Previously on The Apprentice: Book-eeze on the beach, Bitchfights and BLADDY BIZNISS

6.30am, and Pervo Alex is already dressed in a suit. They’ve 30 minutes to get up and ready, but instead give themselves motivational pep-talks in the mirror. Yer a winner, kid. A winner with horrific breath.

They meet at Fortnum and Mason, and Lord Al can be bothered to show up this week. There’s cakes everywhere, next to piles of cakes, and baskets of cakes. They’re turning flour… into dough! Hilarious, Al. Yer a winner.

They’re setting up a bakery each, and because the girls just screech at each other like a drunken hen night gone wrong, Shibby and Chris will mix it up by swapping teams with Melissa and Joanna.

Jamie tells us how fantastic he is, to which Lady Gaga lookalike Melissa repeats “me too” like a demented echo. At a vote, Gaga is picked unanimously as Project Manager. On the other team, only Shibby steps forward. He threatens to smack bums if things go badly, to the delight of resident hottie Liz. As he talks, it becomes clear that he has less charisma than a bag of flour.

Gaga stutters and stammers over her brilliant ideas, before realising that this is a task that happens in the real world, and mentally falls over. She mutters something about thinking out of the box, because she’s in BIZNISS, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Shibby has finalised his ideas, so it’s off to the factory, where they get baking. Accidentally, they manage to produce purple dough, which they could probably sell as Grimace burgers.

Team Gaga sort of think of some ideas, then don’t, then, er, argue a bit and nobody makes a decision. They have to pitch in front of a baker, which Alex does quietly, while Melissa uses her Gaga skills to fanny about with a calculator and calculate costs. The tension becomes so pathetic that they’re asked to leave while she tries adding up. They spend 15 minutes out in the corridor, before being harried back into giving a cost: “in terms of the white roll, I’m looking at £1.82 a unit”. Amazing.

The other team bowl straight in with their prices. A single roll? 6p. They commit to baking 1,900 items overnight. With zero experience or qualifications.

Shibby phones the order through to Liz, and when she complains that they weren’t making croissants, is told that “we need to make whatever our clientele wants”, and that she needs to make 400 of them. Like, brilliant. Start ordering solid gold Mercedes and Shibby will confidently tell you that you can have a billion of them. This afternoon. He’s the one with no business experience, by the way.

After Gaga’s rubbish costing, she passes it over to Alex, but not before we find out that she has no idea how much the items weigh. They might as well have sent a squirrel in.

Paloma continues to add items to their orders, thrilling herself by upselling. Shibby (no business experience) almost ruins it by asking the coffee chain to order what he finds easiest to produce, before pulling the plug on negotiations himself. He argues with Paloma about whether they have the capacity to keep adding food, while a man tries to walk past on the stairs, very conscious that he’s interrupting telly. Paloma is a typical marketing tosser: making promises that other people have to bust themselves to fix. Apropos of nothing, I hope Ed Relf reads this while googling himself.

Christoper (ex marine, slightly scary) takes charge of Team Gaga’s kitchen, with everything running as smoothly as if Mr. Kipling himself were overseeing things. Shibby realises everything in his kitchen is going to pot, and turns to the Apprentice staple of shouting. By midnight, they may or may not have baked everything, and it’s off to sales.

Shibby, remember, has promised 1,900 items, and clearly hasn’t managed it. Shaun the breakfast maker looks furious as he is presented with 16 bread rolls and a mish-mash of various muffins. Shibby wisely makes a joke about putting the customers on the Atkins diet. They pay out compensation of £130, which, after last week’s show, probably won’t even be brought up in the board room.

Gaga talks about an attractive muffin – despite the fact that the cafe customers will be eating, not fucking them – but the owner thinks they’re about as attractive as Gok Wan, so doesn’t make the purchase.

Out on the stalls now, time to sell the rest. Gaga irritates everyone by standing on their faces until they buy. Stuart Baggs the Brand is irritatingly calm and quiet.

Shibby and Chris go out with Chris dressed as a cooker. Chris the Cooker. Chris the blooming Cooker. The muffins are £2 a pop, so they wisely wander to Covent Garden, where everyone expects to be ripped off. Sandeesh is the meekest of sellers, apologising for even daring to be on the same pavement as them.

Gaga switches her attentions to irritating her team and manages to stop them all from selling while they argue over GCSE maths results. Alex got eleven A*s. Well done, Alex. You’re still unemployed, champ.

Towards the end of the day, both teams do the usual desperate scrabbling around trying to get rid of as many as possible in increasingly desperate ways. Haggling over £2 in a cafe like a French tourist.

Day over, and it’s off to see Mrs Tiggywinkle in the board room. Gaga keeps saying things like “skill sets” and other horrific HRy BIZNISSy words Despite her terrible, floundering pitch, they were redeemed by the sterling work in the kitchen. There’s a noticeable, horrible silence when the other team is asked if Andrew Collings was a good team leader.

Gaga makes a profit of £859.57, while Collings profits at £665.99. Both teams actually did quite well for an industry that they know nothing about. Alan rubs the shine off things for Gaga, by pointing out that they won despite her, and Jamie also thinks she’s a massive idiot. We like Jamie.

The winning team head off to a creepy belly dancing bar, where a girl with preposterous breasts wraps a snake round the neck of Stuart Baggs the Brand. We’ve all wanted to be there.

Shibby holds his hands up in the boardroom and says it was his fault that the first order was so big. Alan gets confused by Shibby’s happiness that the second pitch went wrong. He was happy because they would only have disappointed the business owner. They delivered 16 out of 1,000 rolls – 16 out of 1,400 is a hell of a lot worse.

Shibby gets all simplistic, because it’s the only way to make himself look good, and attacks Sandeeeeeeeeeeesh for her personal sales. She said she was attracting customers, and Shibby makes another terrible joke about her wandering around with her top off to attract them.

Shibby admits to making the wrong product choice (on top of everything else he cocked up), and is asked to bring two people back with him. It doesn’t matter who he picks, he has to be screwed. Sandeesh and Paloma are the chosen two that will get to barrack him for even longer.

Karren talks about Paloma’s upselling as though it’s a good thing. THEY WERE UNABLE TO FULFIL THE ORDERS THEY ALREADY HAD. How difficult is this? Shibby makes the point that she was wrong to do so, and Paloma shouts over him, does a terrible impression of him, and turns into an uber-bitch.

Sandeesh is brought back because she doesn’t really do anything. Paloma denies bitching about her, despite it being on camera earlier. Just as Shibby starts to get the truth out of her, Al moves the conversation on, and brings out Sandeesh’s reh-soo-may (Al, just call it a CV if you can’t pronounce the American version), and casually compares her to Hitler.

Shibby, you know, has an agile you know, mind you know, he you know, had £200 you know, when you know, he started you know, and you know, whatever it is you know, he’s got “it”.

Sandeesh tries that annoying thing of saying she’ll be PM next week, to bypass a firing, but Al’s having none of it and tells her that HE will decide if she’s PM. Unless he forgets, and they’re left to do decide for themselves in an argument next week.

And finally, Shibby you know, you’re fired.

Next week: Inventions, ideas and idiots

Comments

1. Scorpio Scott says:

   October 21, 2010 at 1:22 pm

   Awesome and insightful

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