This week’s loser, ‘fashion conscious’ Paula Jones – ‘an academic with a love for interior design’ – is the absolute doppelganger of ‘fiery British actress’ Alex Kingston – ’ Elizabeth Corday on NBC medical drama ER.’
And for those of you who don’t agree with me (everyone), I’ve done a mock-up of what Paula Jones might look like playing three of Alex Kingston’s major roles.
(From left to right: sexy Nurse Elizabeth Corday, sexy wench Moll Flanders and sexy warrioress Boudicca.)
I guess you could say we’ve seen both the ‘Fortunes and Misfortunes’ of young Paula over the weeks.
(Edit – it actually is here now – Ep. 1 reviewed over here)
By now you’ll be well aware that the new series of The Apprentice begins on the 25th of March.
As has become the tradition, the BBC have issued some scant but tantalising details about the runners and riders. So let’s have a look at them, here and now – and make some wildly speculative judgements on their good character while we do so.
Anita Shah
Anita is inspired by James Caan, it says here, so she’ll be the one stroking her beard in a warehouse, too nervous to invest in anything. She ‘can make impactful statements’ she adds. I’m not sure if ‘impactful’ is a proper word, so she’s made an impact right from the off with this year’s first taste of language-mangling, or ‘langling’ as I like to call it, impactfully.
Ben Clarke
Viewers of HBO’s The Wire will know Ben from his role as Democrat candidate (and, latterly, Mayor of Baltimore) Tommy Carcetti. Ben states that ‘making money is better than sex’ – the sort of claim that demonstrates the speaker is a one-minute-man.
Debra Barr
Firstly – that’s not how you spell ‘Deborah’. Secondly, any woman with ‘a passion for business and a love of horses’ is instantly terrifying. Add all this to the cold eyes of a killer, and Debra’s already looking like a candidate to fear.
Howard Ebison
Howard’s an award-winning dancer, apparently – so expect a few jokes at his expense from Alan Sugar – the ultimate man’s man. A part qualified CIMA (Management) Accountant, Howard looks a little bit like Ben Mitchell off Eastenders in this promo shot, minus the hearing aid.
James McQuillan
James is a former child chess champion and a football fan. His profile doesn’t feature any incriminating quotes, so it’s possible this fellow’s a Lee McQueen type. But we won’t know until we tune in.
Kate Walsh
Kate says she has ‘the ability to sustain business relationships at all levels’ – and I haven’t the foggiest what that’s about. She’s ‘highly motivated’ and has ‘really achieved within a corporate environment across sales, marketing and a number of different aspects of business’. Yes, Kate – but what does that actually MEAN?
Kimberly Davis
Kimberly’s an American – but ‘not a typical New Yorker’, which is a stereotype she says she’s faced. I don’t know what a typical New Yorker is. A hot dog vendor? A cab driver? George Costanza? She’s an accomplished musician and dancer, so should there be a musical round, her and Howard can team up and really impress with an all-singing, all-dancing song and dance.
Lorraine Tighe
The obligatory single-mother, Sugar will no doubt be onside with Lorraine as she’s had more life experience and has ‘had a very hard time’. She sums up her attitude to business as the ability to drive a dead horse to the winning line – which is pretty much what’s expected of her here – so good luck pushing those moribund equines to disaster, Lorraine.
Majid Nagra
Majid is a Business Development Manager who got expelled from school. Sadly no details are forthcoming regarding his expulsion – do they kick kids out for ‘schmoozing and bullshitting’? He runs youth charities and has his own car hire business and the papers point to the fact that he might be a source of comedy.
Mona Lewis
‘Former beauty queen’, it says here. Mona’s also not educated beyond her A Levels, and that lack of formal education will probably chime with Sugar. She says she wants to do this for her son, so expect much hand-wringing about wanting to provide her boy with the kind of opportunities she never had, etc…
Noorul Choudhury
Confusingly, Noorul has a CIM qualification – he’s a chartered marketer – but he works as a science teacher. A strange career change that, considering the CIM is bloody difficult to get. He also deals in cliches, believing himself to be ‘feisty’, ‘ambitious’ and ‘driven’. Interviewing this lot must’ve got terrible repetitive.
Paula Jones
There’s often a mental redhead – remember Jo and last year’s Jennifer? – and ‘scatter-brained’ Paula looks like she might be there to fill that slot. She was born and raised in Wallsall, so we can look forward to editing that mocks her outrageous Brummie accent.
Phillip Taylor
Phillip has the generic sales-face. Notice the complete lack of character and the identikit haircut. Completely unremarkable. But it’s very early days – for all I know he’s a genius and a wit, but on the strength of this quote: “Business is the new rock ‘n’ roll and I’m Elvis Presley”, chances are he’s not.
Rocky Andrews
‘Rocky’??
Seriously – ‘Rocky’??
Apparently ‘Rocky’ is on £100,000 per year already – so his only reason for appearing is good, ol’ fashioned showing off. He owns a chain of sandwich shops after leaving a promising career in football due to injury. God knows why he’s taking part.
Yasmina Siadatan
Going by this photo, Yasmina looks to be quite suitable for television. Her profile blurb hasn’t annoyed me at all, and I’m not sure if that’s because of her presentable photo. It probably is.
Go Yasmina!
* * *
And that’s your lot. All of last year’s Apprentice reviews are here. if you’re feeling nostalgic.
In this one off charity special, Chris Moyles and his celebrity mates climbed a mountain for the Comic Relief cause. Viewers tuning in expecting to see Gary Barlow tumbling down a rocky scene, shattering bones with each bump, were disappointed – as all he did was complain about his back. Those who set Sky+ in the hope of seeing a naked Cheryl Cole bathing under a waterfall will also feel let down by the fact that all she did was worry about her make up and walk like an upright stick-insect, unable to move a step unless a flunky held her hand.
Aside from that, this wholly unremarkable show featured Denise Van Outen being her usual chirpy self, Ronan Keating sporting his curtain cut in a variety of different lengths, Aleesha Dixon laughing like a hyena one minute then sobbing the next and Fearne Cotton feeling peaky.
So not a particularly eventful feature, particularly considering the build up the BBC had pasted all over their magazine shows this week. In fact, it was such a non-event that they felt the need to feature three ten minute appeals in the one hour running time to get some money in, presumably to wake viewers up and remind them that this wasn’t just a complete waste of time.
Immediately following the monotonous trek, Comic Relief Does The Apprentice lifted the spirits somewhat. There was, admittedly, an issue this time round. The Producers filled the teams with funny people (or in Jonathan Ross’s case, people who think they’re funny), with only one business-experienced individual on either team.
Rather than cause no end of hilarity, this resulted in Jonathan Ross on the boys’ team going into overdrive and steering his team like some terrible, cheesy dictator, his team becoming instantly timid in the face of his gigantic salary and influence.
The girls’ team split into two camps, causing some friction and an underwhelming argument between Patsy Palmer and an underwear magnate, but aside from that they bumbled through just fine.
The best line of the night came from Jack Dee – at one point perfectly executing his comic timing to complain about the amount of seats in the boardroom, then retract his outburst like a small boy.
Enjoyable stuff and for a good cause – but the real thing is coming soon…
The remit has been expanded to include any current affairs, news or magazine show.
Good morning.
Today’s Friday Question concerns the folk who lurk behind the scenes. The button-pushers, the format-tweakers and the devils in the shadows. I speak, of course, about the Reality TV Production Team.
They are the unseen heroes and villains of Reality TV. If it wasn’t for them, nobody on Masterchef would go on about how winning would be a dream come true, because they wouldn’t be asked constant, leading questions along the lines of ‘just how amazing would you feel if you won it?’.
The Apprentice cast wouldn’t be urged on with cumulatively aggressive questioning and Big Brother housemates wouldn’t, at audition stage, be encouraged to act like complete arseholes the second they get in the bungalow…
SO… If you were behind the scenes of any reality show, be it Wife Swap, Maestro, Strictly Come Dancing or any other that come to mind, how would YOU tweak the format?
You can add or take anything away from the usual progression of events. You can guide the participants to act in a certain way. You can even make everyone take all their clothes off! So that they’d be naked! With all tits and arses everywhere!
If your thirst for asinine entrepreneurs wasn’t quenched by the borderline unwatchable Natural Born Sellers on ITV, then you could do worse than flick over to BBC3 on a Wednesday night for The Last Millionaire. It’s like The Apprentice in reverse and without the flawed concept of Sugar as some figurehead of business ethics and success.
What you get is a bunch of youngsters who’ve crucially already made their first million and are on the show simply to strut and show off their imagined business acumen. If they win the weekly task they can go home – but if they lose they stay on and run the risk of ultimately being the outright loser in the final week. And it seems that losing is the thing they most fear – whereas in The Apprentice, all but one will lose, so only being the first to go really carries any shame.
All these bright young things are dropped in a foreign clime, week upon week, and paired up. They’re given about 60 quid each, tossed in a hostel and told to make as much money as they can within seven days. A borderline impossible task, you might think.
There’s clearly a little help from the production team in terms of providing contacts and offering inspiration, but for the most part it seems they’re left on their own and many minutes of quality chuckles are reaped from their absent-minded bull-headedness, pig-ignorant self-belief and vain lack of self-awareness. As seven days is too short a time to set up a legitimate business beyond selling bottles of water to tourists (which is what one pairing did one week, while others were selling high end night out to models), most of the participants resort to scamming bar owners, museums, tourist agencies and holiday-makers. And sometimes their arrogance is breathtaking.
Last week’s winners, for example, sold a Spencer Tunick style installation at a German bar. The owner was impressed by the non-tacky pitch and would provide cash for the publicity as well as use of the bar. A photographer who was asked to generate that publicity was also asked for some money – he could use the prints as he liked afterwards. So, with money made, all the lads had to do was find some dudes who were happy to be nudes.
Having promised a jam-packed barful of naked folk, all of them rendered anonymous by their sheer numbers, they managed to get about seven very uncomfortable people to take part through sheer, sneaky manipulation. The bar looked half empty so the photos that were eventually produced must’ve resembled the opening shots from a C-grade group porn pamphlet. But – amazingly – they got the money from the photographer.
On the other hand, the bar-owner turned from an easy going cool-cat into a rage-filled German stereotype, ordering them to get out of his bar without payment in a thick, furious accent in one of the most satisfying sequences I’ve seen on TV this year.
They won the task. And they won it through sheer audacity, front, bullying, smarm, charm and bullshit. Where The Apprentice makes out that there is still a huge amount of honour in the business world and uses the stooges as bad-example scapegoats, The Last Millionaire proves that the real way to make money in this ‘orrible old world is to con people into handing it over. Just ask anyone who bought the Amstrad Emailer.
Show ten opens and by now we’re so used to the Sugarman’s spiel that it forms a meaningless babble. ‘Job interview from hell… wibble flib… 40 years gruggle plap.. etc…’
All you can really focus on is the stuff that went unnoticed before in the opening sequence over preceding weeks. And this week, for me, it was the size of Alan Sugar’s hands. They are enormous – without equal. They look like big cartoon hands. He’d be a bloody good goalie with those ridiculous flapping grippers.
Six contestants remain in the house and as the phone rang it looked pretty empty – nobody for Claire to hurdle over as she wobbled towards the telephone, shattering furniture and punching holes in the wooden floor as she went to take the call from the interchangeable Franceses. As news breaks that they’re to convene at a breaker’s yard, Sophocles picks up on the fact this this is possibly the last chance he has to show us his hairy nipples, so after a full frontal he gets himself dressed whilst moaning that ‘it’s never gonna fucking stop’. Poor lad’s had enough it seems – he’s ‘finding it harder than everyone else’. The nation is unified as every man, woman and child cries ‘DIDDUMS’.
‘What’s a breaker’s yard?’ asks Lucinda. ‘Gvwaveyard for cars, innit’, replies Lee. That’s what he’s talking about. Breaker’s yards are what he’s talking about. ‘Grr-vvvv-waveyards for du cars’. Just so we’re all clear.
They gather at the scrapyard and the beardie Super Hands turns up to inform them that they’ll be renting cars out. But hey – these aren’t any old cars – these are the sort of cars that make Clarkson spuff his globule into Top Man briefs. On the horizon, several posh four-wheelers rev onto the scene – Scalextric on a grand scale. While the girls smile, a little bit confused by the machinery, Alex and Lee grin from ear to ear. Michael feels that ‘cars are alien’ to him, on the other end. Looking at the high end, two grand a day Zonda, it’s not hard to see why as it looks like a mechanised shark from the future.
Michael was up against Lee as Team Leader and he chose the Ferrari and the Spiker whilst LEE MC-CONCERNED-MC-MCQUEEN’S-WHARRAM-TORKIN-ABAAART chose the Aston Martin and, as a high risk strategy, the Zonda.
All the footage at this point focused on how unfocused that hairy little twit Michael was. He sent Helene and Claire out to sell in the City while he went off on his lonesome to sell in Knightsbridge. Knightsbridge, for the unititiated, is a place where the kinds of people who don’t need to rent posh cars live. The kind of people who can actually afford posh cars, and therefore actually own a few. And so, unsurprisingly, not a single sale. Claire racked up a few small scale sells – renting out a Ferrari for a couple of hours here and there at 65 quid per sixty minutes. Michael’s strategy dead in the water, he used his ‘knowledge of London’ to pick his next spot. Portobello market – the popular fruit and veg stop. On a weekday. The prize idiot.
As Michael flapped about like a grimacing baby chick plummeting from its nest, Lee complained about Lucinda and invented a few cliches, just to pass the time. ‘When a woodpeckers pecking you, it’s time to say “Get off!” to the woodpecker’ he said, creatively.
Lucinda – perhaps predictably – wasn’t really suited to this task and so was disowned by Lee and Alex. Despite begging not to be sent off alone, she was kicked to the kerb and, without the slightest clue about the product, started selling the Aston Martin as a Zonda, her head all confused after wasting hours perforating raffle tickets that were never used.
Lee didn’t sell a huge amount with his tactic of begging businessmen but soon his and Alex’s isometric death-stares forced the Zonda onto a pinstripe prick. Then later, even Lucinda cracked a sale as the afternoon turned into evening.
Over on the other team, only Claire managed to vend her wares. Helene watched, goggle-eyed and confused while over in a completely useless location Michael chased a middle-manager down the street shouting not only ‘You’re going to regret saying no!’ but also ‘GO ON!’ and finally ‘COME BACK’. In the throes of desperation he began to follow this poor sod, asking if he could come to his meeting with him whilst abandoning the supercar in the middle of nowhere. Smart thinking! Ultimately, he was disappointed by his customers, he said. Which is perhaps the worst angle a salesman can approach his work from.
Then it was onto the evening stretch and selling under the traditional Apprentice marquee. You need a marquee for an Apprentice task. It’s stitched into the fabric of the show.
Michael’s positive attitude continued on even with drunk City boys wandering around with open wallets. ‘Treat yourself for GOD’S SAKE!’ he cried, trying to add bottles of champagne into the mix as a freebie, and coming away with nought. Claire managed a few more sales and Helene achieved nothing.
Alex, on the other hand, notched up at least three Zonda sales by the end. At this point, his future (and my place in the sweepstake) were secured. The last gasp chase for the final sale (in 60 seconds – yeah right) was so fabricated you could only laugh. Like they didn’t give him a quarter of an hour to sort it out.
So Michael’s team sold £2,114 whilst Lee, Lucinda and Alex flogged almost twelve grand. Which is impressive. Sugar almost raised his cartoon-hand to his forehead and said ‘fucking hell….’ in astonishment at just how well they did. Before they were sent off to gob out a load of trifle-tasting wine into a bucket in Mayfair, Sugar had a dig at Lucinda. ‘Shut up’ he said ‘before I give you a bigger shovel to dig your own grave with’. Yeah! Nice one , Alan! Stupid girls.
So it was between Claire, Michael and Helene. The former was told she was safe and the latter was told – at quite some length – that she’s a corporate nobody. She almost cried and that evil feline face was on the edge of cracking into tears. But then, joy of joys, the reckoning arrived. Despite ‘flickers of diminishing brilliance’ – the word ‘flickers’ being Alan’s contribution and the ‘brilliance’ Michael’s own, this mini ‘disaster zone’ was booted out, and not before time, eh?
Thankyou for the opportunity, he whimpered, before wandering off, probably more relieved than anything. He’s good TV, but pray you never meet the bumbling little tit in real life.
Sometimes, when you lose someone early on, you get the impression that a handful of people are just too good for the world. Something about their raffish charm and twinkly brown eyes being beyond the capacity of the amount of goodness this world can actually handle.
On the other hand, some people are all mouth and no trousers, dress foppishly in order to distract from their empty personalities and have a decent vocabulary which isn’t backed up by any substance. Raef somehow had it both ways… being both a grade ‘A’ bullshitter and also an apparently lovely bloke. Rather sad to see him go – he was certainly this year’s Nice Contestant. We’ve not got much left to work with, after his exit.
We’ve got Lee – loaded with common sense but prone to unblinking twattishness and we’ve got his ex, Lucinda who is a lovely leader but a pain in the arse when asked to follow. We’ve got Alex who, despite his protestations about being a Sales Manager with an international remit, whatever that means, is all over the bloody shop. We’ve got Helene, who is dripping with awfulness. We’ve got Michael Sophocles who walked out of a sitcom and into the boardroom and then we have Claire, the one who won’t stop SHOUTING ABOUT HOW SHE WAS RIGHT.
Sophocles treated the ladies to the sight of his naked, miniature frame as he answered the phone in enormous boxer shorts. Frances was on the blower, predictably enough, and she told them they were off to the National Theatre. ‘I’ve got to step up’ said Sophocles in a split-second vox pop, his neck riddled with shaving cuts.
When they arrived at the National, Nick and Margaret waited patiently as the briefing kicked in. Nick did that weird thing with his face. I think it’s meant to signify impatience but it actually looks like he’s trying to hold back a huge flood of diarrhoea.
Alan changed the teams about, as is his wont, and we ended up with Raef as team leader over Claire, Helene and Michael – the latter having been refused his plea to lead a team this week. The same old method used by desperate contestants to stay in the show. I DO BETTER NEXT TIME MUMMY. PROMISE! On the other team, Alex was to lead just Lee and Lucinda – who at this point were still very much in love.
They were asked to come up with a name for a box of tissues, as well as suitable packaging, a print advertisement and a 30 second television ad. Quite a lot of work for two days, so Alex’s team sat down to brainstorm. And they brainstormed really badly, with Alex totally non-commital, Lee in a bad-idea-frenzy and Lucinda coming out with some utter crap. When coming up with names, Lee barked ‘WHAT ABOUT SNOT’? ‘COSY-NOSE?’ ‘COSY-NOSE IN THE CAR, COSY-NOSE IN THE PLANE?’. At least he tried.
Lucinda seemed hell-bent on sabotage and suggested gathering the pink pound with snot-rags aimed at gay men. If they’d have done that, they’d have reduced their market by about 90%. So probably a good thing she was roundly ignored, despite her assertion that Alex was ‘worse than useless’. Her whining cost her the love of her life, as Lee Cold Eye McQueen finally seemed to dump her through the medium of swearwords.
Rather than do anything so insignificant as research and planning, Raef picked up his little pal Michael so they could be driven around the West End and talk of their thespian pasts. We learned that both had extensively trodden the boards – Raef as Sebastien in Twelfth Night and Sophocles with a singing part in West Side Story. Cue: Dodgy recitals of lines and show-songs. Never before have two birdbrains looked quite so preening. This culminated in Michael singing one of Fagin’s numbers from Oliver – and it was horrendous.
So, Alex’s box was designed and, good grief, in comparison to the others’ it was a thing of unbounded ugliness. An orange monstrosity with irrelevant stock photos and bad fonts. It was the Cillit Bang of tissues. The television advert was almost brilliantly awful. The mother figure was accepted after an awful audition in which Alex asked them to ‘freestyle for a bit’. Her reaction was to whimper like John Inman in a man-trap. The actual TV ad involved this whimpering and a father who was on the money as cheesy-ad-dad. At one point, he grabbed his ‘daughter’s’ nose and tweaked it so melodramatically it looked like he might wrench it off, stuff it in his gob and spit it out in a fountain of gore. The ad was so garishly orange and pink and ridiculously heavily branded, they might have handed victory to Raef before they reached the edit suite.
Might have, were it not for Raef’s Sophocles-buffered pretension. Their ad featured Sian Lloyd for bugger all reason (even SHE said they should’ve googled her before booking her) and for only about five seconds. In their mini-masterpiece, a couple of children shared a tissue (unhygenic) and then smiled as Ronan Bloody Keating warbled in the background. It was well-shot in every way but one. There was no branding, whatsoever. Not one logo, one mention of the brandname or even one shot of the box – a shame as the packaging was pretty impressively well-made by Claire and Helene.
Right from the start, it was obvious that branding was of the utmost importance, so how they could have forgotten to stick in a logo and deemed a close up of the box ‘vulgar’ reeks of a complete lack of awareness of how advertising stripped to its most basic elements actually works. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, but for a businessman or a ‘tycoon of tomorrow’, it’s actually disastrous.
And so it was that Raef made a fundamental error, and it was with ‘all due respect’ that Alan told him he was full of hot air. And though it’s not very nice, it’s true. He was a likable statue, an affable ghost, a respectable spectre. But he hardly had acute business acumen. The ladies will miss him, I’m sure.
Sugar had a ball in the boardroom, sarcastically dubbing Sophocles and Raef the next Spielberg and Fellini, telling Lee he was mind-numbingly boring, laying into Alex… Rather than have anyone read out the scores, he simply launched ‘YOU LOST. YOU LOST’ at an unsuspecting Raef, telling them off for doing 95% of the task and leaving out the main product point – a call to action. And quite right too. He then told Alex that his ‘crap advert had won’, having a pop at the box, the clip and the print media while Alex smiled at the criticism, safe in the knowledge he’d lived through the trauma yet again.
Despite Raef’s eviction, Sian Lloyd probably came out of this episode worse than anyone else. Not only did she suffer the indignity of appearing in one of the worst pieces of advertising ever made, she also had the mickey ripped out of her by Alan – with his sly Cheeky Girl references. Add that to having been dumped by that lip-twisting turd, Lembit Opick and you have to say that things aren’t going too well, eh love?
When that Alan Sugar character lets rip in his opening spiel, he tells the assembled morons ‘this is the job interview from HELL’. Clearly this is untrue. He’s indulging in hyperbole in order to talk up the gruelling series of tasks and the humiliation that approaches. Interestingly, he follows up with ‘your prize will be working with me’. Logically then, Alan Sugar is Satan.
Raef, answers the phone with his clockwork orange eyelashes and immaculate in his bedroom attire, only a few stray cockerel hairs on the back of his sweep betraying his shut-eye. St Barts church is the destination for the debrief, and they’re to pack an overnight bag.
In a between-scene vox-pop, Claire states that she’s building momentum, whilst Helene spits that, not only would she never mix with the housemates in real life, if she was working with them, she’d fire them. Therein she makes the assumption that she would be their boss rather than the other way round. It’s what makes Helene the most annoying of the flotsam that’s left. A superiority complex the size of Cornwall, all mixed up with a pathological lack of patience and a withering gaze that comes at you from three angles.
‘This church was used in Four Weddings and a Funeral’ says Beelzebub, as the remaining soldiers look about them, cooing and wondering why His Evil Highness hasn’t burnt up on contact with holy ground. The audience shrugs at the Four Weddings revelation. That film’s about 20 years old. Alex looks nervously at Claire, the memory of their boyfriend / girlfriend role play still firmly wedged in his brain and any thought of churches, weddings and marriage causing visible discomfort.
The teams were split again, with Helene as team leader taking Sara, Alex and Michael under her vulture-wing whilst Lucinda took the reins again, despite winning the ice cream task recently. She got LEE, Claire and Raef. A winning set up if ever there was one. It was clear from the off which team was headed for an almighty fall.
Michael’s vox pop followed and he noted his own effortless charm. If you’re aware you’re doing it, Sophocles, then it’s not fucking effortless, is it? Let’s dive in and look at Michael’s efforts this week. This week’s was the Sophocles show, so it’s only fair we focus on the hairy little twat.
When looking at prize-winning dresses by Ian Stewart, he brown-nosed the designer until he barely had a tongue left, then decried his work as ‘ghastly’. When describing it on the phone to Helene he had an ‘I can take it or leave it’ attitude to it, even though, when it was revealed that these high end dresses would win the task, Michael lied that he’d pushed for them. The squirming squirt. All he’d actually done was described them as ‘dresses like the ones in Beauty and the Beast’ and used the grammatical clanger ‘very unique’. Either it is, or it isn’t unique. Piss off with your very unique and effortless charm.
In the event, they let those dresses get away from them and Lucinda’s team secured the winning items. At a few thousand per dress, it always looked like Raef’s ‘high-risk’ strategy would work.
Helene’s team settled on some unbelievably tacky frocks, in every garish colour of the Essex wedding rainbow – as worn, according to the salesgirl, by your Katie Prices and your Jodie Marshes… a great sell, if half your brain has degenerated.
As every bad decision was made, including choosing to sell cakes that looked like shrubs, Alex silently sat and twiddled his pen with increasing frenzy. When he sold, he did very well, but it’s becoming clear that selling is all he can do. He’ll have to lead a team in the next couple of weeks, so if he gets beyond the lip-pursing whining, he may show some initiative beyond winking at girls in order to hoodwink them out of their pocket money.
Raef’s attitude to selling cake to girls was the only real stand-out laugh in the show. Discussing dresses for the larger, BBW side of the market, he declared that if they were going to sell big dresses, they’d be able to flog the cake too – as the larger-dress consumers are just that – big consumers.
Beyond that, this wasn’t the greatest Apprentice ever but there were a few cringe-moments that rescued it. All of these were supplied by Sophocles and Sara. Poor old Sara… the one-trick-pony beneath her lovely frock was exposed and the poor little mite got booted out. I’ll miss her. For a day or two. And then she’ll be gone from my brain.
Michael’s selling technique, branded ‘telesales’ by Alex, was actually quite terrifying and involved recrimination, accusation, holding his head in his hands with outright impatience and even, at one point, a cry of ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE’ when a lady quite rightly stalled on a purchase of his crap confections. He was absolutely terrible. With the expression of his doppelganger all over his face, this Costanzaesque idiot even resorted to calling the general public ‘dumb-dumbs’. Dumb-dumbs who just ‘don’t want to make decisions’. A laughable attitude, really, and just the sort of thing Jerry Seinfeld’s little mate might say to a laughter track.
Sara was similarly bad, but where Michael was passionately engaged to the point of almost openly weeping at his punters, Sara had her cold thousand-yard-stare focused on the great, empty, nothingness of existence behind the heads of her potential clients. She literally didn’t listen to what her punters said and that caused her ejection. But Michael should’ve gone. Because he’s 810% uglier than her.
Over on the winning team, Lee and Lucinda apparently fell in love as they cruised about looking at sale items. The princess and the pauper, as Raef might put it, the bit of rough has definitely wooed the beret girl and a posh nosh-off is on the cards. Especially considering that Lee is now an expert on selling thongs, as he proudly boasted to Satan himself in the boardroom. The fact he was selling £6.99 trinkets to Brummie slags compared to Claire’s thousand quid dresses was lost on the poor brute. But at least he sold something.
So Lucinda won and Claire did her PR machine a power of good with a recommendation from Maggie Mountford, who herself, it was insinuated, had a lovely honeymoon thong encased within her buttcrack, purchased from Lee McAnn McSummers McQueen.
For no reason whatsoever, Raef put on a teddy bear outfit at some point, apparently to drum up interest but mainly because this was a drab episode and it needed someone to be a berk for three minutes to lighten the tedium.
Before they faced Belial’s wrath in Brentwood, Michael stated that he’d be interested to find out how Helene was going to spin her way out of trouble. Which was interesting, as he’d already started the process of spinning her into trouble…
In the boardroom Sara went with little ceremony, and Alex got the piss taken out of him. Like Syed before him, the favoured Michael will probably get to the final as Lucifer likes him and he makes good TV. But no way will he win.
Incidentally – why do the winners get so excited about the substandard treats they receive? It’s like Big Brother… OOH! We’ve got a task!
They should scrap that. It stops it being the interview from hell and turns it into the interview from a not particularly exciting corporate promotions company. But we did get to see Lee indulging in primal scream mantra therapy, like a bellowing Chelsea headhunter in a yoga retreat.
It’s the make-a-TV-ad episode next week. Be afraid.
Watch With Mothers 
