The Apprentice 2013 Episode 8: the one where Louise had to write the review…

For the last seven episodes Billie Graham of Cranberry Panda has watched The Apprentice on my behalf and for your entertainment has reviewed it (Setting the tone in episode’s one and two,  Episode 3: the one with the poxy boxy and the sales orgasm, Episode 4: the one with the milkshakes and the fruity cow…, Episode 5: the one without data roaming in Dubai and Episode 6: the one with the £300 plastic flamingo).

Yesterday due to circumstances beyond her control she wasn’t able to so I said I’d have a go. I had no idea who any of the people were (Al, Karen and the lovely Nick excluded of course). Here is my (not half as funny as Billie’s) summary of what happened last night…

The credits roll and some nice voiceover chaps gives me the low down on what I’ve got myself into; £250k and a partnership with LORD Alan Sugar for the winner. 16 nutters fighting for 12 flaming weeks for this “life changing” opportunity… just eight remain… whoohoo I’m on the edge of my seat.

So 6am and the phone rings and the eight remaining inmates are summoned to the Marylebone Town Hall. In the taxi someone thought the task might be to do with weddings and blow me they were right. I’d been under the impression they were all thick!!

It was a massive shame the recruiter had left last week as they were tasked w setting up an online dating business and ad campaign. She would have rocked this task.

Then I did a massive yawn for about 20 minutes whilst they chose their leaders, made a strategy, harassed people on the street (Nick looked a bit bored too), created a logo fit for a funeral parlour (Karen appeared at this point and made her thoughts clear) and generally faffed about. Bit disappointed not to see any use of a Yellow Pages – Billie has assured me this was their main research tool.

After spending far too long creating his funeral parlour/dating site logo poor Jason got so stressed that his eyebrows totally met in the middle. Then he had a revelation that everyone was out to get him. Doh it’s competition guys.

The filming of the adverts was painful. Alex dressed as a panto character and enjoyed himself way too much and the other team appeared to create something for the over 90s (their target audience was funky 50-something’s).
Its safe to say that the Friendship and Flowers’ pitch to the “experts” did not go well. The Cuflinks advert got some smiles and creepy Alex was chuffed to bits and thought it went very well.

In the boardroom everyone crept and sniveled to Al whilst attempting subtle (or not so in the case of horrible Luisa) backstabbing. That alone made me realise why Billie drinks when she watches this tosh.

Joyously before I knew it Al was about to announce the winning team and then kick someone off – he waffled on for a bit and then announced the winner to be the creepy Herbert campaign. They all escaped and scoffed £35k worth of
caviar.

Little Miss Bitchy, Mr Eyebrows and some relatively inoffensive female were back in the boardroom. I had no idea which way it was going (and frankly I couldn’t care less) but suddenly Al was telling Jason to do one!

Lessons learnt:
A) asking the opinion of six people in a pub is not a “focus group”
B) disappointingly, being a cow is more likely to make you a winner than being a nice guy
C) Billie is hard-core managing to watch 7 episodes of this so far.

Quote of the show; “it’s like buying a wife from Russia”

Next week Billie WILL be back to review the show 🙂