Perhaps it's because the previous series only seemed to end a few months ago, but after two episodes, "The Apprentice" already seems to be getting a little repetitive.

Let's summarise. The first episode of this series saw team leader Edward Hunter get fired after he completely failed to inspire his team to victory. In the previous series Dan Harris was fired in the first episode after grating against his whole team as well.

In the second episode of this series Alex Cabral was fired mainly for "lurking in the shadows" and not doing much, just as Joy Stefanicki was fired in the second week of the previous series for "not pulling her weight".

Despite this repetitiveness it was pleasing to see Mr Cabral go early in the process, as he seemed to be one of the nastier characters who often get disturbingly far, for example, Ben "scholarship to Sandhurst" Clarke.

The preview of next week's episode also shows the teams having to travel around London looking for rare items and having to haggle for the lowest price, an identical task was seen in the last series.

However the second episode of this most recent series did have an original task idea, with the teams having to design an "app", with the winner being the team with the most downloaded app.

As it was, the girl's team made an app which emitted strange noises, while the boy's developed an app which played allegedly humorous voice clips of regional accents.

The "Slang-a-tang", as the boy's product was called, did not go down well with one of those they hoped to promote it to, as he was afraid that it was playing on racial stereotypes and might be offensive to those with regional accents, this despite the fact that it was being pitched to him by Jim Eastwood, who has his own regional accent from Nor-den Ar-land.

These ridiculous, humourless, Labourish and Guardianista type concerns aside, the Slang-a-tang was still a rubbish product, but then the girl's app was not much better.

In the end the girl's product won, not because their product was great, but because animal grunts have a greater worldwide appeal than Scouser accents apparently.

So Leon Doyle led the boy's team to failure and he soon led Mr Cabral and Glenn Ward into the boardroom, but only after Jim told Leon not to take him in.

Strangely Leon listened to him. Leon does seem to be rather weak-willed, not only because he was talked into changing his mind about who he brought into the boardroom, but also because he keeps agreeing with Lord Sugar no matter what he says. Such behaviour hints at a lack of what Peter Mandelson once called his "inner steel".

The show goes on.

London