Thank you so much for joining the fun and not leaving me alone with these despots. Come back next week for Sugar on sugar. It’ll be sweet(s). See you in the comments!
Next week, the contestants go fully Wonka with a confectionery challenge. My gums hurt just thinking about it.
“It’s not how hard you hit, it’s how hard you can get hit,” grins Karthik in the people carrier home. What does that even mean? He wants us to hit him? I think there’d be a queue the length of the Millennium Bridge, dude. Don’t advertise that fact.
As is traditional, Sugar hovers some more, like a drone which may or may not deploy a stink bomb. But ultimately, he relents and everyone else gets to go back to the house.
Natalie is sanguine, whoever she is. Good on her.
Natalie is fired. Goodbye, Scotland’s rose. We never knew you at all. Literally, we saw nothing of you because the editor clearly didn’t see any point.
Karthik is silenced, several times but it’s a dummy, I think. He won’t fire him.
JD is given a free pass. Everyone else clenches.
This bunch are actually losing the plot in episode two. This is not good.
Karthik sees a gap and tries to fill it with bluster and human barking. Alana gets wobbly and weepy. Natalie has another go at saying almost nothing. Alana has another crack and can’t speak. She literally can’t speak.
Natalie doesn’t seem at all like an Apprentice candidate. I mean that as a compliment. She has so little to say for herself, it’s like she’s running on half power.
Alana says the posters were her idea. Silence. Natalie had a face like a licked stamp. She flounders as she tries to justify her contribution. She did the make-up but Alan probably already has his own make-up artist.
“Ooh, I’ve lost me train of thought,” says Jessica, flustered again as she fights for her right to become a Yellow Coat. Is anyone else getting Peggy Ollerenshaw from Hi-De-Hi?
When Sugar’s beam turns on the boys, Mukai slams Karthik and the eyebrows attempts a fight back. It’s not great for the lad. He’s fiery and furious and a nightmare to work with. I can’t see Alan going for it, long term.
Imagine if that was your claim to fame. “I was fired in episode two of The Apprentice.” “Oh, were you? Sorry, I asked for a flat white. This is latte.” The shame.
Jessica is bringing back Natalie and Alana.
That leaves eleven of you, says Alan. Jeez, that still sounds like a lot. Who will escape the jaws of doom and do we know any of them enough to care?
Mukai is bringing back JD and Karthik. Who is JD?
Jessica takes the floor at the Bridge Cafe and starts going off like a market barker. The team roll their eyes. They all blame her and she blames all of them. She secretly looks like a girl getting bullied by horrible fellow sixth-formers and I kind of feel for her. People aren’t nice on The Apprentice, Jessica. These are not your friends. Choose wisely.
He says it’s his “favourite task” like they’ve all spoiled his Christmas surprise. He’s actually using emotional guilt-tripping this year instead of out and out personality slamming. It’s freaking me out. It’s like the show is being presented by my mum this year.
I think he’s building up to a spray of automatic weapons firing. From both teams.
He is! Both PMs must bring back a brace of losers. Pow pow pow!
Sugar presses nuclear quite early again and says he’s angry. Again! He thinks they both did appallingly. Never mind Mad Men, something something demented dimwits. Who IS writing his zingers this year or is he going completely off-script? I suspect the latter.
Amazingly, the girls’ ad isn’t as shit as the boys’. But Alan is brow-furrowing about the choice of a bus shelter as aspirational or luxury. Then another awful zinger about waiting for a terrible bus shelter ad and then three come along at once. How I hate him for it.
Aleksandra is in Jess’s ear telling her she’s paranoid. Aleksandra shall from hereon in be known as Iago. I think I love her. Whisper whisper.
Jessica opens her eyes really wide as she starts her defence. Is this an animal thing? Showing the whites of your eyes to prevent a predator from biting your face off? Nice try, Jess but I don’t think that’ll work here.
Yes, the boys’ ad script isn’t even up to Julian Fellowes standard when it comes to exposition and character. They spent less than five seconds choosing those words and even less time deciding what order to put them in.
Dillon gets it in the neck for spending too much time on the casting couch. But actually, Mukai takes some of the heat for not watching the clock.
Karthik is that character in the first ten minutes of an episode of Casualty who has a very important deal to close and nothing must get in his way. Ten minutes after that he’s strapped to a gurney clutching his chest and going blue. Chill out, Big K. Seriously.
Do you get the feeling that the people at the back are actually extras for all the screen time they’ve had? I bet they’re different every week and we don’t even notice.
Mukai has the brass balls to wear a poweder blue bow tie like he hasn’t just flushed his life down the crapper while everyone watched.
Alan listens eagerly on is modernist yet still inexplicably corded phone as the ad exec panel slag off both teams fairly evenly.
And then it’s time for the boardroom. Regular as clockwork, 35 minutes in to every episode, that blue light kicks in and everyone looks like they’re sitting in a fridge.
The boys’ team have misunderstood the meaning of unisex. Is it what happens in halls of residence during Freshers’ Week?
DAY denim or whatever they’ve called it, launch into their presentation. Mukai barely gets his first word out before nerves overtake him and he says, “I’ve completely fucked it.” He actually says that. I pause the liveblog to play a short, sad trumpet solo for Mukai’s career. Best moment of the series so far. Who had money on the girls definitely losing this one? Oh how the tables turn.
Aleksandra says the heavy tube box thing that contains the jeans is like a big heavy diamond. Some kind of barrel scraping prize is in order here. She’s terrible at analogies.
Jessica is actually not rubbish at leading the presentation. As the video plays, that line about Japanese food starts to make my teeth itch on the third listen.
It’s a new day or at least a new location. The teams arrive at an impressive art deco building to present their half-baked denim diatribes to a bunch of ad execs with interesting hair.
And the question mark?
Back at the house, the samples arrive. The girls are really excited about their jeans in a tube emblazoned with the hashtag Claim Your Fit. All I keep thinking it, they’ve missed the apostrophe.
As the girls choose their music, Karrren points out that the girls filmed their ad in a toilet so they probably shouldn’t have picked Shake It Off as the soundtrack. Now I can see why Karrren is worth millions.
Karthik tries to stage a bloodless coup over Mukai and tells him he is overruling him. He is quite aggressive and everyone had noticed. The two men refuse to back down. It’s heady testosterone-y stuff but ultimately no one wins. Stalemate.
Ah! So the interactive thing becomes clear. The girls hover by their billboard on a busy shopping street and do something abhorrent with selfies and social media to spread their insipid brand message. Which I think might be “Wear jeans”.
Dillon is directing a skateboarding scene in an urban skate park which is clearly giving him a thrill.
The big special K or whatever he calls himself is behaving like Donal Trump at a beauty pageant, shouting that he is so hot he’ll have to strip. No one wants Karthik (for that is is name) to strip.
The girls throw themselves into shooting their ad. Aleksandra runs us through who is doing what and massively patronising Natalie “bless her” in a way that suggests she would like to “bless her” with a full glass of Pino Grigio. Quite hard.
Alana and Rebecca swoon over their logo and mentally high five each other as they decide to put the white writing on the brown background. Is there a Nobel prize for putting letters on things?
I love how the soundtrack goes all hopeful. It’s the start of a new day. We can DO this, the plucky strings seem to be saying. Let’s nail this guys.
ADVERT DAY
Mukai says he is moving to “The A Team”. No big cigar or clandestine trip to bust his insane friend out of a secure facility but otherwise identical.
Paul (geezer) expresses his serious doubts about Mukai and Dillon takes the call to hear they have missed their deadline for the interactive thingy which is obviously important but I have no clue what it is.
Tomorrow, the advert. The best bit.
Jessica says today has been not at all smokin’ and that tomorrow she will be better. Because she will be a different person with a brain and ideas and some sense of what is going on around her?
Courtney (never noticed him before) poses as a male model for the boys’ campaign but goes all shy when he has to look the female model in the eye. This is all too fast. We’re not getting nearly long enough to wallow in their awkwardness.
She directs the photo shoot with terrible suggestions like, “Do a fake laugh.” It’s painful.
The girls finally get their jeans back and Jessica swigs from a bottle (which must contain gin) while Alana and co hold their heads and wonder how the hell they’re going to pull this back because Jessica is all over the shop.
Mukai tries to call his artistic director who is auditioning hot models for the advert. “I’ll be the girl,” he grins as he runs through a role play with a young man. Meanwhile, is phone is going to voicemail and Mukai is vexed.
Crisis number one! The girls do not have the all important jeans. They’ve left them on the bus or something. This is like the antiques last week.
Karrren just stares at them as Jessica loses her nerve and starts to jibber. Karrren’s actually nice to her and tells her to go outside and chill out. This gives her team the opportunity to conspire against and say loudly that she is unreliable.
Karrren wrinkles her nose as the girls design their logo for Unclaimed Japanese Denim. Which means nothing. An Apprentice slogan should never actually mean something.
Mukai hangs him out to dry by leaving the branding decision to Dillon. Thus, he washes his hands and Dillon is left holding the poop.
Art director Dillon, who looks ASTONISHING. Trust this man on matters of colour and style. I mean look at him. Their brand is Day After Yesterday Denim. I’m lost here. Where did that come from? It’s awful.
Dillon claims that he can’t be interrupted during his thinking process and I’m disappointed he doesn’t physically put on a crash helmet to get some space.
And it’s onto the streets for the all important market research. The boys keep stopping passersby and then tactfully telling them they’re too old.
Mukai has vetoed the name Emo-jeans. Good move. Jessica is deploying her team because she is the PM. This is going to be an actual disaster. Rebecca points out that she should be in charge of branding because that’s her job but Jess disagrees. I love how everyone tries to play this game like they’re already in the boardroom, checking a list of things they should have raised at the time.
The girls are getting fighty over who should PM and Rebecca votes for herself, thus disqualifying herself. She doesn’t look entirely unhappy about it with that, “Well, at least I tried,” expression.
Alan unleashes his first zinger horribly early in the episode, telling the gormless wobs that one of them will be “hung out to dry”. Like the body parts up in the ceiling. Who had the first five minutes for Alan’s zinger? Collect your body part at the end.
Alan appears to be meeting his candidates in some kind of Burke & Hare nightmare warehouse strewn with dangling body parts. Is this the gangland twist I’ve been hoping for?
No, it’s a textile advertising challenge. Stand down.
The early call! Alana answers with suspiciously beach-ready hair as the boys discuss which colour shoes they should wear. Big K (Car Sick) makes a joke about funerals which I’m not even going to type but safe to say, it was pure Apprentice bravado of the worst kind.
In a case of TV eating its own tale, apparently the company that laid on the vintage jive lessons last week, actually got partly funded by going on Dragon’s Den. Aaaaaaaah, I feel like I’m falling.
So, while they recap last week’s episode, who do we think doesn’t look like a total no-hoper? I couldn’t pick one of them yet, unless Jessica is using her The Mask persona as a brilliant disguise for her actually ruthless business sense. Is she hustling is or is she really that wacky?
I think he went off on the anger tip a bit early last week. Where’s Alan got to go if he’s already raging at the upturned, shiny faces of his newly arrived idiots before they’ve even unpacked their wheelie suitcases?
Michelle! That’s who went last week.
How fantastically uncomfortable does Alan look performing that BBC One ident with his firing finger. “I can point it. But now you’re asking me to twirl it in a circle? I want extra for that.”
*taps lectern* Wallies assemble. It’s two minutes until a houseful of sleepy tycoons are awoken by a sarcastically early phone call, tripping over the wires of a thousand straightening irons before staggering into people carriers.
Can anyone remember who was fired last week? No, of course you can’t. Can anyone name a single contestant left in the competition? No again. That’s OK. We’re going to get through the second episode together and forgive each other our trespasses (well me, mine) when we get the numpties’ names wrong.
Obviously, I have ways and means of keeping track. This year, I’ve installed my glass evidence wall with laser pointer because this live blogging gig has, ironically, made me considerably richer than any of the candidates.
In a particularly cruel move, producers have chosen week two for the most humiliating of all the tasks, the advertising task. Whoever it is that’s still vying for the money must come up with a marketing campaign for some jeans. Because that hasn’t been done before.
Join me here about 10 minutes before the off for pre-show stretches and a pep talk.
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