Next week, those five rare creatures will butt antlers like never before as they compete to reach the final of this silly programme. We should probably watch right?
Join me here next week for that and see you in the comments!
Grainne and Frances are sent back to the house while Trish and her pastel accessories board the cab of ennui out of town.
Back at the house, Jess, Courtney, Alanna, Grainne and Frances clink glasses and delight in the idea that they’re winners, much in the way Donald Trump is doing right now, still struggling to believe that he gets to rule the world in a minute.
“OK, ladies...” says Alan sounding like David Cameron that time.
He begins his tension build-up by pointing out why all of them should go, one by one, before actually throwing the ball and sacking one of them. I’d sack Trishna.
Oh! He sacked Trishna.
I think Grainne is going to get the ultimate heat here because she became quite hands off when she’d delegated the jobs. Her only defence is that Trishna was a bit frowny. And Frances adds that it was her idea to make the gin a horrible colour.
Frances is immediately targeted because the stats say she’s mostly on the losing team. But she won when she PM-ed. The problem with having three loose cannons on one teams is that they all see themselves as solo artists. You try and wrangle three Robbie Williamses, all focusing on their solo careers. It won’t end well.
Claud and Karrren whisper in Alan’s ears while he nods reasonably.
And they’re back in the room. Who would you fire right now?
None of this matters now, because one of these people is about to get launched into space/ the taxi rank.
Trishna says she doesn’t know about gin. “You drank enough of it,” Exocets Karrren with a look of pure venom. Trishna tries to imply that Grainne is at fault. Alan and co identify her propensity to wildly blame everyone else.
Back in the boardroom, Alan waves around the bottle of Colony Tramp’s Widdle. Frances owns her lack of geographical knowledge and he puts the boot in about her bottle design. Which, let’s face it, is not the weakest bit of this whole gig.
Grainne has to accept that the only pitch she didn’t lead, won them business.
And still we come back to the fact that no one who buys gin, wants it to be a funny colour. No one.
Of the three of them, Trishna’s eyes are the most panic-stricken. Just on the scent of fear alone, I think she’s a gonner.
Trishna throws wild interference at Grainne but whoever goes tonight it mustn’t be Frances.
I feel bad for Frances. Her branding, with a less Irn Bru-ey drink, would have worked well.
£20,400 for Giiiiin from the supermarkets. £51,000 from the bar chains.
£5280 for Colony. Nothing from the bar chains. The winners are going on a helicopter. The losers, aren’t.
Claud berates Courtney over his dullsville pitch. Could this actually be the first all-female Apprentice final? In a way that culturally balances out Hilary Clinton? That might be cool.
When Courtney tries to justify the Giiiiiin concept, Alan replies with what I assume his tonight’s zinger. “What do you drink it with? Tunic?”he says, barely committing to the zinger at all. It’s like his heart isn’t in it anymore.
Grainne goes in hard on Frances and says she was “very undermining” if we’re in any doubt about who Grainne wants to kill and bury under a motorway.
Frances tries to justify the branding and Karrren sympathises about her being left high and dry thanks to her drunk team mates.
Grainne is getting stick for being “researched as a newt” during the tasting part of the task. She’s on The Apprentice, dudes. Give her a break.
Boardroom
Just thirty six minutes into the ep, and we’re tensely perched on office chairs, justifying our dreadful decisions. It’s boardroom time.
Onto the next pitch: they all sound fully desperate now as team Giiiin do a weird demonstration involving a “raspberry-ruption” which is both volcanic and underwhelming.
Meanwhile, Colony Gin is getting heavy criticism from their next pitchees about colouring the thing like Donald Trump’s arse and failing to list the ingredients.
Frances phones Grainne from the back of their respective people carriers and tries to suggest changes to her pitch. It’s world war two and a half. They pass-agg each other while Trish joins in but nothing gets decided.
I buy gin and if someone handed me a bottle of Colony Gin I’d just assume that it was what left after the stills were emptied and the floor-sweepings from the nice gin had been chucked in a skip, rescued and then boiled up to make something that pubs could pass off to really drunk people. With no tastebuds.
The experts indulging the Giiin team, try to take on board the “bloody waffle-off” they managed to pull together. The Giiiin team’s post-pitch analysis is a bit glum. They realise they’ve kind of stiffed it.
Alanna and Jess row like hell and Courtney ingratiates himself in between them, saying he “senses a negative vibe”, the tool. When it comes to the pitch, he dries totally and Alanna has to keep saving him.
The experts say that the colour of Colony Gin is off-putting and Fran has the brass balls to claim that the orange comes directly from orange peel. Rather than a dead beetle’s exoskeleton. Oh come on.
Over at Frances’ putch, Karrren scowls as Fran does a really good job and Trish drops things, clanking and banging like someone staggering back from an off-licence.
As Jess rants down the line, post-pitch, Alanna sucks her biro and the darkness of her lipstick makes it look like the ink is leaking onto her face.
Meanwhile, Jess continues to “speak” and achieves nothing.
Courtney and Alanna prepare their pitch to Majestic Wine while they wait. Claud says Courtney is a total snore-fest when it comes to pitching and he pronounces Giin like Peter Sellers would if he were trying to sound a bit French as Clouseau.
The consumer testing reveals that Colony Gin has negative connotations. Did they not just see Liz Bonnin’s Who Do You Think You Are? A colony is generally now seen as a bad thing.
Courtney is floundering and says Alanna shouldn’t pitch. She literally says, “I can speak well” and he changes his mind. He is sooooo weak. The girls are killing the boys this series.
Colony gin looks like Irn Bru. Or the micturation of a very dehydrated tramp.
It’s the next day and the teams lay eyes on their finished products. The Giiiin team roll the pronunciation around their tongues. It’s gin, guys. Call it gin.
Grainne is pissed. Fully. And she has 19 missed calls on her phone.
Frances goes through to voice mail. Again
So she comes up with the brilliant idea of being vague on the packaging. They’d better not fire her for that. That’s initiative.
Courtney insists that their gin should be pink while the girls insist that it should be clear. The girls are right. Frances is still going to voice mail.
Courntey asks Alanna for the ingredients and she just says, “raspberries”. Stop going on about raspberries, Alanna. You’re never going to meet them.
Grainne and Trishna quite like their spicy gin (hint: no one else will) and Frances continues to dial her team’s voice mail when trying to sign off on the branding. It’s called Colony Gin but Grainne and Trish don’t know that because they are hammered. Frances is sober and they are jeffed.
“I have to stop drinking this,” says Grainne as she drinks this.
Alanna can’t actually HEAR the gin distilling expert when he says, “We have never tried to distill raspberry before” and immediately demands that he add more raspberry. I know everyone can’t hear you, Alanna, and I feel that, but please don’t fall into the same trap.
Frances is fully in a branding state of mind and is confidently issuing instructions to her designer for maps and monochrome. It looks quite pro.
Meanwhile, Courtney and Jess have come up with Giin. What’s the flavour? Raspberry and pink pepper. Blurgh. Is anyone even slightly inspired to try a Giin?
Alanna has chosen raspberry as her key flavour. Along with peppercorns and some other appallingly misjudged pick’n’mix of made-up hipster flabours.
Grainne says the gin went to her head because she hasn’t drunk in months. Seriously, she’s living in that house with those people and NOT drinking? How is she doing this? Mindfulness?
And now for the tasting.
Both teams start knocking back the lethal, clear fluid before choosing their poison. It’s 10.30am. Oh, no hang on, it’s 10.30am the NEXT day and the teams are moving rapidly towards their final branding. This is moving WAY too fast as usual.
Trishna suggests that their spicy gin should look orange. Orange. Yes, because people who love gin (HIIYA) really like it when the gin is a weird WKD colour. Who is her target market? Ten year olds????
Alanna really wants to be the boss of her teams. She and Courtney go at each other verbally as Jessica sits back and goes cross-eyed. Someone wins.
On the other team, Grainne says she’s fully up to her eyes in gin on a daily basis. Frances says she will take on the branding alone. Karrren reminds us that branding is a huge task.
Back over at Courtney’s table, Alanna is for the 100th time, being told that as she is a woman, he will want to check whether she’s messing everything up or not. She does her usual saucer-eyes and tries to bite her tongue as the misogyny flows.
I once appeared in an episode of Sherlock Holmes (starring Rupert Everett) at the naval college. I was “a mudlark” and got thigh-deep in Thames mud while a runner pumped dry ice at me. It’s a wonder I didn’t catch something.
Alan is in full flow about gin, telling the teams something about its naval history. He’s laid on a distillery for each team and they must come up with a new gin concept. He mixes the teams up a bit and sends them off to work. Or “work”.
It’s 5.30am and Lord Sugar requests the presence of the candidates, all girls except for Courtney, must me Alan at the naval college in Greenwich, birthplace of time itself.
The recap of last week’s virtual reality task is giving me flashbacks. I’m in space and being attacked by jellyfish while the boardroom walls fly off into the cosmos and Alan’s face morphs into Jupiter and Karrrren and Claud become the rings around him.
I will pause here to be slightly sick.
This show starts every week now with Alan’s unequivocal “I’m not here to make any friends.” It’s become a mantra for the reality TV generation. I have TEN friends and do not need anymore friends. It’s what marks these strange people out from the rest of us. They can function very well without friends, thank you and prefer to continue on their path to the grave with a trimmed-down chum contingent.
I do pity anyone who isn’t Danny Dyer, tracing their family history on Who Do You Think You Are, after Danny Dyer traced his history on said programme. He defined the genre. They should have pulled the plug after him.
Which gin are you drinking? I’m going for an Isle of Wight navy-strength which kicks like a mule and blinds at 20 paces. Nothing less will do.
Updated
It’s gin week on The Apprentice. Gin week. It’s a thing. I will be, unquestionably, drinking a gin throughout because I deserve it and they’re going to ruin gin so I might as well remind myself how nice it is before that happens. The candidates are actually distilling their own, probably with all twigs in and that.
The remaining dim-bulbs are competing for a place in the final five. Like an Archers omnibus, it seemed like it would never end, but end it will. It’ll be all over by Christmas and I do actually mean that. Although, I may end up live blogging The Apprentice years after it has ended, like that Japanese soldier after World War II.
Join me here just before 9pm, drinks mixed and shoes off, for an hour of faffing about with botanicals. Oh god, they’re going to ruin gin.
Updated
