Category Archives: The Apprentice 7

The Apprentice 7 – Final Summary

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Giant It rings the house, in the middle of the Final Four celebrations, which is just as well because Helen is using them to talk about the last task. Fun Time Helen in evidence to the very last. She’s ringing to tell everyone to get their business plans ready, because it’s TIME FOR INTERVIEWS. There then follows lots of footage of the candidates sat on their beds, balancing spreadsheets, chewing pens, furrowing their brows, and generally pouring their hearts and souls into these portfolios. Of course they needn’t have bothered because…all the business plans are crap.

Helen – Army of slaves, organising your Occado deliveries for you.
Jim – This
Susan – Just keep doing what I’m doing now but…more. Enough more for it to be £1,000,000 more tomorrow
Tom – A chair that might work

So naturally, all these rubbish plans are junked, although this takes a very long time, and it’s all very painful, and a bit boring, and I hope they either go back to the old format, or next year’s prospective finalists start on their business plans now because seriously…no. It robs time from your bog-standard Interview awesomeness, like how we discover that Susan is basically a gang-leader who dodges tax laws to hire cheap cosmetics slaves, Helen has no life or sense of humour, that Jim’s a bit of an ass who can’t stop talking in cliches and SOMEBODY thinks something called “an elevator pitch” is a worthwhile business tool. Oh wait, that’s one of the new interviewers. Never mind.

Whilst all this is going on Helen is perched on a chair outside, like, even when she’s being interviewed herself, chatting shit about everyone, casting unpleasant smirky glances everywhere, and basically making her own upcoming loss terribly satisfying to be perfectly honest. Tom mostly sits there wishing she’d stop and occasionally joining in, but not terribly heartily. Susan’s incredibly positive to the point of near-psychotic delusion, and Jim…I think Jim knows he’s beat but is quite happy to go down swinging.

When it comes down to the Final Reckoning it’s Jim who gets the first flick-off, which Nick calling him a wicked seductress and everyone getting really affronted over the fact that his idea is child-centric. This is “going for the sympathy vote” apparently, and very very bad. Cept when it’s the Baby-Glow, or the Backpack Booster Seat obviously. After Susan remains grimly oblivious to how ridiculous the sums she’s talking about are, and Lordalan vacillates seventy times over whether he wants to ACTUALLY enter the cosmetics business (again), she’s next.

Which leaves a Final Two of Tom vs Helen. Erstwhile allies they turn on one another immediately – Tom disparaging Helen for not having her own business, and Helen disparaging Tom for his existing business being in ruins (hey, remember last year when Stella attacking Chris at the last was WORST THING EVAH?). As if this wasn’t desperate enough, Helen clearly makes up another business plan right there and then off the top of her head. Involving cakes. I’ve never seen a finale more dedicated to making it look like nobody there deserves to win.

In the end, Tom does, because of some story involving how he bullied his way into Wal-Mart to sell those curved nail-files we heard about way back in Week 1. I kind of wish this had happened on camera so we could see it (I bet she had rubbish hair), because nothing from the last three months of tv time really justified it. I guess he thought EveryDog was a bad idea? And he’s likable? That’s good enough.

Dear next year’s candidates : better business plans please.

The Apprentice 7 – Week 11 Summary

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So, what to do to fill the void created by the temporal shift of interviews to the final week, probably because Margaret is stuck on a particular trick of papyrus/Parappa The Rapper and can’t tear herself away? Let’s just rip off another BBC reality show, preferably a failed one. That’ll tide things over. Yeah.

Sadly this task was filmed too long ago to rip off “So You Think You Can Dance” but too recently for anyone to remember Only Fools On Horses (imagine Susan on horseback…) so…let’s go with The Restaurant. Teams have to start their own fast-food restaurant. That’ll do. After a heart-breaking scene where Natasha tries to make herself the new Debrabarr by making everyone a pre-Interviews Redemption Arc Breakfast-In-Bed, for a round of interviews that never ultimately happen, teams are told of the task, and also that they will be judged entirely on subjective criteria. The subjective criteria being “no, really, it was quite funny that Natasha Scribbins has made it this far, like Michael Sophocles, but we’re not having her in the final”. No team shuffle, which means that Tom has now been Logic 4 Life. How ironic.

Jim is PM for Venture, despite Natasha having a degree in International Hospitality. To be fair, I always assumed “International Hospitality” was a euphemism for something far more exciting and sexual than “restaurants and hotels and stuff”. He comes up with a Mexican theme, because this is Susan’s favourite food type, and this means he has TWO people he can arbitrarily blame everything on. Their restaurant is a complete mess – unappealing decor, cold, rancid looking food, no business plan, crazy waitresses, signage that’s an explosion in an apostrophe farm, and an angry Spicy Latina running the kitchen who hates Jim. To be fair, the last thing is actually amazing and would actually make me visit, but it probably doesn’t speak well of him to have such a fractious relationship with his kitchen staff.

Meanwhile Helen is PM for Logic, which in my opinion should get Tom fired right there on the spot, but apparently we don’t do things like that. Even though we should. In contrast to Team Venture, their restaurant works a treat. They go for pies as their product, and Helen makes sure that quality is at a premium, as well as vaguely rude sounding catchphrases about people munching on her beefy pie. The decor of their restaurant is horribly Union-Jacked, like a cross between a BNP leaflet and a British Airways, but service is efficient and the food tastes nice and some fluffy giggling from Helen and awkward flummery about cold pies from Tom aside, their pitch goes fine.

(Sidebar : I’m a bit of a quiz buff, and usually early to pub dates, which has resulted in a lot of quiz machine experience in my life. One time I got a machine that was wired wrong, and constantly told me I was wrong when I wasn’t. Fenella Fielding was in Carry On Henry, Marc Almond was in Bronski Beat, the capital of Michigan was Detroit. It was INCREDIBLY frustrating, and for a five minute burst of this episode I relived the experience in intense Nam Flashback detail. The General Knowledge of these people is POOR yo)

Anyway, for once, the editing isn’t a fake-out (except for how it’s a long game fake-out for when Susan wins the final), and Logic win, and get a treat of getting to be in the final. Susan, Natasha and Jim get to exorcise all their demons, like how Susan and Natasha randomly hate one-another, and how Natasha believes she is the only one who can see through Natasha, and how Susan looks down on everyone else for not owning their own business like what she does. So exorcised, Natasha is sent on her merry way.

But who will cook the finallists their pre-interviews breakfast now? *sniff* *yeah?*

Come on Lord Sugar, LET’S GO!

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The Apprentice 7 – Week 10 Summary

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So, remember the shopping task? Remember the Wolf Spirit jacket? “SHEILA, HOW REGAL DO YOU LOOK?!”? Lorraine & Howard’s Chips Hour (MMMMMMMM CHIPS)? Simon Amrbose wanking off a trampoline? Well, even though it’s a biennial Apprentice favourite, this year it’s being lobbed in the bin, along with my credibility when I ran around twitter yelling “THEY’VE CANCELLED INTERVIEWS!” when in fact they’ve just been postponed a week. What are we getting in its place? Something similarly iconic? Yes? No.

Candidates (with Susan and Helen flipping between Logic and Venture and Tom getting a random rollicking whilst they’re in mid-air) are given a warehouse full of goods, and told to sell them. Then come back and buy some more of whatever sold. And then…maybe keep on doing this? To somewhere else? Maybe? Look, I’ll understand it when I watch it again, but this is sorely lacking the simple elegance of Naomi trying to sex it up in a wheelchair then getting fired for being a pretty girl.

Melody is PM for Logic(/Venture/Winning Women/Whatever I’ve lost track) because it’s been two and a half months since she last did it, and from what she remembers, she was quite good at it then, so why not? Well, why not is that Melody is broken, and has been for a while now. I think it started about when I decided I wanted her to win (just before Paris) and it’s not stopped. She sends Tom out to sell nodding dogs to kids in an adorable/mildly creepy (*check your ovaries for answers ladies*) way whilst she and Helen wander around fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of a pound shop like a Catherine Tate Nan sketch. The nodding dogs sell well, but it’s Tom so no one cares, and instead they restock duvets (for some guy who ends up being closed when they call back) and phone chargers. The important thing is that the thing from another dimension inside Helen realises it’s going to lose and goes mental, and Helen pours ugliness everywhere, trying to snatch PMship off Melody, freaking out in the Results Boardroom hurling abuse at her, and doing some sort of weird tribal dance when it sells a phone-changer. It’s a bit wrong, and therefore more interesting than she’s ever been, and THEREFORE completely ruins her chances of winning. Probably.

Over on Team Natasha though, she’s not about to let Melody walk away with the Crappy PM Of The Week prize, no, not at all. It’s kind of hard to identify WHAT Natasha does all day. The blue eyeshadow’s out again. She’s wearing a hat. That’s about it. Susan falls asleep on Day 1 and spends the rest of the time trying to shove mattresses through Kensington letterboxes so, whilst she pulls it together on Day 2, she also leaves Jim free to kick his REDEMPTION ARC into gear. You’d think the week he broke the Apprentice Sales Record would be the one to start with, but hey ho. He sells a lot, Nick likes him for the first time ever, he constantly tells Natasha to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING, but she ignores him in favour of saying “yeah?” 50 more times. They sell umbrellas, nodding dogs, and some bangles Susan picks up from a newsagent. Probably some other things as well. THE GLAMOUR.

In the end, it’s Team Natasha who come out on top, despite Lordalan giving them a fine for no reason, slagging them off viciously, refusing to give them a treat, and standing there repeatedly smacking Natasha round the face with a frying-pan screaming “WHY WON’T YOU DIE?!”. Naturally Natasha puts all this down to Susan for no earthly reason I can think of as they sit around Apprentice Mansions bitching about one another.

Final Boardroom sees Melody and Tom face off for the third week in a row, and clearly they’re both over it at this point. Helen trips over her own feet repeatedly when she’s asked to talk about what Old Helen did. Given that Old Helen was some mousy secretary who worked in Greggs and one day decided to apply to The Apprentice for a laugh to see how far she could get, like people always say they do on X Factor, before she…I don’t know, got shoved off a skyscraper by Christopher Walked and became Interstellar Catwoman or whatever happened…it’s no real surprise that New Helen doesn’t have a clue what to say. In the end Melody goes, probably because we’re getting too many Useless/Villain candidates stacking up at the end as it is. IF THIS SERIES WERE A PROPER ONE, SCRIBBLES HAS MADE INTERVIEWS, THINK ON THAT.

Really at this point nothing makes sense as a Final Two to me other than Jim vs Susan, so it’s OBVIOUSLY going to wind up being Helen vs a returning Felicity or something.