The Apprentice Review

The Apprentice is more enjoyable if you treat it like a comedy sitcom. The best business minds in Britain (discounting the business minds that wouldn’t be seen dead on a show like this) are set a task, fail miserably, and then try and shift the blame onto someone else in the boardroom before one particularly surly or crawling candidate gets fired. The same format happens every week. And yet the best part is, I’m still not bored.

 

To give the candidates some credit, the task this week’s task was harder than the tasks in previous weeks. Lord Sugar set them the task of coming up with their own board game, designing, and selling in just 48 hours. And so with much face-pulling (mainly from Nick and Karren) and glorious arguments, the two teams went their separate ways.

 

 

The first team came up with a game called GeoKnow which actually sounded pretty good. The basic concept was that someone would pick a card with a country and hint to the other players what the country was by mentioning the capital city, what the country’s famous for etc. The candidates took this idea to a group of primary school children and they were having fun so the board game was living up to its purpose.

 

As for the second team… oh dear. They decided to target the adult demographic and came up with a dating game with questions so sexist, I’m pretty sure the Victorians would have balked. Indeed the people at the pub they tested the game out on weren’t too impressed either, with one punter going so far as to say that if the game was brought out at parties, he would probably walk out. Amazingly the project manager decided to press ahead with the idea, despite the bad reviews and the clear feelings from the other team members that this idea was rubbish (and that’s putting it nicely).

 

Both board games were designed, packaged, and delivered the next morning, to the delight of the teams. And so we moved on to sales. The team with the awesome board game (I’m never going to remember who was Team Tenacity and who was Team Summit) had some successes with retailer Toys R Us buying for £10 each, even though project manager James was ridiculously rude telling the other candidate to shut up. If that was me being pitched to, they would have lost the deal right there and then.

 

 

However it couldn’t all go well with that team and when James mentioned that he’d given exclusivity to a shop in Hampstead in what was admittedly a pretty good deal, Bianca did the same with another shop buying six games and exclusivity to the borough of Westminster in what was basically a con job. It meant James had to go to Waterstones and other stores in Westminster and tell them they could only sell the games online and at stores in other areas. Needless to say, no one was impressed.

 

The team with the sexist board game didn’t do so well. Surprisingly enough no one wanted to buy the game - with a few exceptions, including Toys R Us(!) I’m guessing Karren must have paid them to make the deal because the alternative - that they want to stock that sort of game in a store primarily for kids - worries me.

 

 

Apart from that surprising success, they didn’t do so well with the best salesman ever (just ask him!) Daniel not selling anything. However Mark (who seems to be the only likable candidate this series) did manage to make the game sound good, which is nothing short of a miracle.

 

Back in the boardroom, and I actually found Lord Sugar overly negative which didn’t impress me, especially when he talked over the GeoKnow game with Team 1. OK, he may not like the sound of the idea but a businessman in his sixties weren’t the demographic they were targeting. Bianca was called out on that stupid deal she did offering exclusivity to a shop in Westminster, and James didn’t know when to shut up. Nothing new to see here. Unsurprisingly they won the task with a clear margin and were sent to play football with David Seaman. At least this week’s treat was a treat unlike the abseiling from last week.

 

Team 2 were completely decimated by Lord Sugar, who questioned whether Mark and Lauren could have contributed more. Again I thought Lord Sugar was overly harsh on Mark especially, considering his good sales technique but what do I know? He also accused Daniel of being delusional and admitted he couldn’t find any words to describe him (‘Annoying’ and ‘Irritating’ were a couple of words that entered my mind at that point) and accused Lauren of being clever and playing a game. Of course if she was being clever, Lord Sugar wouldn’t have noticed she was playing a game but that’s beside the point because it was the project manager Pamela who got fired - and rightly so! As soon as she heard that the game wasn’t going to be a success, she should have called a team meeting and held another brainstorm. Since she didn’t, the task failed and the right decision was made.

 

 

As you can see from the above article, The Apprentice is a deeply worrying show if taken seriously. The best business minds in Britain (supposedly) are making mistakes that only a student studying Business/Admin would make. And as a student studying Business/Admin, I should know! Still the bitchery and the boardroom ‘banter’ is entertaining enough for me to stick with the series, even if the candidates aren’t likable, bar one. Then again, from a show that produced Katie Hopkins and Luisa Zissman, what more could I expect?