As I'm already reviewing the new Doctor Who episodes, I cant resist but now reviewing each episode in the new series of the Apprentice. The Apprentice is one of those shows for me, where half way through the show you'll find yourself shouting at the screen, hoping and praying they'll hear you so they wont muck things up. If you havent yet heard of the show, it features 16 candidates hand picked by Lord Alan Sugar, who every week get put through a series of business related challenges, where one person from the losing team in each challenge gets fired. The candidate left at the end then gets to become Lord Sugars Apprentice, earning a six figure salary.
From the very first series of this show I was hooked, there wasnt any other show like it at the time, and so I tuned in each week to see what tasks the candidates had been set and how they got on. However....over the last few years the candidates seem to have been getting worse and worse, to the point now that its funny to watch, because they are so bad. This is usually the main reason why I end up shouting at the screen.
Todays episode being the first in the new series showed you each of the candidates opening 'speeches' about what qualifications they have, where they worked, and why they are perfect for the job. As ever, after hearing these first few minutes of the show, you can quite accurately sum up what type of people they've choosen for the series. In this I don't mean how educated they are, but to put it bluntly, which one is the comedian of the group, which men and women are going to cause trouble and so on, and as I said its usually very accurate. For example one of the women finished her 'speech' saying, and i quote 'dont tell me the skies the limit, if there are foot prints on the moon', I immediately thought from this, who speaks like that, shes going to be trouble and in all fairness, she was.
After having seen all of the candidates, Lord Sugar met them in the board room, split them into the teams of boys vs girls, and gave them their first challenge, which was to take £250, buy as much fruit and veg as they can and sell it to make as much profit as they can. Sounds simple enough i thought, however from the word go, there were problems; the girls were arguing over team names, and the boys were having trouble deciding if people were wanting to put themselves forward for project manager, and who to vote for. Due to it being the first task, I thought i'd give them all the benefit of the doubt, on the little mistakes, which truthfully there werent very many, however throughout the entire show, one of the boys, constantly in my opinion kept messing up. Now again I would have given him the benefit of the doubt if he was one of the guys in the background not doing much, so didnt really affect them, however he was the project manager for the boys, the guy leading everyone else.
From what I saw of the girls, there didnt seem to be too many problems, the odd little squabble now and again, but for the first task, I actually thought they did really good, their fruit salad idea worked really well, they managed to get all their ingrediants quite cheaply, and they didnt spend too much time messing around when it came to preparing the food. The only major fault I would say, that also Lord Sugar pointed out, was that they still had alot of their spending money left, and having run out of fruit salads in the challenge, it would have been better to have bought more produce to begin with.
** Spoiler ** When it came to deciding who was going to be fired, for me it was very clear, as the boys lost the challenge, it would be one of them, and as only one boy really messed up, I was very glad to see that Edward the project manager was sent home. I was even more glad after I heard that his main arguement to be kept in was, and again I quote 'Not only am I the youngest, I'm the shortest', why he thought that was a good idea to say that, I have no idea.
Anyways, I thought it was a great first episode, the bars not been set too high just yet, although they've still got loads of time to get into the swing of things. The next episode is actually on tomorrow, and then the episodes are every wednesday from then on, so I'll be typing away again on tomorrows show. Cant wait to hear what anecdotes they come up with tomorrow!
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