Oh! And just in case you didn’t know (and I hate to be the one to break it to you) you will need to come back here tomorrow because we’re doing it all again. I’m serious. Second episode tomorrow.
Oh, it’s finished. I am trying to unfurl my spine and sit back in my seat but I can’t. Sugar has me like a coiled spring for the next thirty weeks (probably, it seems like that long) and then I’ll get off to the osteopath. Ow.
So what did you all think then? Time for a look at twitter and then I am diving face-first into the comments for a chat because it’s only fair. You sat through it too!
Next week, someone will be told they are a “complete and utter shambles” just to ring the changes and really shake things up. We don’t mind that Alan is a worn-out cassette playing the same four songs, do we? Because they are the four greatest songs of all time. In this context. At this very specific time.
The rest of the candidates are back at the house in their jersey casuals, doing OMG face as they realise Chiles isn’t coming back. Like they can even remember which one he was already.
He will! He’ll fire a second chump before we’ve even shaken hands or complimented their hair gel. No he won’t. But he sure did enjoy making them (and us) think he was going to. I hate you, Darth Sugar. Never change. Talk about an abusive relationship.
I can’t believe they’ve jettisoned Chiles when we didn’t even get to find out why his parents didn’t just call him Giles.
Are they really going to let Felipe go so soon? NO! He has fired Chiles on the basis of something something t-shirts. Is he serious?! Will he fire another?
Here it goes - Sugar’s first summation. He is going to fire the first person this series who doesn’t actually work for him. Everything and nothing is at stake and yet we care about them, right about now, more than our own children.
So Felipe is fighting it out with Robert (beautiful sheep) and Chiles (Ming). I do not want an Apprentice series in which ANY of these three go without so much as a chance to develop a catchphrase. Whichever way this goes (unless he saves them all), I am going to get a right sulk on. I may refuse to come back tomorrow night. (I won’t.)
Don’t fire Ming. Don’t fire penguin friend. More than that, I cannot confidently say. Tomorrow you will find me at London Zoo being dragged away from the penguin enclosure where I will have been spending the morning, trying to make the penguins hug and counsel ME.
I have just noticed Scott for the first time. If he goes tonight (and he’s being squarely hounded right now) I will be furious. I didn’t even get to find out if he was awful. And Steven is already being called “your own worst enemy” when he hasn’t really had a chance to be dreadful either.
None of these people can sell t-shirts and hotdogs, granted. But I would like a little longer than a few minutes to work out which one is the most worst. This is like Apprentice Time-lapse. I cannot keep up. Which is the point of me. I’m fired.
Felipe is nodding like a dog on a dashboard as if just agreeing will do it. Alan is giving little eye contact. Steven is gesticulating like an American and shouting the word “Scapegoat”. It’s like we’ve had no run-up and we’ve arrived straight at the money shot without passing through Squirming Central, Self-Immolation Parkway or Oh Shitsville. I feel cheated.
And now to the cafe of recrimination. It was your fault. No it was yours. Trouble with this new 20-strong line-up is we don’t really get time to fully hate any of them sufficiently. Where’s the fun in that? I am finding this quite frustrating. Are you?
Despite this, the girls win and the boys sit there in their various blue suits looking a bit put out. The girls react to going on the London Eye as if they’ve been allowed free run of the Palace of Versaille for the night. “This is what success feels like,” says one of them as they sup tepid cava and survey London from on high.
Sugar must have an earpiece this series. He can’t know all of this stuff in his actual brain. The girls, unlike the boys, think Sarah was a rubbish PM and they aren’t shy about saying so. Oh well done, women. Prove the point that women all hate each other so we can never advance as a people ever. Thanks then.
Sugar questions Sarah on the name Decadence. “Have a re-think,” he says. He usually doesn’t bother to correct their terrible naming decisions. It just feels like he’s looking for stuff to do. Sugar is bored. Sarah says she gauged each personality when she met her team. I am so far behind Sarah with that.
“Can I just finish,” says Sarah before she’s even really begun speaking. That will be the title of her autobiography.
Felipe is judged a good Project Manager. That means nothing. They always say that on the first task. Oh yes, Lord Sugar, he’s a mensch, we love him, gonna be godfather to my kids. Wait til week 2.
The t-shirts are proving particularly hard to knock out for the boys. Maybe the zoo would have gone for the t-shirts for their penguins. Give them all a sense of identity like a little monochrome stag weekend. Awwww.
And we’re at the boardroom already. How did that happen. “Good morning, Lord Sugar,” they all singsong like they’re at junior assembly.
The boys are now attempting to shift their spuds. (Not a euphemism.) No one thought to combine the bangers and potatoes to make a quintessential British meal did they? I’d have thought of that and then commandeered a pub kitchen and I’d have ended up slumped over a peeler, my knuckles bleeding, my eyes crossed. Trying to cook sausages over a candle. I’d have been great on this show.
I just looked at the clock. I shouldn’t have done that. We are not quite half way through. I’m just going to stick my head out of the window and have a little scream. Be right back.
That was them, you understand. Not me. I’m not having a breakdown. I’m in seventh heaven!
It is already 6pm on day one and everyone looks bewildered. They flail wildly foisting lemons and sausages and flowers on anyone who passes near them. Eat my pork coffee flowers you MOTHERS, their eyes seem to say. Why won’t you help me? I’m obviously on the verge of a breakdown.
Sarah is trying to sell two bog brushes and some Flash. To a zoo. For £250. Where is Sarah from and what radioactive thing bit her to make her into this super human bull-shitter? She’s amazing!
Chiles is absolutely fascinating. He looks a bit like Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon when he sets his brow with determination. Then at other times he’s more Michael Stipe with tonsilitis. But there’s a lot going on in that head. I want to know ALL about him.
Sarah is talking up her sales while milk dribbles onto the pavement in a pure moment of pathetic fallacy. She is “sorry” a lot in that way people who aren’t sorry, are. “I’m project manager, I’m sorry,” she chants. They all hate her and her non-stop pass-ag talking. Karren damns someone utterly but I can’t even recall who because the typing is making my keyboard smoke and I can’t see the TV now.
Almost inevitably, Daniel is dressed as a hotdog and spouting sales talk like a commerce hydrant. Meanwhile, sales manager Mark has warned the others not to interrupt him when he starts his own sales spurt. He slaps James down like a naughty puppy who piddled outside his tray. “James, James...” he continues almost actually hitting him on the nose with a newspaper. James will one day rise up and kill Mark.
Pamela just sold some potatoes to a man for exactly the price he wanted to buy them at. I’m not sure that can be seen as a haggling success. She even weakly suggested he up the price by ten pence a bag and before he even came back on that figure, she just caved and offered the lower figure like he’d beaten her down. She’s rubbish! My new favourite.
Team Summit and their emphatic sausages need to make their presence felt before lunchtime is over and done with and they’re just a bunch of guys with a sausage mountain they can’t shift. We all like sausages but that sausage window doesn’t stay open all day. I mean it does some days for me. Depends how starving I am.
Right, there are people selling flowers and coffee while rowing with each other. “You guys have all the seed capital,” says a lovely Irish candidate, Roisin, from another location trying to be as polite as possible. She is calm and yet devastating. Roisin to win. I’m calling it. Well, thanks everyone. This was fun.
I am fascinated by Robert Goodwin. Who is he? I imagine he plays the viola while solving crimes. His hair is FULL of secrets like that character in Mean Girls.
The boys are fixated on sausages. It was ever thus. Steven the penguin counsellor is audibly unhappy with Felipe’s decision. Whatever that was.
I think these new, bigger teams are really working. We have no idea who they are. The shouting is almost constant and everyone is trying to shine, sound wise and in control and not get shrill or tantrummy. It’s brilliant. Basically two conductor-less orchestras tuning up forever while the audience gets fed up and just leaves.
So, they have decamped to Leadenhall Market in London’s famous “city” in order to divvy up the enormous, random pile of crap they need to sell. There is a lot of talk about lemons and whether or not they should be chopped up. Sarah - yes. The entire rest of human existence - no. Who will win? Fifty quid says Sarah.
So far, a hundred shouting people are trying to talk strategy with each other while advising each other on make-up and business and hating each other. This is worse than ten migraines and yet I have literally never felt happier.
Ooh the team naming - Viper, Summit and.....Summit wins. Daniel’s idea wins and he’s more pleased than a lottery winner whose found out he’s entirely made of chocolate. The other team (oh Sarah) can’t decide whether to be elegant and feminine or entirely forgettable.
Felipe is standing out so far because he talks in the third person which is always brilliant. Julia thinks he’ll go far. Sarah, project manager has barely spoken a word that hasn’t provided pat judgement on vast swathes of society. It’s quite an achievement to be this awful in such a brief window of lens time. Well done, Sarah. Julia is pleased.
I won’t pretend to know who any of these people are but I’m pretty sure someone just said they’re a 7ft tall mother of two with a diploma in ping-pong.
This first task is horrific. These poor mugs have to sell all the awful old tut leftover from nine previous series of The Apprentice. That stuff must be toxic by now. Anything that hasn’t bio-degraded by now must be kicking out a right pong.
Quick football dig directed at someone who likes Arsenal. Someone else says they have a lot of animals but around 80% sheep. JUST LIKE LORD SUGAR THEN.
Come on, I’m typing as fast as I can.
Steven is a social worker in the Arctic. Sugar asks him if he was counselling penguins. Ah ha ha haha. How funny he is. How he demolishes each one of them with a single, Exocet of admonishment.
First curve ball of the new series - Sugar sends in four extra candidates. Wow, that was a bit of an anti-climax wasn’t it? He looked pleased though, that’s the main thing. And having 20 starting candidates means he can perform multiple executions I mean firings. Which will be fun, no?
Isn’t it a little early for the head-in-hands montage? Also, we have to quickly broach the suspension of disbelief. When he says, “You’re fired” we all know that he can’t fire someone who doesn’t work for him, right? And even if they win, they don’t work “for” him? Right? So this is going to annoy me for the whole series. I just thought you should know that now. I am already cross. When he says “You’re fired” I want every single one of them to say, “No, I’m not.”
“I like big bucks and I cannot lie” - Lord Sugar. That would be his charity single, right there. Can we make him do it for Children in Need? There’s still time.
Wow, he is terrifically bad at voice-overs. Never ever let him try to step outside of his skill set because he can’t.
And here come some candidates. Alpha males who think women are rubbish. Americans. Someone who has already described himself as good-looking. Who was four-year-old Toyota man??! His hair was AMAZING! Like a beautiful sheep!
It is now! Nearly now. Do you have a drink? Have you toileted? Doesn’t matter, it’s too late. Here comes Alan and his corporate army. Bring on the Montagues and the Capulets. (That’s the music, yeah?)
Holby City has never seemed so long. Talk faster, clinicians.
Quick word for Darth Sugar himself while we wait. Lucky, lucky us. (Obv it’s NOT two hours til the show. Don’t listen to this bozo.)
JUST 2 HOURS to The Apprentice! The day after each episode I’ll be asking a question on it - the first correct answer wins my autobiography.
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) October 14, 2014
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Please park your sad little wheeled suitcases by the door and sit down in an ungainly pyramid under the unflattering bleached-out lighting provided, because the fun will shortly start.
When I say “fun” I mean the serial-regarding of three successful business people aiming the shotguns of their disapproval into a tightly-packed barrel of floundering, stupid, argumentative fish.
It’s been so long since the last series I’ve almost forgotten how this works. A reminder - Lord Sugar will take his seat at the frosted glass table flanked by Nick and Karren who, for added peril this series, will both be packing Tasers and pepper spray. (Citation needed.) And then they’ll send their 20 flying monkeys out across London, haggling with everyone they meet and flying into lampposts and low doorways as they do.
Twenty, count them (I have), mad-keen business try-hards in off-the-peg tailoring will spend the best part of an hour tonight either trying to get noticed or trying very hard to fly under the radar, depending on which of the two contestant-types they fall into.
Join me here at 9pm as I try to differentiate between them AND have opinions on them all without losing what’s left of my mind. Let’s call all the men Geoff and all the women Pam. See you at 9.
Until then, I’ll leave you with the excellent @jakeyapp and his version of The Apprentice theme tune.
I am not doing the Yapprentice roundups this year, but in honour of tonight... the #Apprentice Theme: http://t.co/BKPsexG5hu
— Jake Yapp (@jakeyapp) October 14, 2014
