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Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Apprentice x3

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So last night we had a bit of an apprentice catch up. Having been away for a couple of weeks we had the last two weeks stored up, plus another episode going out last night.

First off we had the week three “Pub Grubâ€? task. The idea was that each team was given a pub, neither of which had offered food, and the teams had to set up and deliver a food service. For the first time this series Sir Alan picked the project managers – in the case of the boys picking Ian who having been brought up in a pub would reasonably be expected to have an advantage.

The first problem however was the distinct lack of cooking experience on either team. For the girls, project manager Sara took on the cooking duties, over with the boys, Kevin – a bank manager by profession – volunteered primarily because he ate at a lot of Italian restaurants, Italian being the chosen food style for the boys. Over with the girls, the chosen style was “Bollywoodâ€? where they basically ripped off the menu from the local Indian Takeaway. This perhaps highlights the most fundamental flaw for both teams – the over-ambitiousness of their menu. Neither team opted for traditional pub grub which probably would have been a lot easier to cook. Instead both teams struggled with the cooking, forgetting key ingredients and in the case of the girls totally failing to deliver any service at all during lunchtime.

The winners and losers eventually came down to costs. Whilst the boys spent a small fortune on professionally printed menu sheets and flyers, and bought their ingredients (and frozen pizza’s) from the local Tesco, the girls got all their printing for free in exchange for advertising on the tickets and menu sheets, and sourced their ingredients cheaply from local suppliers. The ticket idea was another deft move on the part of the girls – they sold tickets for the evening service at £5 per head offering a £5 discount on the food bill – since half of the fifty people who bought tickets failed to turn up that produced a significant boost in profits. Ultimately it was the boys that were up for the chop, and despite a valiant effort to blame Kevin in the kitchen – even lying to try and escape (Tip: Don’t put on your CV that you value honesty in business and then be filmed being totally dishonest) it was project manager Ian who took the taxi ride home.

The next episode sadly marked the demise of popular candidate Simon Smith. Through the preceding weeks he had shown himself to be one of the better organised and enthusiastic of the boys, always keen to turn his hand to anything. However, in the pub grub task he had attracted attention by trying to point out the problems within the team – in particular issues like setting the menu prices before costing out the meals – and then felt he had something to prove. When the task came up as running a photography stall in Bluewater, photography being an interest of his, against the reluctance of the other members of his team (now mixed around to avoid personality clashes) he put himself forward as team leader.

The reluctance to have Simon as leader translated into some of the strong people in his team – in particular Claire – making the management job all the more difficult. Since he was also acting as photographer, someone needed permanently on the stand, things became impossible. Since both teams also had problems with the technology – one weren’t able to correctly identify the pictures to be printed, and the other only managed to print out on normal A4 paper – his project management was highlighted as the weak link. Even a valiant effort by Claire to annoy Sir Alan in the boardroom (he threw her out of the room rather than the whole competition) failed to save loveable Simon. However if the audience reaction in the studio of The Apprentice: You’re Fired is anything to go by I’m sure he’ll have a good career in the media if he wants it.

That brings us to the ice cream making last night. Both teams were under the leadership of people on trial. On one side was Claire, who Sir Alan had thrown out of the boardroom the week before. The other side was led by Lucinda who had again been set up to fail the previous week when she had been put in charge of picture processing by Helene despite possessing no technical skill whatsoever. Lucinda proved to be a revelation though – after grumbling in the previous tasks that she was being put into roles that she did not have the skills for, she proved to be a good manager, quietly and efficiently planning the task, allocating roles and so on. Perhaps her only failing was that she stepped back from an idea to mix the production and sales teams on the second day to avoid a confrontation and bad feeling amongst the sales team.

Over on the other side it was chaos. Most of the work on the first day was done by the production team whilst Claire and the sales team disappeared off and failed to get many confirmed sales calls or ingredients that were needed in good time because they wasted a load of time sampling cider. They even failed to make it on time to their taste test, instead opting to pick two blokes at random from the local pub. So whilst Lucinda’s team were working through a list of confirmed appointments Claire and co ended up going door to door. That made it all the more frustrating when thanks to one big deal, Claire’s team put in a flukey and narrow win.

Whilst Sir Alan would have had a vast choice of potential sacking targets and reasons amongst Claire’s team, it was difficult to pin down a reason for the loss for Lucinda as they only lost by a small margin. Ultimately, when it was discovered that the sales team had achieved at least two sales by offering exclusivity deals without consulting either the project manager, nor the farmer whose produce the teams were selling it came down to being one of the two salespeople who offered the exclusive deals – the chosen victim being Lindi who was supposed to be in charge of the sales team so should have stopped Jenny (the self proclaimed best salesperson in Europe) when she first mentioned exclusivity, and certainly shouldn’t have subsequently agreed to a similar deal herself.

The boardroom debate though highlighted an interesting feature of the Apprentice. Jenny, the other one of the final three alongside Lindi and Lucinda, at one point put forward that she was the best candidate, and highlighted what a good salesperson he was. More often than not a large number of the contestants in the programme are vocal sales types who maintain they are the best candidate due to their sales volume. However, Sir Alan doesn’t ever seem to go for that. Certainly he likes people who can sell, but they need to posses other skills as well. Indeed if you look at last years winner, he definitely wasn’t the best salesperson, even in the final two.

Ironically because Lucinda seems to have proved herself to be a well organised manager, she could be much more of the kind of person that he goes for – although in her case she perhaps doesn’t stick up for herself as much as she should in the boardroom. We’ll have to see exactly the kind of person he is looking for this time around – certainly after this week it will be interesting to see how far she goes, as before I was expecting her to be gone pretty quickly.

So now we have got into the series a bit, who are the people who are starting to stand out? Interestingly at the moment it is Alex, someone all the ladies seem to love. Whilst I can’t really comment on his attractiveness he does seem to be finding his feet and is coming over as trustworthy and efficient, and without the level of antagonism that seems to surround certain of the other candidates. Having said that, there is still a lot to go – I totally failed to agree with the choice Sir Alan made last year, so I could be surprised again by the end of it this year too.

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Losing It in the Boardroom

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Last night was perhaps the first time watching The Apprentice that I’ve thought Sir Alan has got it really wrong – and I wasn’t alone. The audience of The Apprentice: You’re Fired were almost unanimous with almost everybody disagreeing with Sir Alan’s decision, everybody at work thought it was the wrong decision. Having said that, the new series clearly has found it’s new villain…

So lets roll back to what actually happened. Adrian Chiles said on The Apprentice: You’re Fired that the boys and girls team had swapped in terms of their handling of the task, however I disagree, in actual fact the girls were really not that much worse than they were last week, it was really just that the boys last week messed up a lot more. This week they seemed to find their form, and in what seems to be usual for The Apprentice the boys team appeared to put aside their differences and work together, whilst the girls were fighting. Perhaps it says something about men and women and their attitudes in business, but the number of times early in the series where the girls team has degenerated into arguments is really quite telling.

Anyway, the task this week was to run an overnight laundry service. The boys had an ace in their hand thanks to Simon Smith who in a previous life in the army happened to run a laundry. Under the leadership of Raef the team seemed to work well and to be thinking – for example they priced their service by phoning laundry companies in the phone book. They also grabbed the irons in the contestants house in case they needed them later. The split was still apparent to some extent, but the team worked well in spite of it.

The girls were a different matter. Jenny Celerier put herself forward as project manager and quite quickly rubbed some of the team up the wrong way with her very direct and forceful style of management. That style obviously works in some environments – she wouldn’t have got as far as she has in the real world if it didn’t – but the test of being a project manager in The Apprentice is managing a pretty diverse bunch of people. Looking at my own work life the management style for a sales team is very different from if you’re managing a technical team of software developers. Ultimately it was in the management where it went wrong, however the sales aspect was pretty jaw droppingly bad as well. Whereas the boys team researched their prices, the girls just seemed to pluck a number out of thin air – £4.99 an item. They then took that price into a sales pitch with a hotel, who would usually expect to pay about £200 to have a batch of 1000 items, including sheets, pillowcases and so on – the girls pitched at nearly £5000 for the same job, and just looked blank when the amazed hotel manager queried the price.

As a result, the girls team had to go for door-to-door sales. One of the key important things when dealing with the door-to-door jobs at the laundry though was making sure things didn’t get mixed up. Shazia took responsibility for this coming up with a system that kept track. However when team leader Jenny turned up late on at the laundry with a load of extra jobs, the girls realised that they wouldn’t have time to finish the work before they ran out of time in the industrial unit, so Shazia suggested that they should use the ironing facilities back at the house. Jenny therefore took the decision to send Shazia back to sort out the irons, leaving the rest of the team to finish off the washing – however with Shazia gone, the rest of the girls messed up the system, and got the washing mixed up.

Things then went from bad to worse when back at the house they realised that the boys had all the irons, and then whilst Jenny was continuing her one woman vendetta against fellow team member Lucinda the team proceeded to mix things up even more as they struggled to get the washing all ironed.

Heading back out to return the washing, and realising that they’d stuffed up on pricing, the girls hit on another tactic to boost revenue – asking for tips – however all of that came to naught as their customer discovered that either washing was missing, or they’d been given other peoples items – indeed the team was even fined £50 because one persons shirts had disappeared altogether. Needless to say asking for tips went down like a lead balloon in the boardroom too.

Fundamentally, with so many faults in the management, it seemed obvious that Jenny the project manager would be the one to go. After the girls team again degenerated into arguments in the boardroom after being told they had lost, Jenny brought back in Lucinda and Shazia.

What followed was a classic demonstration as to how the entire show can be won or lost in the boardroom. Shazia had been the person who had managed to organise the system in the laundry, and had also had the idea to use the irons – the system had only gone wrong when team leader Jenny had sent her back and the remaining team members had messed up. However that’s not the picture Jenny painted, and with Shazia in it seemed total shock as to what was happening, and failing to defend herself, Sir Alan took the version that Jenny had told, and fired Shazia for abandoning her role and causing the shirts to be lost. There was no question that Jenny should have gone, of the three people sat in the board room she had the most responsibility, but because she was willing to personally attack her team mates, and they weren’t willing to defend themselves, she survived. Having said that, but surviving in such a dramatic way, Jenny has definitely ensured her position as the villain of this years series.

You can watch the whole sorry debacle again on iPlayer, with more clips and discussion on You’re Fired.

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Nicholas Gets an F

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One of the most satisfying aspects of the Apprentice is always watching someone who after all the pre-show bravado falls flat on their face – and every once in a while you get a candidate like Nicholas Brown – sorry, Nicholas de Lacey-Brown (if you read his profile he added the ‘de Lacey’ as he felt it sounded more sophisticated) – who falls so spectacularly that it is almost unmissable.

This time around, the first task was a simple sales job. No issues with buying – each team was given an identical van full of £600 worth of fresh fish, plus a folder containing two sections, one containing pictures of the fish with their names, the other containing a list of the wholesale prices of each of the fish varieties, and told to go make as much money as possible.

However there were a couple of tasks to do before it got to selling the fish. First off the teams had to decide on their team names, there was then the thorny problem of picking a project manager. Team names seemed to go okay this year, but being the first project manager is always very much of a poisoned chalice, so invariably nobody wants to do it. This time around though on both teams people volunteered, or at least on the boys team Raef who had been pretty vocal up to then was nominated and spent ages trying to back out, at which point Alex put himself forward.

Then it was off to a street market to sell the fish. As seems to be traditional in the programme, the girls team quickly degenerated into chaos. Although they made it quickly to the market, getting the better available pitch (apparently it sells five times as much as the pitch the boys team got later on) the stall was besieged by shoppers and some of the team started selling before any of the fish had been identified or priced. From what we saw of the girls, they quite often had to be pulled back into line, and it wasn’t exactly easy to manage them for Claire.

Having said that, we didn’t see much of them, thanks to the brewing class war in the boys team. At the beginning Alex seemed to have things under control, he allocated out roles, amongst others allocating Raef the job of identifying the fish and Nicholas the job of pricing it.

Both screwed up.

Raef managed to identify a crate of potentially lucrative Monkfish as much less valuable Turbot, and Nicholas priced up fresh lobster at £4.50 each – by way of comparison the girls were selling the same thing at £23. Both, when the mistakes were noted, started trying to shift the blame, and causing the beginnings of the split. Then, just to round things off both were also part of a group that at the end of the day sold £135 worth of fish to a firm of solicitors for £50 – they had been sent off, almost as a chance to redeem themselves – so when they made it to the boardroom, the boys team was really ready for a fight with each other.

With this task, the boardroom was therefore very much the main event. Despite their problems the girls made a reasonable profit – the boys scraped through with a profit of about £30. It was really no surprise therefore when Alex brought back Raef and Nicholas.

What was amazing though was quite how badly both of them crashed and burned. Their problem was that both of them tried to argue to Sir Alan that they were both there because Alex had an issue with their class – bear in mind here that Alex had a regional accent, and both of the others spoke with received-pronunciation accents – also bear in mind that Sir Alan left school at sixteen, and regularly says that he assesses people on who they are rather than the school they went to.

Nicholas came in with the first classic line:

“I feel that the barrier that has been drawn is kind of, you know, like maybe, kind of, educated against, you know, more kind of gritty salesmen.”

Alex nearly exploded at this point exclaiming that he was educated. Nicholas further dug a hole for himself by saying he liked art and had difficulty having conversations about football – provoking an amusing expression from football loving Sir Alan. Then Raef chimes in saying that he can talk to prince or pauper – “Which one are you?” says Sir Alan “The Prince?”

After that Sir Alan picked through Nicholas’ CV – Nicholas said that he was disappointed to have got a B in his French GCSE. Raef had said on his CV that he had faced death many times.

Ultimately though it was Nicholas that got the boot, with Sir Alan saying that if he was disappointed with his B, he’d hate the F he was getting, Nicholas was sent on his way.

Watching the taxi interview and the post-mortem show, Nicholas was blaming everybody but himself – and he came on to the stage, as he had at other points in the episode sporting a pair of oversized, Top Gun style sunglasses. It then turned out that alongside his law degree, he was a budding artist – check out his website for details – and the self-penned bio is worth a read too. However, in probably one of the most unanimous decisions I’ve seen on the programme, almost the entire audience, aside of course from his friends and family, said that it was right he should be fired.

So what’s coming next week? A laundry service… can’t wait.

If you missed it, the programme is available on iPlayer, along with the companion post-mortem.

Alternatively, enjoy probably the best bit of the programme on YouTube:

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

New Lambs to the Slaughter

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Tonight it’s back, a new selection of the cream of British business talent – probably with a few more Big Brother rejects thrown into the mix – are taking on the challenge of the Apprentice. BBC Breakfast gave us a bit of a preview, with Sir Alan saying that he’s not totally happy with the editing, and snippets of some of this years contestants. The two that stood out were someone who got a first class law degree, a distinction in his masters, and says he’s always a winner, and a woman who proclaims herself the best saleswoman in Europe – at least one of them will discover that they’re wrong. Sugar thinks this is the best year ever, so we have an enjoyable series of Wednesday nights to look forward to it seems.

Movies & TV, The Apprentice

Sport Relief Does The Apprentice

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It looks like the BBC have decided that a celebrity special of The Apprentice for charity is a good prelude to the series, as well as being a good money-spinner for the charities. In much the same way as the Comic Relief special last year, this years Sports Relief included a celebrity version of The Apprentice, following much the same format.

This time around the two teams of five celebrities, again split men and women, were given adjacent retail space in which they had to set up shops, invite guests, and make as much money as possible for the charity in a one-night-only sale at the shops. On paper, the women had by far the stronger team with two people with business experience – Jacqueline Gold, CEO of Ann Summers and Kirstie Allsopp, who alongside her TV work has been part of several property companies. On the other side, perhaps the only person with any business experience was Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun. Of course, as regular viewers will know, it’s not always the team with the strongest individuals or the relevant experience that does well.

One strong similarity between this and the previous Comic Relief special was how clearly it showed that the kind of person who becomes famous is more often than not really bad at working in a team. The men especially fell out fairly spectacularly, and effectively wasted the whole of the first day arguing after Kelvin MacKenzie refused to lead (he later stated that he thought his abrasive management style would be detrimental to the group) and Hardeep Singh Kohli put himself forward and then resigned after Kelvin MacKenzie made a pretty poor taste joke comparing his management style to Adolf Hitler. Following on from that, MP Lembit Öpik stepped in. It wasn’t all sweetness and light on the other team either. Jacqueline Gold was quickly appointed as leader due to her relevant experience, however her management style caused problems, especially for Kirstie Allsopp who objected to being micro-managed by Jacqueline. At one point she referred to Jacqueline as a control freak, and at another point just stormed out of the meeting.

The other big similarity this time around was the importance of contacts. The task effectively had two money making opportunities, the first being the sale of tickets, and the second being the selling of goods. The men lost out significantly to the women with regards to ticket sales by firstly failing to sell all their tickets, when the women sold them all, and also by not selling their tickets for as much money. The big star in ticket sales this time around was footballers wife and former singer Louise Redknapp who managed to sell several tickets at vastly inflated prices – including three to one contact for £100,000. The women also did well on their choice of merchandise, managing to get a good selection of quality items, including some notable support from Harrods. The men weren’t without support either. Although their merchandise wasn’t as upmarket as the other team, they did have a valuable contact in Bernie Ecclestone, the billionaire in charge of Formula One who generously offered to match all of their sales.

When it came to the boardroom, it was these contacts that became the key, whilst in terms of ticket sales the women were the clear winners, the effect of Bernie Ecclestone meant that the sales figures were a much closer affair – however in the final totalling up, it was the ticket sales that won it, and the women won the day.

In the board room, it was clear that Alan Sugar had some people he blamed for the loss. First up he gave Kelvin MacKenzie a real hard time for not stepping up to the mark as leader, but ultimately it was Hardeep Singh Kohli who got the boot – both for his destabilising effect on the group, and also because he took responsibility for the shop – including arguing with the rest of the team over the logo, and also for not charging for food – something the women did and made money on.

Of course being fired from the celebrity show doesn’t really mean anything, as there isn’t a next episode, and no big job at the end, so certainly there isn’t the tension. Certainly various of the celebrities treat it as a bit of a laugh. Having said that, it still is an entertaining curtain raiser to the new series, and in terms of the charity, it raised over £700,000 for Sports Relief.

If you missed any of the show, the sixty minute first episode, the boardroom show and the final episode where Hardeep gets fired are all still available on iPlayer.