The Apprentice UK 2015

Hooray! Weeks and weeks and weeks of Claude being a horrible bellend rather than just one week. Bring it on.

No Dara this year. I'm not sure Jack Dee is the replacement I'd have picked.

Whatever happened to Adrian Chiles? Gone without trace, it seems..

Gone to Radio Five Live

The Icarus-like trajectory of his career continues apace.

Dara and these threads are the only reason I'm still watching this. As I probably said last year as well.

Anyway, another 10 weeks of pointless tasks before alSug chooses the business plan he likes

We'll have to see how jack d does

I swore I wouldn't ever watch this again but I did :(

Thought it was an interesting gambit by SPOILERS Daniel to be banking all his continuing appearance on the fact his business plan was a winner, and not on his actual abilities. We've seen in the previous years that once AlSug has been told what's in the plans he begins to overlook things about the person he wants to work with (see notably Tom in the first year of the format who could/should have gone two or three times in the last 6 shows, and definitely true of Mark last year) but he probably hasn't been briefed about them yet so it was a risky strategy. It does feel right though, that if the whole basis now is about setting up a new company, why do you actually need to be a good salesman?

Aside from that, first ep was just a pointless shoutfest with everyone jockeying for position or trying to avoid responsibility; no prize idiots standing out thus far. I did have to laugh when just before the Bridge Café bit two different people on the team said on VT "the people who didn't contribute could be in trouble" and for both of them it was literally the first thing they had said all episode. One of them was being puffed up as a front runner on YF too.

Ep 2 feels much too early for the advert task, even if they are always ridiculous. Also having done the gender mix-up in ep1, AlSug switches it back this time - so not a pointless gimmick at all then.

YF was crap, new formatting/set rubbish.

"Comedian does a pre-filmed comedy bit"

It was funny if you laugh at the title sequences to some 70's comedy - Terry/June, Some Mothers, etc.

The clearly scripted banter between Jack and Romesh is stilted, the whole 'Jack Dee is Jack Dee' asides to camera aren't funny, and the fired contestant gets sidelined.

i thought for a moment that they'd instigated some 'whitest people out first policy'

is that a new cafe? looks less like a greasy spoon, more like an out-of-town halfords.

and, bugger, i forgot to set a season pass for YF.

Keep expecting Gary to put on sunglasses and go 'Mister ANDERSON'

it'll be 6 weeks before i remember any of their names.

Yes, if I want to buy large quantities of seafood, what I'll do is try and buy it off a restaurant. I will never ask any of these disbelieving restaurants who they bought it from. And Karren Brady will not find this weird.

That toy boat was another Felipe's paper skeleton in the making, I thought. But apparently not.

I have no idea who any of the boys are yet. Other than wordsmith, except I don't know his name, just that he described himself as a wordsmith. I think I can distinguish all of the girls apart already.

I don't like Vana.

Does anyone know what the 'fine' rules were? The amounts for the items seemed to differ.

Their oligarchs-in-training house is just around the corner from me, and is actually owned by Rupert Murdoch - it's where Rebekah Brooks hid out on the day all her not-guilty verdicts came in. Back in April I went by the house while walking Kenny, and three of the guys came outside and started to fuss over him.

xp although not a viewer, from being in the room while this was on I gleaned that the fine was £50 + some sort of average price for the item

Right, so if they had not bought the boat, the fine would have been £60?

yes, they dodged a bullet with the toy boat. but they won by well over £300 so it was all a bit academic. (the camera seemed to linger strangely on the size of the toy boat printed on the front, as if it didn't meet the requirements, but i guess not, maybe it was focusing on the toy-boat aspect).

i can't believe they are all given only 20 minutes to get ready and then spend some of that time ironing.

Must get an iron each.

We have no idea what the boat fine would be - if SrAlan's 'team' had assumed the boat was supposed to be of the type the girls bought, and it turns out what they paid was about the right average price for it, then the fine would have been £300. The whole 'average price' is a nebulous concept - if they only looked in places for lace that were priced similarly to what the boys paid then that would be what the fine was for not buying it, irrespective of how much girls were able to find it.

The penalty for the cheese, the mussels and the mirror was £325 or so (£398.44 to £725.90) and the boys only paid under £100 (£50 + 50 Euro). The boys were on penalised £80 for the snails, which the girls paid 50 Euro for.

If you watch this with fashion people who are used to calling in items for shoots etc, the yelling at the ineptitude on view is staggeringly therapeutic, because everyone I know in that demographic could do this task in a few hours. J (who was over for dinner and another round of 'you really need to get a new dog') and I were yelling FISHMONGER at these useless idiots for about 20 minutes solid.

All the women on this show always strike me as potential foot spa and 'chicken fillet' owners.

I thought the one who went was pretty cool (for an Apprentice contestant, obv). Vana was ridic, insisting that something labelled "1/4" was a whole cheese.
Skeletongate itself was bloody stupid. They never explain the rules properly - would they have had to ship the stuff back on the ferry themselves, what about exchange rate etc making it more/less expensive to buy in one country than another?

Vana is the kind of UK-based American that gives me the full-body cringe.

I think the obvious unasked/unanswered question they should ask is "What for?" when asked to get these items.

For instance, during the hotel items challenge, the "cloche" requirement is not a wooly hat but a thing you put over cheese (or whatever).

I forget where they were for the skeleton one, but a paper/cardboard skeleton would prove to be useless if someone wanted to use it for whatever. The boat was borderline, but hey it floats and you can get people in it, so hey.

thin end of wedge...

"OK, so we can make a price of £4.80 for 150 copies, but if you want less, let's say a quantity of 50, we can let you have them for a price of £3.50"

hmmmmmmm............

Which makes sense if you actually mean £4.80 for 150, but that was a unit price..

i did wonder whether i'd actually heard that.

bloke in gosh, comic / graphic novel shop in soho where they offloaded the last of them, was a bit canny i think - huge discount, free publicity, just stick an 'as seen on the apprentice' sticker on them. given that they often have piles of £60 books in the shop then this was probably peanuts to them, really.

(although you could say the same for waterstones who took only 50)

Waterstones were 'playing the game "We are Buyers" ' as they were pre-booked.

The Soho bookshop, as you say, knew he'd shift them as souvenirs when the day came. (That day is TODAY!)

We had to rewind Selina's amazing creative unit pricing because I genuinely couldn't believe she said that. Her "I'm not good good at mental arithmetic" excuse was awes, how much mental arithmetic skills do you need to know that 3 is less than 4?

Mmmm, marine pie...

Elle was utterly rubbish, though I admired her honesty from the outset in admitting that she just bullshits her way through things she doesn't have a clue about. Shame she couldn't even do that though.

I still can't tell Brett or Richard apart. Sam makes me a bit ragey, as do Selina and Charleine. I think I quite like Scott.

Also, this really was the worst task ever. Go and do shit you can't do for prices you can't estimate. I assume this was just because they had a few more blue-collar folk in this year.

Oh, and ask a sub-team guy to assess the whole team that he wasn't working with. Brilliant.

No thoughts on last week's show? I was glad to see the back of the useless Sam. I think Joseph might go all the way.

I can't remember anything about last week's show. Joseph, Scott and maybe Vana are the only ones I don't actively dislike. Sam was like a caricature of what Sugar thinks clever people are like. The other half reckons Brett might win. There are still two guys whose names I can't remember.

I think Scott was the one with weaknesses for geriatric whippetlurchers and sitting on the front steps of his nearby oligarch's palace.

I find by the time I've got to the end I've completely forgotten what happened - this year's crowd are identikit rentagobs or yes-men. (As a living example of this, I've just had to look up what this week's task is. Oh aye, kids' party.)

I think Joseph is a shoo-in after his performance in the week Elle went after he took over the task. Gary is the only other one I can see winning.

Scott is only still in it because there has always JUST been someone worse than him each week. He was the one that suggested they could re-landscape that whole back garden in the odd job task, got the teams completely wrong on pet show, contributed nothing on book or ad tasks, and didn't understand retail at all last week. Also his whole strategy to get out of the boardroom was to claim Brett had threatened him with violence, leading to Karren calling him a liar.

Can't see David lasting much longer tbh, he's been totally ineffectual during the entire process.

Oh shit, yeah, forgot all about that. I just remember him being quite sensible on, er, something, once. That's usually enough for me to take to someone amongst the general ocean of twattishness.

xpost

I can't get over the fact that one dude looks like the lead singer of the Kursall Flyers.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/67689MU_28A/mqdefault.jpg

Haha!

Charleine looks like Helen Skelton.

Jeez, that bus ride.

Jeez, £200 per kid.

That's That London for you.

Did I mis-hear or was the whole nutella scandal fabricated? I was sure the conversation went:

Karren - "Don't you think you should tell them about the chocolate spread?"
Gary - "OK, look, I don't want to worry you but the label of the chocolate spread says 'may contain nuts'"
Parents - "Is it nutella?"
Gary - "I don't think so, they would have said."
Karren - "You'd better go off and check, it's quite important."
Gary (after checking) - "It's milk chocolate spread"
Parents - "OK"
(later)
Dad (after checking the jar) - "Yeah, that's definitely fine."
(boardroom)
Karren - "YOU TOLD THEM IT WAS MADE FROM HAZELNUTS"

Putting aside the fact that the spread wouldn't actually have been fine, which tells a whole different story about the 'allergy', all the doubt was generated by the parents themselves and Gary did nothing but reassure them and try to eliminate the issues.

Many people with nut allergies are OK to have almonds (and one friend's partner and daughter are also OK to have hazelnuts/Nutella) so the dad at the party isn't an outlier. Peanuts seem to be the AVOID! nut in a great many cases.

But that didn't seem to be the case here - hazelnuts/nutella = ALLERGY KLAXONS, generic warning for 'nuts' (i.e. 'nuts' /= 'no hazelnuts') = FINE FILL YOUR BOOTS. They were less concerned about a generic and all-encompassing warning than a specific one.

Scott's going even if he's on the winning team. Calling it now.

Well, that was unexpected.

How? You called it!

he seemed genial enough. i guess after al's comments he knew there was no chance of winning so why prolong it?

the woman not turning up for 'you've been fired' was more of a thing. what if she'd been the only leaver?

this week's 'treat' seemed a bit brutal

I thought he might be sacked even if he won to be honest, after his woeful first tour of the 'flat' where he didn't know where the lounge was.

I was sure Selina was going, she'd done her 'tell-all' stories earlier in the day including her first lingerie shoot. Other people have not turned up before on YF with flimsy excuses, was watching Peep Show so didn't see it - did they say (as she did in her press yesterday) that she wasn't doing it because she was deliberately breaking the contract so they couldn't bother her again?

Selina is an awful person.

It always amazes me when people try to rewrite history. Don't they realise there are cameras and mics everywhere?

Also the hilarious overreactions to Scott's withdrawal were golden.

I don't remember many other people not being on YF except for when they've left because of family/personal circs, ill relatives etc.
Selina is the total woooorrrsst

I think its a first, yes.

"The one where nobody wins"

it's funny that themed seemed to make a decent fist of pretending to be estate agents (selling things worth 100s of thousands) and then utterly failed with the 70p snacks.

actually, that just reinforces my view of estate agents.

was last night's additional programme worth watching?

Don't know, not seen it yet.

It isn't, usually..

And yet..

Watching it now. It isn't.

"I'll take your comments on board, Claude
I'll take your comments on board..
I feel we've reached an accord, Claude
but I'll take your comments on board

ALLTOGETHERNOW..

(I'm fairly sure that's not on "You're fired")

I think Joseph might go all the way.

― schlep and back trio (anagram), Wednesday, November 25, 2015 1:51 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there was no task in the last episode. there was some research, they printed a logo on some overalls, then there was just a presentation. there used to be more to it than that.

anyway, i never liked her. or him.

On the one hand, it was more 'fair' than having a big task, where one team obviously wins and then AlSug picks the other finalist because of the proposal.

On the other, it was more like the 'grand final' of The Generation Game where the two finalists stand side by side while Brucey reads three questions out.

Comedian Jack Dee has announced he is to quit his hosting role on The Apprentice's spin-off show You're Fired after just one series.

Dee, who took over last year from Irish comic Dara O Briain, blamed work commitments for the decision:

It's been a tough decision to leave You're Fired. I'd like to thank The Apprentice team, BBC Two, the candidates and the 'Big Man' Lord Sugar himself for making me feel so welcome but now, in keeping with The Apprentice tradition, I am firing myself. Good luck with the next series.

I don't think I watched more than about ten minutes of it apart from the one after the final last year. Bring back Dara.