The Apprentice Week 7: Ignorance and even some courtesy on display
One of the many things that surprises me when I watch the Apprentice is just how shockingly ignorant the contestants, supposedly some of the best brains in Britain, are.
Now is not the time for a debate on the merits of comprehensive education, grammar schools or the new "Free schools" idea being pushed by the government, but clearly something needs to be done.
Our contestants this week were sent to Pinewood Studios, which are of course the most famous film studios in these islands, and have been pretty much since the film industry began.
This did not stop Sandeesh "naff all" Samra from stating that she was sure it was a furniture store. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than fellow contestant Laura Moore, who had never heard of Pinewood at all.
This public display of ignorance follows last week's description of the Blitz by the alleged maverick (now eliminated from the process) Alex Epstein, as "some bombing in London", before adding that most of the people around at that time were dead by now. Well I hope he was watching the Remembrance Day service this week, he might have found that quite a few of them are still alive and well, thank goodness.
Now we've got that out of the way let's go the task. Quite fun this week, the teams had to make a film backdrop for paying customers to stand in front of so that they could have a video of them doing something interesting.
Both teams wisely decided to aim their video at children, although the team leader of Apollo and alleged brand Stuart Baggs, took some convincing on this point.
Apollo chose to film a racing car at Brands Hatch, while Synergy, under the leadership of the well-informed Sandeesh, recorded some skiing in Milton Keynes (the Alps were unavailable it seems).
Joanna Riley, who has been so far very successful in starting arguments with people, although less so than the dreadful Melissa Cohen (also eliminated), soon came into conflict with Stuart. However given Stuart's brash and patronising style this was hardly surprising.
The ever wonderful Stella English dealt with the young fellow merely by facial expressions, showing her disgust with the slightest narrowing of the eyes. I suspect she will get far in the series knowing as she does when to stay silent as well as when to speak.
When it came to selling their product Joanna showed a much better side to herself, being excellent with all the children who were eager to be filmed driving in their toy Ferrari. DVD's were sold, medals distributed and all was well with team Apollo.
Things were a bit slower over at Synergy, with a brief training session on how to use the technology involved, taking valuable selling time. The skiing video also seemed to be slightly less of a hit than the driving one and so sales were slower. The solution? Lower the prices and get a toy car.
In the end Synergy successfully sold more DVD's than Apollo. Unfortunately they also bought much more than Apollo, taking their costs up and their profits down, giving Apollo the win by a mere £39.
So Sandeesh was in the boardroom for the fourth time in seven weeks, she brought with her Liz Locke and Chris Bates, who has been on the losing team five times.
The boardroom scuffle was unusually well mannered and I was pleased that Sandeesh, rather than attempting to pin the blame on Liz and Chris accepted that all of them were responsible.
By contrast Chris mumbled away vaguely, but the gist of it was that he was not responsible. Liz, in her first time under the spotlight, was more coherent and said that while she added up the figures, the whole team was responsible for the costs being too high.
In the end Lord Sugar decided that nice as Sandeesh was, she was not quite of the same calibre as Chris and Liz and so she, like many before her, was fired. She left the boardroom with a courteous and apparently sincere thank you to Lord Sugar.
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