grocers will market acai berries as a superfood and sell them for three or four times the cost.

And Versatile just never seemed to get this. As various snake oil merchants rambled total nonsense about superfoods, Versatile then went and clumsily repeated that nonsense to other people.

Well, for a time, at least. Due in large part to a failure to measure anything by Charleine, they ended up not having enough of the ‘superfoods’ in their bars to actually market them as that - something which did not get translated over to the packaging, as when relaying information to her team, Charleine just rattled off the data in a rapid-fire staccato that nobody could keep up with. They had to adjust the packaging with felt tip. Felt tip, guys.

(Gary suggested that if anybody asked, they just be up front and honest about it, marking the first and last time an Apprentice candidate has ever advocated honesty.)

In the pitching, none of the retailers were especially impressed, and all of them were dubious about the product.

Connexus, meanwhile, decided to make dehydrated vegetable crisps. If that sounds disgusting to you, then congratulations! You have taste.

They decided to market their product as ‘gluten free, vegan, and raw’, which made me roll my eyes, but if they had pulled it off, might have actually worked: If there’s anything that you can definitely say about vegans and raw food advocates, it’s that they’re wealthy, gullible, and slightly desperate.

Not to mention that Richard was actually pretty good on the branding and marketing side. They fell down when Vana, faced with a recipe that called for a little bit of olive oil, put three times the recommended amount in, something that might not have happened if Brett had bothered to actually lead his team.

The result was something that might be the oiliest, wettest thing ever described as ‘dehydrated’. I actually didn’t realise until we were shown a shot of them in the boardroom: They were dripping with oil. They didn’t look like crisps, they looked like chunks of red onion that had been soaked in a vat of oil. They looked horrible.

None of the retailers liked the product, and in the case of the first retailer, Brett’s absolutely terrible pitch (during which Richard looked like he wanted to garrote the man) didn’t help.

When the two teams got to the boardroom, Lord Sugar hated both products as well, describing the bars as being like ‘soil from Chernobyl’ and the crisps as being ‘impregnated with oil.’ In an Apprentice first, as well, both teams lost, with each team getting exactly zero orders for a sum total of zero pounds.

I wondered if maybe Lord Sugar would fire someone from the team that spent the most, or whether he’d fire someone from both teams, but instead he asked Charleine and Brett to both bring back one person each.

Charleine brought back Gary, and Brett brought back Richard. These were both terrible choices: Gary wasn’t stellar, but he made the best of a bad situation, while Richard was the only competent member of his team.

Brett was fired, but Lord Sugar did say that he was honourable, so there’s that. That means that going into interview week, we have Charleine, Gary, Richard, Vana and Joseph.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E9

Okay, I’m going to level with you all here, for most of this task I had no idea what was going on. It was a real estate task, and they’ve never really done one of those before, and nearly all of it flew straight over my head, so I can’t really blame the candidates for not doing too well. It was a bit nervewracking to watch too, as the teams handled vastly larger quantities of money than they ever had before.

Joseph, who has a stupid moustache but has done well on several tasks, was made team leader of Versatile, while Richard was made team leader of Connexus, which seems like an absolutely terrible choice to me.

Weirdly, though, this challenge was Richard’s time to shine, along with Vana. The two of them, it turned out, were really good at wooing developers, at one point covering their lack of a show-flat and floor plans (logistical errors on their part) with a relentless charm offensive that actually worked.

Scott and Brett, also on Connexus, did less well. Brett was fine, but Scott was constantly screwing things up, with one memorable moment involving him flailing at a map and declaring “Everyone’s enjoying the Clapham!” in slightly angry, desperate tones. Brett had to bail him out of sticky situations at multiple points, and by the end of the challenge, I’m pretty sure he was considering defenestrating Scott.

For Versatile, meanwhile, 90% of their problems came down to Selina being pretty terrible. Joseph had a bit of a screw-up near the start when he tried to push for 4% commission, only to be flatly told that he was getting 1.5% and that was the end of the matter, but Selina was like a wellspring of terrible decisions and interpersonal drama.

Most of that drama seemed to come from Selina really not liking Charleine. Charleine was doing a great job selling loads of middle-end properties, only for, during every team meeting, Selina to start browbeating her about being ‘unpolished.’

Bear in mind that Selina hadn’t seen any of Charleine’s sales, and that the ‘unpolished’ remark was actually a criticism made by a client about Joseph and Selina, so the whole thing was just a little bit bewildering, and came off as Selina trying to desperately save her ego by pretending that her clients weren’t unimpressed with her, but with Charleine, whose activities they knew of via psychic powers.

Selina wasn’t getting along any better with the rest of her team, either, with Joseph describing her as ‘manipulative’ several times.

In the boardroom, Connexus won with £79k to Versatile’s £29k - only for Scott, who was on the winning team, mind, to immediately announce that he was leaving the process. This was largely due to Lord Sugar having basically said outright that Scott would have been fired if he’d not been on the winning team, but people were shocked. Charleine audibly gasped. Connexus fled, with Brett herding them out like they were evacuating a room with a bomb in it.

After Scott left, Selina was fired, and it was really never going to be anyone else. Still, with a triple firing a few weeks back, and someone dropping out this week, the numbers are getting thin on the ground. Only Brett, Vana, Richard, Joseph, Charleine and Gary (I always forget Gary) left for the remaining three weeks of the process.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About ... The Apprentice S11E8

I feel like this series is the one with the most collateral damage. Not long ago we had the disastrous handyman business, and now we have this one, a party-planning business: Usually, that means a high-society garden party or a tour group. This time, it meant a child’s birthday party. The parents had volunteered £2000 as a budget, with the stipulation that they could ask for a partial or total refund, which is kind of the epitome of ‘a race to the bottom,’ because it’s essentially a challenge to see who can piss off the parents the least.

I do have to wonder what kind of parents have two grand to use on a kid’s birthday party, but apparently care so little that they’d leave it in the hands of Apprentice candidates. That’s an odd mix of rich, involved, and apathetic they’ve got going on there. Then again, possibly it came with an offer to have Lord Sugar pay for a second, better party for their kids. Or maybe it was neither of the kids’ birthdays at all, and their parents were just like “Hey, kid, find nine friends and invite them to a fake birthday party, this is going to be fuckin’ hilarious.”

Anyhow, Selena became the project manager for Connexus, and Gary once again became project manager for Versatile. Selena also got to choose someone from Versatile to join her team, and for some baffling reason, chose Richard. This would turn out to be a mistake.

The fun immediately started when Versatile was told that the mother of their party childling had a severe and deadly nut allergy, because it was obvious, from the moment she said that, that they’d end up getting food with nuts in it. And what do you know, they did! Well, nut traces - the kind of warning that gets put on most things as standard, if only because traces of nut might have ended up on factory workers’ hands or suchlike.

This moderate but salvageable fluff was then exacerbated dramatically when Gary was asked if he’d brought Nutella - which might I remind you is made out of nuts and has the word ‘Nut’ in its name - and replied that yes, he had. This wasn’t actually true: The team had bought Cadburys’ Chocolate Spread, but by the time he bothered to check and find out, the damage had already been done, and the poor mother had spent about half an hour sitting three-hundred metres from the party, terrified of actually attending her own kid’s probably-not-actually-birthday party.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Putting together a set of party bags, Versatile then tried to sell them back to the client for fifteen quid each. They were eventually pushed down to nine quid, which is still an extortionate amount, especially when the party bags were not actually very good. One thing they had in them were these glo-stick necklaces, but it wasn’t long before the candidates were talking about how they could just use the glo-sticks and forcibly place them around the throats of the young boys and girls in their care, and then demand that the parents pay for them and the rest of the party bags.

(They did, in fact, try that plan, but forgot to actually perform the racketeering step, instead just using up the glo-sticks from the party bags and then limply failing to even try intimidating the clients into paying for them, which is a failure on their part, but also probably better than the alternative?)

Versatile did have some great ideas, like an outdoor adventure park and a barbecue, but ruined those ideas by a) Being the most boring people in the known universe, literally draining the hope and joy out of the children with every passing moment, and b) Failing to barbecue things promptly.

Connexus didn’t do much better, starting with a disastrous interview with the client where Selena took her enthusiasm to terrifying levels, pretty much talking non-stop and at one point wheezing “I KNOW HOW TO FIRE BREATHE,” at them. Things got steadily worse when Connexus decided that theri clients’ birthday party would be hosted at a gym.

A gym.

Connexus was rather insistent on calling it an ‘athletics centre’, which I suppose is somewhat apt since it also had a running track, but it was, nevertheless, essentially just a gym. They decided this based on the party child mentioning in passing that she was interested in sports. I mean, dear god, people, there are other ways to use that: Go to a water park with skiing and tobogganning or something. Have a swimming pool party. Endless possibilities.

Connexus also forgot to take their clients’ phone number, which meant that when they decided that they too were going to put together ridiculously expensive party bags to sell to the client, they didn’t have any way to gauge whether the client would be even remotely interested, and so just bought a bunch of stuff hoping they could sell it.

The client did (I think, it was a little confusing) buy the party bags for ten quid each, but she was visibly irritated at being put in that position at all.

Picking Richard also turned out to be an absolute failure as, after being put in charge of the food, he was only starting to get burgers out by the time the first girl was leaving; and he had not only failed to come even remotely close to finishing the cake by about half an hour before the party was due to end, he screamed at Vana like a spoiled child when she asked him about it.

Richard really needs to go.

In the end, Versatile lost, largely due to the party bag fiasco, which means that Richard survives another week despite everybody hating him. David was fired instead.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E7

This week’s challenge was the discount store challenge, where contestants have to set up a discount store in the vein of Poundland and its many imitators. Scott, best known for his hardline views on hair replenishment, became the team leader of Connexus, while Gary, who is so bland that I was unaware of his existence until this week, became team leader of Versatile.

Well, apparently half of the candidates don’t know how wholesalers work. One went in asking for a buy-one-get-one-free deal, which a wholesaler would never do since they make tiny margins and profit from selling in bulk, and a fifty percent discount would mean they were making a loss.

Sam, meanwhile, revealed once again that he can’t do numbers at all. Not complicated numbers or anything: Basic mathematics with the aid of a calculator. It was horrible and embarrassing.

So, they got their stuff, tested them out on street stalls, and then bought more of the biggest sellers to sell in their actual shop - that, actually, all went pretty well. It was when they’d actually set up in physical shops at a shopping centre that things started to go really wrong.

For Team Versatile: Richard. Tasked with bringing in shoppers to their store, he decided his primary method of doing this was going to be to scream ‘I AM ICE-SKATING’ while chasing people around the shopping centre. It was horrible and embarrassing to watch, and only made worse by the fact that this is the only thing he seemed interested in doing: If he tried any other tactics for getting people into the shop, we weren’t shown any of them.

For Team Connexus: Everyone. You had Sam meandering around the shop being unable to work tills and apparently unwilling to sell; you had Brett and Vana protesting that being sent out to bring in shoppers was all part of some kind of diabolical political game plan meant to make them scapegoats for an eventual loss; and you had Scott trying and failing to keep everyone under control. At one point, tensions in the team got bad enough that Scott and Brett had an out-and-out, highly aggressive argument.

(This would become somewhat relevant in the boardroom.)

When they got into the boardroom, Connexus had actually brought in more money than Versatile - but since victory on this task is calculated both by sales made and the total value of the stock they had left, Versatile, which had almost three times as much stock value, won. Scott brought Sam and Brett back into the boardroom - Sam being a no-brainer, and Brett having been quite aggressive.

Quite aggressive, but not as aggressive as Scott tried to claim. Scott tried to tell Lord Sugar that Brett had threatened to assault him, only for Brett, Sam, and Karren to all respond that literally nothing like that had ever happened. I’m not sure why he thought it would be a good idea to tell a lie that blatant, but he did, so here we are.

Probably the only thing that saved Scott from being fired for that was Sam’s tremendous incompetence with everything, and the fact that the previous week had been a triple firing already. Sam was fired, and while Lord Sugar seemed to really, really want to fire Scott, he refrained from doing so.

(Some tabloids are reporting that shortly afterwards, Brett and Scott did indeed have an actual fight, so that’s a thing.)

Next week, we apparently have party planning, which will surely be an unmitigated disaster.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E6

So, this week’s challenge was for the teams to set up handyman jobs and go around doing ‘odd jobs’, which seems like an even worse idea than the children’s book challenge, because it’s possible to actually seriously screw up someone’s home or business if, say, you’re washing their windows and you accidentally set fire to the building.

Or if you try to put up a shelf and instead put a massive hole in the wall, we’ll talk about that in a moment.

Lord Sugar picked the team leaders for this one, putting construction executive Elle in charge of Versatile and builder Brett in charge of Connexus. Obvious choices there, the teams would probably have chosen the same way.

Things kind of went downhill immediately, though, when it came to putting together the fliers. Connexus decided their slogan would be ‘connexing people together’, which sounds like the slogan of a telephone company owned by Genghis Khan; while Versatile spent so long discussing whether it should be ‘Minor DIY and window cleaning’ or ‘Window cleaning and minor DIY’ that they missed the deadline for fliers entirely.

(Mergim decided to make the best of a bad situation by scribbling notes on pieces of paper and putting them up in shop windows, and was roundly mocked by the team for this, despite the fact that his logic was completely solid: They didn’t have any fliers because their team were fucking about, and it was better to have horrible sub-par advertisements than nothing at all.

Mergim would also be mocked for completely different things later, but we’ll get to that soon.)

Connexus, in an odd turn, didn’t manage to make any money on the first day of the task, because instead of doing handyman jobs, they were doing market research, which basically consisted of wandering around asking if anyone knew anyone who needed work done, to which the answer was always ‘No.’

Versatile did manage to get jobs on the first day, but it would probably have been better if they hadn’t. Apart from sub-team pricer April’s ridiculously low price point (ten quid a job), the sub-team also had Mergim, who, it turns out, is an actual walking disaster area with the most terrific case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’d seen in a while.

The man insisted that he was a brilliant handyman. He insisted on that so hard, even as he was putting up a shelf and having to be gently told by Karren, in the manner of a beleaguered primary school teacher, that you don’t screw in a nail. Instead of putting up a shelf, he instead made a gigantic hole in the wall of a poor woman’s shop.

“That’s pretty bad,” you might be saying, but guess what? Mergim also doesn’t know how to paint. When asked to paint a shop front, he instead painted the shop’s sign. He painted over the sign. That shop has no sign now.

Connexus, meanwhile, did surprisingly well, scoring a lucrative job cleaning a football stadium - which they then failed to complete, something team leader Brett said was due to how professional he was, because apparently Brett takes a homeopathist’s approach to professionalism. Surprisingly, they still got paid almost the full amount.

In the board room, it was revealed that Connexus had brought in nearly twice as much money as Versatile, with £1050 to their £530. Since Elle, the team leader, has yet to ever be on a winning team despite having been in the process for six weeks, she was fired on the spot - leaving Mergim to bring back two people with him.

He brought back April, because she was responsible for the pricing, and David, who had just kind of blended into the background. April was fired shortly thereafter for the catastrophe that was the ten pounds a job pricing, followed shortly by Mergim, because oh my god you can’t put up a shelf or paint.

Which is good news for the rest of the candidates, since a triple firing means one less double firing means some lucky person is going to get to stay in the process for longer than they otherwise would have.

Also, Mergim dreams of being a millionaire. I just thought I’d throw that one out there.

He doesn’t know how to paint.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants about... The Apprentice S11E5

So, this week’s challenge is an entirely new one. New and, I think everyone will agree, absolutely terrifying. The candidates had been tasked with creating (including writing and sourcing the artwork for) and then selling a children’s book. For children. If that doesn’t make you scream loudly out of fear of the unknown, then I’m not sure what will.

Connexus, who is referred to in my notes as Team Not-Bee for reasons which will soon be apparent, thank you past me, put private tutor and creative writing graduate Sam in charge, which turned out to be the most horrendous mistake they could have made. Clearly far more in love with the idea of spreading his limitless creative vision to the world than in actually making a product that children would enjoy and that bookstores would want to stock, Sam immediately launched into babbling about his idea about a magical adventure with an elephant giraffe dragon.

Many of the candidates on his team tried to stop him and remind him that this was a book meant for other people to read, not a vanity project for himself, but he just would not listen. The creative shenanigans on his part didn’t stop there, either, as when the audiobook version was being recorded (yes, they had to do audiobook versions), he had advice like “Say it like the wind.” How the fuck do you do that, Samuel? Breathily? Whispering? Screaming? Whistling? There’s no end of adjectives that have been ascribed to the sound of the wind.

(It doesn’t help that out of all the candidates, a fairly upper class bunch at the best of times, Sam comes off as the most posh, with all the hallmarks of that, such as ‘full of meaningless bluster’, ‘unwilling to actually defend his own views in a debate of equals’, ‘totally detached from reality’, and ‘lustful towards farm animals’.)

When the books were being sold, he also proudly announced that everybody loved the book, despite reactions to it having been, at best, lukewarm. He led one team that was pitching, and handed the other team over to Scott, who you may remember as Hair Replenishment Guy. Scott actually did surprisingly well, but was let down horribly by Natalie, who failed to do the basic maths necessary before trying to pitch to a bookstore owner, resulting in them all being practically thrown out of the shop when it was clear that Natalie was incompetent.

This isn’t the first time Natalie has fallen down on pretty basic calculations, either - she did so in the pets task, too, and as with that time, it seems less like she wasn’t able to and more like she couldn’t be bothered.

Versatile, meanwhile, referred to in my notes as Team Bee, did a book about bees, and how bees make honey! Guess how many members of the team knew anything about honey making. Guess. Guess now, do it now.

It was none, none of them knew anything about making honey, you guessed correctly. Well done.

But in spite of what could be charitably described as a colossal screw-up on the most fundamental level of planning, Team Bee still won, because it did, at least, occur to them that they might want to make their children’s book appeal to children, as opposed to a twenty-something posh dude from London.

And yet Sam did not leave! He made the wise choice of bringing back Natalie, and her repeated unwillingness to perform basic maths doomed her to being fired. It was a close one, though. If he’d not brought her back, he would have definitely been fired. 

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About ... The Apprentice S11E4

We’re a third of the way through the process now, as the teams do the now-regular Pet Show challenge, which is pretty much just a slightly reworked form of a challenge that’s been in the series since its inception. The basic schtick goes as such: The candidates have to make deals with the makers of various products (of which there are limited choices) to sell said products at some kind of event - lately, always the London Pet Show - and then sell them, and whichever team wins the most money wins the challenge entire.

(Since the teams have been mixed up, I can unfortunately no longer refer to them by gender, so I will do my best to remember that the former dudes’ team is Team Versatile, and the former women’s team is Team Connexus. Versatile has irritating moustache guy and the woman who was nearly fired last week; Connexus has Hair Replenish Guy and Ugly Suit Woman.)

To be honest, the teams in this challenge were both disappointingly competent. There’s really very little I can say this week, because in a shocking twist, most of the candidates managed to act like actual business students - or at the very least, students in their first year of a business degree.

Versatile chose some slightly pricy animal t-shirts (I would not pay ten quid for a t-shirt with a guinea pig’s face on it, let’s put it that way) and some also incredibly pricy animal balloons (five pounds each) for their accessory products, and some luxury dog sofas for their high end products, and I was absolutely certain this would lead them to ruin.

After all, who spends five quid on a balloon? Who thinks ‘I’m going to buy my dog a luxury dog sofa’? Who ever buys a t-shirt with a guinea pig’s face on it? Well, it turns out the answer is a surprising number of people. Bolstered by some actually pretty excellent, enthusiastic selling, Team Versatile actually managed to win, despite having decided not to go for what was, statistically speaking, the best high end product (a modular cat tower).

They actually had a really good strategy too, which was to combine quick, impulse buy items with much bigger purchases. It worked, too: They brought in over four-thousand pounds, which for a single day’s selling, at an event where people are spending most of their time at displays and competitions, is not bad at all.

Connexus made some more mistakes. For starters, they made Hair Replenish Guy their team leader, only to find out that he was actually a terrible, spineless leader who needed to defer all of his decisions to other people. Like Versatile, they wanted to sell the balloons - but failed to get the deal because the balloon-maker (the ballooner?) thought they weren’t enthusiastic enough.

Further mistakes they made in the challenge included Ugly Suit Lady, previously one of the best sellers in the process, totally forgetting how to sell. Instead of selling, she was just talking at potential customers, endlessly, giving them nearly no opportunity to think, discuss, or talk at all. She would keep talking to them even when it was clear that they weren’t going to buy.

I am sympathetic: When called out on this in the boardroom, she asked if she was meant to just immediately stop being friendly when it was clear there’d be no sale, and was told that she should, and I get that that’s difficult. On the other hand, if those customers don’t want to buy, they also probably don’t want to keep talking to you anyway.

They also picked the cat heating pad and some other inconsequential cat accessory, which were always going to be less popular impulse buys. In the end, they brought in a little over three-thousand, but I can’t really say how much of that was because they made mistakes and how much of it was just bad luck.

Like I said, everybody was shockingly competent this week.

In the end, Ugly Suit Woman ended up leaving, which is terrible. She’s one of the only people on the show who’s actually memorable.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E3

 So, the negotiation challenge, where the teams have to buy a variety of items while spending as little money as possible, is an old standby for this series, but this year they decided to put a little twist on it, by having both teams split up, with half of them searching for items in Dover, and half of them searching for items in Calais.

God, was that a mistake. More for the dudes’ team than the women’s team, as nobody among the dudes could speak French - the best any of them could say was that they had an A-level in the accursed language - which meant that in more than a few negotiations, they were left just speaking very slowly and hoping that whichever person they were talking to understood English. The good news for them was that a lot of French people in Calais do speak at least some English, but when they didn’t, it was painful. It really was.

The task was an interesting one this week, as we saw a face-off between consistent mediocrity (the dudes’ team) and equal-parts-brilliance-and-shambolic-failure (the womens’ team). While the dudes fumbled their way to at least some sort of victory, the women fell chronically short despite managing to out-bargain the dudes on almost every item that both teams actually bought.

I say ‘almost every item’, because they actually failed to buy several: They bought the wrong kind of cheese, didn’t buy any mussels (which you can find in nearly any fishmongers), and didn’t buy one of the biggest and most important items - a specific kind of mirror. Of the items they did buy, they got some amazing deals, on almost all of them bar one: An inflatable boat.

In a move that in a more specific challenge might see them fail, the men bought a tiny kid’s boat, the sort you’d toss into a paddling pool or a swimming pool. Since the brief never specified that it had to be a full-sized boat that you could take out onto the ocean, it was allowed.

The women, meanwhile, bought a full-sized inflatable boat. It was catastrophically expensive, and the poor contestant in charge of buying it wanted nothing more than to walk away and leave it - only to be convinced by her team leader that she absolutely had to buy it.

So, predictably, that team ended up in the boardroom, for the third time in as many weeks. Their team leader nearly doomed herself by taking responsibility for almost everything, something which she admitted later that she did because she hoped it would make the rest of the team rally to her defence (it didn’t), and was only saved by bringing in a team member who had consistently performed in a mediocre fashion.

(No, I didn’t catch any of their names. It’s still too early for that.)

The poor woman gave a whole spiel after she was fired, lasting nearly two minutes, while everyone around her looked steadily more bored. In it, she talked about how she was really sad that she hadn’t shown Lord Sugar what she could do, because all of the contestants apparently feared being in the final with her. It was as if she was trying to convince him to change his mind, even though she’d already been fired.

I’m actually surprised the team leader stayed in, after she essentially said that everything in the task was her fault.

Next week, we have the pet show episode, because what could be worse than having the Apprentice candidates interact with animals. I hope one of them gets eaten by a horse. I hope it’s the dude with the stupid moustache.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E1+2

Gadzooks, it feels like it was only yesterday that we were seeing off the last contestants of The Apprentice. I can see them so clearly in my mind: One of them had hair. Another one was wearing a suit, probably. They had skin. Good times, good times.

Okay, I tell a lie, I remember nothing about the previous series of The Apprentice. A year is a long time, after all. What I do remember is the sense of utter, wearying exasperation I had with every single one of those blasted, smug little toads, and apparently this series is determined to make me even more exhausted.

Our first two challenges, airing on consecutive days, were a challenge to create and sell seafood street food, and a challenge to market (with a television advertisement, a bottle, and a billboard) a cactus-based shampoo.

I’m probably going to talk more about the first challenge than the second, because in the second challenge, colour me extremely surprised, neither of the teams were that terrible. The dude’s team won by a clear margin despite some glaring mistakes (like having a pitch from a man whose pitch consisted entirely of stammering the words ‘man … replenish …’ before going silent for five agonising minutes), with a stylish and on-point marketing campaign that would, in all likelihood, stand up in the real world, but the women’s team was not terrible by any stretch of the imagination. It was refreshing island of competency in what is sure to be a sea of horror and blood and screaming and death.

(That last only if we’re very lucky, one supposes.)

The first task gave us more of what we’ve come to expect from Apprentice candidates by now.

One team decided, in a move I can only ascribe to their never having eaten food before, to make fish finger and calamari sandwiches in a tomato sauce. If that sounds revolting to you, congratulations! You are normal and your tastebuds do work. Pat yourself on the back, you deserve it, champ.

I don’t even know who that dish is being pitched at. Who on earth has ever thought to themselves ‘Oh, I’m just going to buy, from a fucking London high street where I could take my pick of dishes from a dozen different cultures, some fucking fish fingers with some calamari in what is essentially fucking ketchup, because I hate myself and my self-flagellation hour happened to coincide with my lunch hour today.’ Nobody. Nobody has ever fucking thought that. Nobody will ever think that.

This bright idea did, in fact, almost lead to food poisoning. As time wore on and the team grew increasingly desperate and clingy, practically grabbing at their customers’ coats and wailing at them for spare change, they decided to sell their uncooked food - including their raw calamari. Here’s a calamari factoid for you: When raw, it has to be kept at a temperature of five degrees celsius or lower, or else it very quickly becomes quite, quite dangerous. Our intrepid entrepeneurs kept it at fifteen degrees celsius, and if one of them hadn’t caught on, they would have sold what is essentially battered poison to unsuspecting Londoners.

“Well, naturally these people lost, this is a farce,” you say. These people won.

The losers instead made fish cakes. They meant to make three hundred of them using their enormously costly ingredients: They instead made eighty-nine gigantic fish cakes. You couldn’t fit these fish cakes in your mouth. You couldn’t fit them into a lion’s mouth. They were impossibly huge mountains of fish with a few breadcrumbs sprinkled atop.

Not only that, they made them late. They missed the lunchtime rush.

What was the cause of this catastrophe? Well, one team member decided he had to make them according to ‘specifications’ - whose, I don’t know, but apparently said specifications involved the fish cakes being two and a half inches thick. Two and a half inches. In the boardroom, you could have made a drinking game out of taking a swig each time the poor man said ‘specifications’, except if you did that you would die.

They took so long to make and involved so much fish that by the time they got out to selling them, they were having to price them absurdly high just to have a hope of making their money back.

In the end, their profits were less than two quid. You would not be able to buy a packet of frozen fish cakes with the profits they made from selling fish cakes.

So, obviously, that guy left, right? No. That guy did not leave. Specifications Guy is still in the process.

Instead, Dan, a lovely man who looks like he usually hangs around a Tory MP’s home in a leather collar, left, because he was an idiot who stood around on the street, with an untied apron under a suit jacket of all things, weakly asking people if they wanted some fish cakes. When confronted on this, he said he didn’t know how to sell.

He didn’t know how to sell. On a business program.

So, yeah, that sort of irked me. 
Oh, and someone tried to sell seafood to a vegan cafe. I don’t remember who. But they did that.