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Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Apprentice Deja Vu

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It was a definite case of deja vu on the Apprentice this week. In a repeat from Adam last week, we had Ghazal, one of the boardroom survivors who had begged to be project manager in order to prove themselves getting her wish, and again the gamble not paying off. To be fair, this was the advertising task, which thanks to the very limited time-scales involved is always notoriously difficult and unrealistic.

Effectively you have a few hours from cold to come up with a product, and then in two days have to produce a billboard advert and a TV advertisement. The product this year was a trainer – for which the teams had to come up with a brand and associated campaign.

Neither team did overly well – unfortunately the team difficulties came into play and yet again, Stealth lost as they effectively divided into two, and in another deja vu moment the fired candidate, who this time around had been relying on Katie throughout the task, admitted that she saw her in a whole new light having seen all of the rest of the footage in the programmes.

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The most entertaining part of the episode was probably the Tre/Simon double act. The team had come up with a ‘reclaim the street’ concept for their campaign, which aimed to tie in to street culture. Unfortunately the limited choice of actors for the advert couldn’t provide the requisite dance skills. Luckily Cambridge graduate Simon proved to be multi-talented – well maybe it would be fairer to say that he was willing to try his hand at anything. He wrote and recorded the rap for the advert, and then volunteered to do the dancing. However through all of it Tre, who had come up with the concept got increasingly frustrated at the quality of the rap, and the lack of good dancers, leading to a number of amusing Tre-isms to camera.

Katie continued to dominate the other team. As a Global Brand Consultant this seemed like an ideal task for Katie, but despite her presence, and also with Naomi having relevant experience, the team failed to come up with a decent concept. Kristina and Naomi got increasingly frustrated, making a pretty obvious split with Katie and Ghazal. Unfortunately that left Katie running the team by proxy, to the extent that Katie later persuaded Ghazal to change the concept mere minutes before the other two team members headed off to film the advert and take the pictures. Despite producing a good looking advert and poster shot, it couldn’t make up for the lack of concept, which was quickly spotted by both Alan Sugar and the advertising agency.

Katie again was called into the boardroom but largely sat back whilst the other two, Naomi and Ghazal argued. Sugar however picked her up on this, at which point amazingly she seemed to be trying to flirt her way out of trouble – not that it got her very far – Sugar pointed out that she’d been on the loosing side six times out of eight, and what a lousy record this was. Interestingly after protesting for a while, she then tried the ‘give me a chance, make me project leader’ gamble that has been tried by Adam and Ghazal in the previous two weeks. Will it be the same outcome? We’ll have to wait and see…

As to potential winners, I’m not sure. Katie certainly seems to have annoyed Sir Alan enough that she won’t make it. Tre is probably too much of a hot-head too, even if he does survive longer. Naomi and Kristina are possibilities, and Simon seems universally popular amongst his fellow candidates and able to turn his hand to almost anything along with it. I have to say that Lohit is probably still my favourite, not least because he just quietly gets on with things – you can read more about his time on the show on his website. But then what do I know – Sugar very much follows his own path with his choices, so it may well still be a total surprise who he picks in a few weeks time.

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Parlez-vous anglais?

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I mentioned last week that the trailer for this weeks episode of The Apprentice looked entertaining, and it did not disappoint.

The task was simple, buy a selection of speciality British food’s from a list of small independent suppliers given to the teams, load them into the back of a van, and head over to a farmers market in France to sell the produce. Included in the list of approved suppliers was Makro, to give the teams somewhere to pick up miscellaneous bits and bobs, to equip the stall.

Needless to say, there were some gotcha’s amongst the suppliers to catch the unwary – product lines that wouldn’t sell. For example Eclipse picked tea as one of their lines – certainly English, but since the French are a nation of coffee drinkers, not the best choice. Stealth on the other hand went for home-made sausages, and then had a big discussion about cheese. Kristina was adamant that it would be a bad idea, as the French had hundreds of their own varieties. The matter seemed settled until team leader Paul stopped off at Makro to get a frying pan and a burner to cook the sausage samples – as team leader he made an executive decision, and came away with a cheap gel burner, and 30kg of Makro mass-produced cheese… The girls on the team in the other car, even Paul fan Katie looked less than pleased when they were told.

It proved to be a disastrous decision. The gel burner was hopeless, and failed to cook anything. It wasn’t until Kristina used her initiative and asked a local restaurant for help that the samples were cooked, and the sausages started to sell. Paul and Katie ended up going around local businesses trying to shift their stock, sometimes at cost price. The highlight of those sequences has to be the point where they tried to sell pork sausages to a Hallal butcher. In the end, half of the stock of cheese, and large amounts of the sausages were just dumped in the bin at the end of the day. That along with a rather expensive banner that Adam managed to order resulted in an overall loss for the task – something that didn’t please Sir Alan one bit…

Over on Eclipse, everything seemed to go smoothly. After quietly getting on with things over the previous weeks, Sir Alan had appointed Lohit as project manager, and his calm demeanour continued in the new role. On paper he had the most explosive group containing both Tre and Jadine, but he seemed to handle it well. Tre was kept under control, and as in the past couple of weeks didn’t seem to be causing many problems with the other candidates, just providing a number of entertaining comments to camera. Jadine at one point did kick off after a disagreement with Simon, however Lohit took her aside and dealt with it, and the team worked well.

On Stealth, Sir Alan had also appointed someone who had just been getting on with things – Paul an ex-army man. Unfortunately, Paul seemed to be running his team like the army, the cheese thing being one of many examples when he effectively just gave orders. This in particular caused friction with Kristina culminating in the two of them having a stand up row over the price of the sausages in the middle of the French market.

The choices that Paul made for the final boardroom weren’t a surprise. Adam came back ostensibly for the screw up with the poster – but it was as much because with two successive previous visits to the boardroom, he looked like a weak candidate. Kristina came back because she had argued with Paul. Kristina was effectively safe, as it was clear that she had picked up Paul on his errors, but had been ignored. She had also used her initiative to enable the sausages to sell. Adam nearly blew it purely because he was in for the third time in a row. However once Kristina and Adam grumbled about the relationship between Paul and Katie, something that the press has picked up on recently. At this point Sir Alan has heard nothing about the ongoing relationship (although after week 2 he did split them up) and whilst he says he doesn’t have a problem with it, he does seem to believe that Paul hasn’t brought in Katie because the two are an item – to my mind she didn’t do anything to warrant being in the board room though, although she continued with the bitchy comments about the other candidates in the one-to-one interviews.

After all that, it seemed a pretty well fore-gone conclusion that Paul was gone, however Sir Alan seemed to hover an awfully long time over whether to get rid of Adam instead. It wasn’t until afterwards you found out why. It seems that Sir Alan, Margaret and Nick all had Paul picked out as a potential winner – for what reason I don’t know, as from what I can see he hasn’t really done anything to warrant it aside from keep his head down up to now. The only point he particularly figured was back in week 3, when he and Katie wasted a load of time trying to sell the team as a mobile disco whilst most of the rest of the team were working on gardening.

So six weeks in, are there any likely candidates? I have to say that I was impressed by how Lohit handled the team, but he may well be too quiet for Sir Alan. Tre is providing ongoing entertainment, but whilst he may stay in a long time, he is too much of a loose cannon to be the final winner. Katie is getting a lot of attention, but her ruthlessness has made her the main villain in this series, and I suspect when someone does eventually bring her to the board room she may get a bumpy ride from Sir Alan. I’m certainly starting to think that Kristina may have the right balance this time around – of course I could be totally wrong.

Next week is the classic shopping list task, when the teams are sent off to buy a series of items at the best possible prices. Similar tasks in previous series have proved quite entertaining – it will be interesting to see if the teams this year try to push the time limit though…

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Would You Pay £1950 for a Picture from an Unknown Artist?

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This is perhaps the question that both the teams should have been asking themselves on tonight’s Apprentice.

This weeks task required the teams to select two photographic artists each from a pool of six, and then mount a one day sale of their chosen artists work. The winner was the team that made the most money. If the teams picked the same artist then the artist would be asked to choose.

From the outset it was pretty apparent that there was nobody on either team that had much of an interest in art. Having said that, because of the fact that it was a one day sale, the usual techniques of selling art wouldn’t really work – the teams had to get art with a good track record that they knew would sell, and then try and sell as much as they could on the night.

However when it came to the choice of artists, realising that they didn’t know the art world, both teams just went for what they liked, and both picked the same two artists. Whilst one, Tim Flach, was well established, and able to provide a client list, the other Elisabeth Hoff had only one collection, of which she admitted she hadn’t sold any, refused to provide her client list, and was charging between £950 and £1950 per print – the highest cost of any of the artists offered.

As is so often the case, Alan Sugar had presented the candidates with a selection of choices in order to spot the shrewd among them. Whilst if a team who had selected work by Elisabeth Hoff had managed to sell any they would have probably won, as Sugar said in the boardroom it was a big gamble – one that didn’t pay off for the team which she ultimately selected. His opinion is clearly that they would have been better going for more established artists with a client base that would be easier prospective purchasers.

Once the decision had been made, and thanks to some major schmoozing from Katie, Hoff had selected Natalie and Eclipse, their fates were largely sealed. Tim Flach was more impressed with Stealth and went with them (Natalie effectively blew it when she took a phone call whilst talking to him, and then comparing the horse in one of his pictures to the highlights in her hair…). Both teams then picked replacement second artists, Vanessa Warren for Eclipse and Linda Lieberman for Stealth – but because Stealth had a much more popular first choice with established customers, they easily walked away with the task, bringing in £4,702 to £1,599.78 from Eclipse who failed at the difficult task of selling unknown work to a brand new audience.

Perhaps they could have brought it back in with a decent selling strategy for the Hoff work – but since the schmoozing from Katie went on to the extent of Hoff dictating the sales strategy, wanting very much of a soft sell, all was lost. Ironically, although both Natalie and Katie continued to cross swords with Adam, regularly telling him that his car sales experience is useless, and pouring scorn on his ideas, he is the one that manages to sell. Relegated to the back room with the cheaper pictures whilst Katie is in full schmooze up the front, he manages to shift a few saving the team from total disaster.

However I’m totally of the opinion that had Hoff gone for Stealth, it would have been them sitting in the boardroom at the end rather than Eclipse. Hoff would have dictated the soft selling technique for them instead, and the pictures wouldn’t have sold for them either. Despite Tre’s distaste at some of the Linda Lieberman work, he managed to sell some of those, and the Tim Flach sold well too, thanks in part to the much harder – “you don’t want to leave empty handed do you?” techniques that were being used.

The final boardroom encounter is interesting as well. The key problem identified by Sugar is that they didn’t make a business decision in their choice of Hoff, and that they allowed her to run the show too much – Katie being chief in his sights for this. One of the issues that Hoff had was with the quality of the labels for the pictures – produced by Lohit, but Sugar regards this as not important. Alongside this there is ongoing antagonism between Adam and Natalie. Also bear in mind that Natalie has been largely relying on Katie through much of the task, and seems to think that they get on well – however as has been apparent in previous episodes Katie tends to keep her opinions for the one-to-one interviews. This week she is cutting about Natalie, and even at one point wishes that Adam would get run over!

It is often apparent that Sugar has access to the tapes of the task, including the interviews alongside the feedback he gets from his two assistants. Occasionally in previous episodes he has been seen to comment on events that occurred outside the view of the assistants, but in front of the film crew. The impression I got this week was that Sugar was clearly gunning very much for Katie when perhaps it was much more of a group decision to go for Hoff and to capitulate to all her demands. Maybe he had seen the interview where she wishes Adam would get run over?

However, when asked to pick, Natalie brings back in Adam and Lohit – and seals her fate. Adam, although he has personality clashes with other team members, sold well on the task, and did what was asked of him. The only thing that Lohit did wrong was the labels, so he is largely safe. If she had brought in Katie, it was pretty obvious that Sugar had a good chance of removing her, but Natalie protects someone she thinks of as a friend, and effectively leaves herself as the only option, and Sugar, “with regretâ€? has to fire her. Maybe she thought that after last week Adam could be in the frame, but in the past Sugar has shown that he will tend to keep people who can sell for a long while, even if they clash with other team members. Ironically, when Natalie is interviewed on the “You’re Firedâ€? show, having seen a number of the interviews that Katie has done, she is less impressed with her and can certainly see the ruthless streak in Katie’s tactics. In fact Natalie sums it up pretty well in her interview in the taxi – she was just too soft and too nice. Whilst that might build a good team on the task, in the boardroom you need to be ruthless, and seeing that Sugar had his sights set on Katie, it should have been clear that it should have been Katie not Lohit in the third chair.

Having said that, probably the best bit of the whole episode was the brief teaser for next week. The task is about selling ‘British Specialities’ to the French, and from the clips it looks like one of the teams is attempting to sell the French, a country renowned for their love of their many home-grown cheese varieties, British cheese…

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

“It Looks Like Kids Vomit in Araldite!�

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This week, The Apprentice was all about sweets. The teams had to manufacture and then sell sweets to the visitors to London Zoo, and the team with the most profit at the end of the day won. The result was the closest yet, with the winning margin being £10. Although not intended, it also ended up being a battle between one team with a smaller stock selling at higher prices, and the other with masses of stock selling it cheap – the higher prices winning.

This was one of those weeks when in actual fact I thought the wrong team won. The whole reason that Ghazal and her team had small amounts of stock is because only half the team were involved in manufacturing. Through a crazy piece of organisation (that didn’t seem to affect Adam and his team) the only place to get the sticks for the lollipops was in London, and the sweets were being manufactured on the South Coast. As a result Tre and Kristina waste four hours bringing the box of sticks (which were only available in multiples of 1000) down to the factory, and head back to London to organise props. As a result they are two hours away so whilst the rest of the team are failing to produce more than 100 lollipops, Tre is back at the house playing pool, and Kristina is washing her hair. That’s not the only jaw dropping moment, in trying to reduce the cost of the box of sticks, Tre at one point suggests to the wholesaler that he do a totally illegal VAT fiddle to cut the cost – with Margaret Mountford, Sugar’s lawyer in the room! The next day in the selling, Tre is by his own admission specifically targeting ‘fat people’, and Kristina is handing the lollipops to small children and then demanding money from the parents on the basis that the parents won’t refuse.

The other team weren’t without their fair share of problems either. To start of with, they do market research which comes up with the fact that most parents don’t want to be feeding sugary sweets to their children. Unfortunately that idea gets cold water poured on it by the sweet manufacturer, who instead recommends boiled sweet lollipops, in which they use ‘natural flavours’. As a result the team decide to produce ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’ and Chocolate lollipops similar to those produced by the other team. Natalie then gets sent off with Simon to sort out the printing. Meanwhile the rest of the team head off to Asda, and stock up on all sorts of sugary (and not very natural) sprinkles that they set into their ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’, and when they are told they have to list all the ingredients, phone Natalie with the wording, and to change the name to ‘Tiger Orange Lollipop’ – unfortunately having got the signs and printing part done, Natalie sticks with the ‘Natural Orange Lollipops’ name – landing the team in hot water with the London Zoo staff. Ultimately they have to cross out ‘Natural’ on all the packets on the day. Alongside this, Simon, having been far too interested in looking at the animals has totally messed up on the location for their stall, and they initially end up around the back of a corporate hospitality tent, wasting valuable time as they move.

Their selling doesn’t go much better. Adam as project manager, decides to manage rather than sell, and proceeds to manage from inside a lion costume for about four hours, and just seems to wind up particularly Natalie by trying to coach the team as to the best way to sell. Alongside this you have Sophie who has a bit of an issue (unlike Kristina) with hassling parents endlessly to buy lollipops that to be frank she wouldn’t want any kids of hers to have – interesting Natalie admits at one point to having the same issue. Although they have massively more stock, and are selling at cheaper prices, at the end of the day they are literally giving the stuff away to get rid of it, and loose by £10. Adam brings Sophie and Natalie into the boardroom.

The whole boardroom is interesting. Firstly, Alan Sugar really doesn’t like the Orange Lollipops – whatever they are called – describing them as looking like ‘kid’s vomit in Araldite’ at one point, and ‘sick on a stick’ at another. He is also less than impressed with the time it takes Natalie to admit that the name issue was down to her. In the early stages of the boardroom he has a long talk with Sophie over the realities of business, especially when she admits that she has problems selling a product that she thinks is poor value. However she does then say that she is aware that she is commercially naive, but that she is looking to learn.

Much of the rest of the discussion is three way between Sugar, Natalie and Adam again over the labelling, but also because Sugar believes that Adam is running a vendetta against Natalie, and because he is disappointed that Adam wasted hours in the lion costume. Then after all of that, he sacks Sophie for not being enthusiastic about the selling.

I have to say that I was surprised at the choice, and it perhaps says as much about Sugar’s philosophy on selling that he sacked Sophie for not being keen on selling the sweets, but selling them anyway, rather than Adam for not selling anything and spending half the day dressed as a lion. Personally I can well understand Sophie’s argument of being unwilling to use sales techniques (such as those being used by Kristina) that she wouldn’t be happy to have used on herself. Certainly I would have thought that if you give Sophie a quality product that she believes in then she’d have no problem, and from my point of view having someone who respects their customer enough not to sell them overpriced rubbish is probably better for long term reputation as having someone who will sell anything. Having said that, the environment of The Apprentice is much more about making as much money as possible in a short time, whereas in the real business world many companies are interested in building a long term relationship of trust with a potential customer – the idea being that a happy customer will come back to buy again.

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

The Cream of British Business Talent?

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Tonight, the Apprentice candidates were given a test of their entrepreneurial skills – £200 and a white van, and one day to make as much money as possible – just the way that Alan Sugar started in business. As with week one, they seemed to be competing with each other as to who could make the biggest mess of the whole task – hardly the supposed cream of British Business Talent. If this is it, I’m not surprised we’re loosing out to the Chinese!

The show kicks off with Sugar paying the candidates a surprise visit, and mixing the teams up. Troublesome Jadine gets swapped back into the girls team, with Katie the successful project manager from last week put into the boys team instead. Sugar then gives each team £200 in cash, tells them that he has arranged for them to work in the borough of Richmond the next day, and that they can do anything they like to make money. Interestingly both teams opt for service businesses, rather than the buying and selling that Sugar started out with. Sir Alan didn’t stipulate it had to be a service, but may have been a limitation imposed in the rules. Ultimately it all hinges on the choice of service and this is where it ultimately all falls down.

The boys opt for a door to door gardening business – which as the assistant in the equipment hire shop says is possibly not the best choice, as most people who have gardening work done would have a regular contractor. Plus his colleague points out that the somewhat overcast weather is not exactly great for gardening anyway. Having said that, gardening seems a positively good idea compared to the girls – who decide to organise a children’s face painting business, the problem being it’s actually a Tuesday, and in term time.

Contrary to the opinion of the equipment hire assistant, the boys team do pick up some odd gardening jobs – sweeping leaves, mowing lawns, tidying up and so on, certainly they do better than the girls who after managing to paint a few faces spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly around looking for custom and bitching at each other – Jadine being the main source of much of the bitching it seems.

As part of the task, the teams are allowed to change business idea and provide a different service during the evening. On the boys team Katie and Paul who having been responsible for sales during the garden task and doing a minimum of actual gardening decide that a mobile DJ service in the local wine bars would be a good money spinner. The rest of the team disagree, correctly thinking that a wine bar wouldn’t employ an unknown DJ at short notice – and Katie and Paul are told not to bother, a decision they ignore. Having said that, it does give the two of them a chance to hit it off, and by the end of the afternoon they are walking arm in arm…

Over with the girls, things are going from bad to worse. Having failed to find any more faces to paint, in desperation they come up with a kiss-o-gram plan, something Sugar implies in the boardroom is barely distinguishable from prostitution! Having said that, the boys team goes through a similar issue, and in the end goes round pubs singing. At the end of the day, the boys have nearly doubled their money, whilst the girls have pulled together a minimal profit.

In the boardroom the knives come out. Most of the girls blame Jadine for being a disruptive influence, so it is no surprise when she ends up in the boardroom. Alongside her and Naomi the project manager, the third potential victim is Gerri, who again had been handed finding locations for the face painting in this task, and much as with the coffee locations in the first task, fails to come up with anything suitable. Having said that, in this case I think she was in a difficult position anyway as the choice of service was poor in the first place. However it all goes wrong for Gerri in the boardroom, rather than arguing that it was hopeless with such a poor idea, she seems to back down and not defend herself, so despite Sugar being increasingly concerned about the disruption caused by Jadine it is Gerri that goes, apparently for being a slow starter, and not having done much on the task. Having said that, I could have quite happily fired quite a few of them tonight, the whole task on both teams was a veritable disaster from start to finish, with both Nick and Margaret, usually quiet observers being shown getting increasingly aghast at what is going on, and in Nicks case we hear more from than we have for a long while. From the preview of next weeks show, it does seem that we’ll be hearing more from them too…

Next week it’s selling sweets (and it appears reducing small children to tears) in London Zoo… There has got to be some apparent talent come out sometime soon though – I wouldn’t employ any of them so far!