Trashy lads' mag or hip publication for the over-60s? The Apprentice goes to press
D id anyone else notice the bloodstain in The Apprentice (BBC1)? On the ironing board, when Glenn was doing his shirt? It might have been something else ? coffee perhaps ? but it looked like blood to me. Has there been a terrible crime among the remaining candidates? That would be entertaining. No time to investigate now, they have to leave for Fleet Street in half an hour. "Something to do with newspapers then," says Glenn, knowledgably.
Free magazines, actually. They have to come up with a new one and then sell the advertising space. Team Logic decide to go for a lads' mag. It's not the lads' choice, but team leader Natasha's; she says she feels comfortable with lads' mags. They brainstorm some ideas and Tom writes them on the whiteboard ? business, fashion, women, boobs, nacked girls, features, Afganistan. I think that nacked girls in Afganistan might make an interesting feature, with boobs too. Tom's not going to be much use at proofreading.
Jim's team, Venture, is targeting the over-60s. They're off to do some market research at a bowling club. "I can think of a million and one questions I want to ask," says Susan.
"What's the first one?" asks Glenn.
"Stuff like: what do you guys do?"
"Bowl," says Glenn, anticipating their reply.
They end up asking a lot of patronising questions to the bowlers, such as whether they'd like little puzzles in the magazine, to keep their brains busy. No, absolutely not, say the bowlers. So team Venture go away, and under Jim's guidance, they create the worst-looking, most patronising magazine in the history of magazines, with a feature on how to make a phone call. They have a dull picture of a cardigan-wearing old couple on the cover. They might as well have put a set of false teeth on the front. Or a replacement hip joint; the magazine is called Hip Replacement, after all.
Logic's focus group, meanwhile, is a bunch of rugby players, who urge Natasha's team to keep it upmarket, not go too Nuts. Natasha's not convinced. "One thing we need to bear in mind is that our focus group was quite focused," she says, intriguingly. And every attempt by one of her team to nudge things towards respectability she counters by dragging them all further into the gutter. One of the cover lines of their magazine Covered is How to Blow Your Load. Classy. And the cover shot is a scantily clad model in underwear tugging at a corner of her knickers. Not covered for long seems to be the message.
Natasha is obsessed with underwear, and how on or off they should be. "We don't want to drop our pants before we get in there, do we?" she says before going in to pitch for advertising business. She could be referring to the cover shot or it may be a metaphor ? perhaps they really are going to go in and strip. Jim, too, is concerned about not losing clothing too early. "Let's not lose our shirt straight off the bat," he says.
This wasn't the greatest episode of The Apprentice, though the idiocy of the candidates never fails to amuse and entertain. There's a problem with the task I think, because no real magazine is being produced and no one is really advertising in it. That means there's no real money involved. "Put your pretend money where your mouth is" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. It's basically just a game of Monopoly.
Perhaps that's why Lord Sugar comes to the decision he does. It should be Jim who goes, based on the woeful decisions he makes and his total lack of leadership skills. But somehow he talks his way out of it in the boardroom. Instead, Sugar fires Glenn ? based not on this task or on any previous task or, in fact, on anything to do with Glenn, but apparently solely on Sugar's own prejudice: "Glenn, I have never yet come across an engineer that can turn his hand to business," he says. "So Glenn, you're fired."
James Dyson (net worth $2.7bn according to Forbes, compared to Sugar's $1.14bn pittance) might have something to say about that.
Was that the most convoluted Agatha Christie's Marple (ITV1) ever? Admittedly I am spectacularly thick at this kind of thing, but I was confused all the way through and even after the denouement. And not just about whodunnit, but how and why they dunnit too. A ridiculous story ? send Miss Marple to the Apprentice house instead, to get to the bottom of the bloodstain on the ironing board.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/15/the-apprentice-tv-review
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