Last week, Baggsy pulled one out of the, er, bag, when his team won a crisp-peddling task out in Germany. Scouse dullard Christopher was fired, in one of the more unfair decisions of the series: “Chris, you’ve been rubbish every week. But Christopher, I don’t think you’ll fit in. You’re fired.” (Chris and Christopher are different people; it’s not a Jekyll and Hyde situation, or a sign of Alan’s worsening mental state.)

The Patented Early Morning Phone Call comes at 5.30am, and they’re off to the City of London. Supposedly, they’re given thirty minutes to get ready, but those must be Magical Apprentice Minutes because it’s enough time for the hair straighteners, seven showers, suit-choices and full make-up.

Tonight is a buying task: Ten items must be bought at the lowest price. That rules Amstrad products out (because they’re expensive.) The teams are rearranged into The Boys vs. The Girls. They have ten hours, ten items, and an A-to-Z. Liz PMs the girls, while Jamie steps up for the boys.

Jamie gives a pep-talk on how to negotiate, and says “busting my balls” like a middle-class Tony Soprano. They head out in the Businessmobile, while the girls make the same negotiations over the phone. Jamie’s first task is to find a twenty-two-carat tikka, but the guy in the store doesn’t know what it is, and clearly Jamie can’t mention that it’s for The Apprentice during negotiations, leaving it hanging in the air like a bad fart.

One of the items – the Blue Book – is, as the girls team know, a manual relating to The Knowledge. Or, if you’re on the boys’ team, it’s an American magazine from the 1920s. Hewer seems pleased with the girl’s definition, so Baggsy has the wrong idea. Brilliant. Joanna negotiates well with a cabbie school, and gets the Blue Book for fifty pounds. Baggsy and Chris wander around to look for the wrong Blue Book, while Jamie wanders door to door to find out what a tikka is. He doesn’t. The girls get a tikka (a type of Indian jewellery, in case you were interested), get a good price, and get away. Jamie eventually finds out what it is, and gets one cheaper than the girls. And, in fact, below cost price. Seems Lord Al is training them to be daylight robbers.

Baggsy gets another wrong definition of Blue Book and wanders off again.

Liz bothers to snip twelve quid off the price of a sewing machine, which Joanna is less than thrilled about. She’d have gotten it for a fiver, and had the salesman wrap it in his own skin. Jamie gets a sewing machine even cheaper.

Chris tells a weird lie about his brother to the taxi firm. Just a co-incidence that you’re on the telly at the same time as you lost his Blue Book, yeah? Laura annoys a man in a van by negotiating rudely, and finally agreeing to his price.

The girls have seven items in the bag; the boys five.

Jamie roots through the Yellow Pages to find a custom-length kitchen worktop; the girls ordered theirs in the morning, before they left. He sits listening to endless loops of Greensleeves in the back of a car.

Stella phones Gordon Ramsay, for some reason, but he’s not in. She goes to another restaurant to buy truffles. Liz wants a “ballpoint” figure on the price. Stella and Laura ignore her instruction to call her, and buy the 56g of truffles for two-hundred pounds.

Chris tells another weird lie about taking his nan to a wedding in Scotland, and gets some cheap tartan – pissing off another shopkeeper on the way. Karren compares them to Laurel and Hardy. They’re definitely trying to amuse each other.

Cue traditional end-of-day running. Chris gets truffles for a hundred pounds, while Liz hurries an elderly immigrant into falling in love with her and giving her a discount.

Liz prays to God (or Lord Al) that they’ll get back in time, while Baggsy offers advice to the driver in the style of an excitable child: “Go up the kerb! Go up the kerb!” God doesn’t come through, and there’s a fifty pound lateness fine for the girls.

THE BOARDROOM

The girls got all ten items. Weirdly, after fannying around all day in circles, the boys didn’t. Baggsy and Chris got their five, but Jamie only got two. Actually, it’s only 0.5 items less than the other two got each, but cue a maths-free bollocking.

The boys, despite their numerous fines, inexplicably won.They get a weekend in Paris, which pisses on the other treats: Wine tasting? Bum sniffing? Who needs that?

Chris manages to combine casual anti-French racism with a hint of homophobia, before skipping arm-in-arm with the others – in berets… fucking berets – under the Eiffel Tower. And then pointing out that the Arc De Triomphe represents their “triomphe”. Eurgh.

Back in the boardroom, Alan thinks the girls used the task as a treasure hunt, rather than a negotiating task. He throws out casual business observations, with all the insight of a fortune cookie. Liz selects Stella and Laura to come back, so Joanna goes back to the house, where Baggsy will make inappropriate jokes and weird her out. Probably.

Liz focused too much on what the items were, and not what they should cost. Stella launches a passionate defence of herself, and she can already visualise Charlize Theron playing her in the heart-wrenching, Oscar winning movie.

Stella and Laura get into a minor shouting match, just like the old days!

“Thank you for everything… it’s been great”, lies Laura, as she’s…. fiiiiirrreeeeddddd. That doesn’t really work. JUST LIKE LAURA.

Back at the house, Stella apologises for not being fired, and Liz takes the opportunity to have a dig at her for comments in the boardroom. Evil but fit. Oh how we love her.

Comments

1. Tim says:

   December 2, 2010 at 9:41 am

   Stuart got it spot on afterwards when he said “How good are we? Even when we’re s***, we win!”

   The boys were awful. Having picked up three fines for unpurchased items, there is no way they should have been anywhere near the girls, let alone win. With the exception of Joanna, all the girls negotiated extremely poorly and although Truffle-gate became the focus on attention, they lost this task everywhere, not just in Knightsbridge. Looks like Stella has had to burn up her get-out-of-jai-free card, and Liz was hardly a brilliant PM either, but thank God Laura the Whinger has finally gone!

   http://slouchingtowardsthatcham.com/2010/12/02/no-joy-of-six-for-laura-as-apprentice-loser-suffers-buyers-remorse/
2. Ben says:

   December 2, 2010 at 2:05 pm

   Laura was lovely on You’re Fired

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