The Apprentice Week 11 – A View From The Cheese Shop

Picture the scene… (in Jarvis Cocker’s voice, if you will. He is in my head at the time of writing.)

It’s early in the morning…
Jade and her voice are drinking a cup of tea at a table…
Ricky Martin is in his underpants…
The phone rings…
The tension of who is going to answer the phone builds…
Ricky is slowly going down the stairs in his underpants…
Jade and her voice, start walking slowly to the hallway…
Ricky… in the hallway… in his underpants…
Jade answers the phone with her voice…

That was exactly how this week’s The Apprentice show began. (You may now revert back to your own voice.)

After waking a bleary eyed Adam, the final 5 made their way to meet Lord Sugar in a famous place that I can’t remember the name of. It’s not that important really. A fancy mall somewhere in London with gentlemens’ slippers in the shop windows.

Lord Sugar explained that this week, the teams would have to create, market and sell a luxurious brand of something that would impress a bunch of important people who are Sir Alan’s mates.
With Adam instructed to be the Project Manager for Team Phoenix, leading Nick and his hair and Jade and her voice, it left only Ricky and Tom for Team Sterling to decide who would head up their two man team. After a little bit of ‘I want to be team leader, because I’m ace at stuff’ later, Ricky Martin declared that he was the man for the job.

Phoenix decided that their luxury brand should be chocolate – high end but not too high end chocolate, at that. Adam sat with Nick in the back of a car trying to decide on a brand name… ‘Lak, ya know, Chocolate Bah, lak a Bah, but for chocolate lak. It’s lak “Can ah ave a chocolate bah” kinda bah. Lak it’s a bah for chocolate…….lak’
Upon revealing their proposed name to Jade, who was off making chocolate and jelly sweeties, she immediately pooh-poohed it, declaring instead that ‘Sweet Thing’ was the way forward. A couple of upturned noses later, they settled on that. I liked ‘Chocolate bah’ because its was a bit like a bah, only a chocolate bah. Made perfect sense. Silly Phoenix.

Tom and Ricky discussed how beautiful they were because they do ‘grooming’, therefore decided that their luxury brand should be a male grooming range…but not just any type of male grooming, a special supe… no, wait… it was exactly like every other male grooming range.
Whatever has happened to men, by the way?
‘Modern Gentleman’ was the name of choice for this brand. After they’d said ‘brand identity’ a few times, thrown in with ‘business model’ and the like, it was off to put some white goo into a bottle. Tom sat with a couple of designers, looking at two screens and telling them the label designs looked a bit boring. They were.
Instead of delving into a blow by blow description of the show, here are some words that were said. You can arrange them into whichever order you like, and you’ll get the picture;

• Profit Margin
• Business model
• Business plan
• Brand Identity
• Quantity
• Quality
• Smell my hands
• Jelly is popular
• Building momentum
• Minimalistic
• Shopping experience

Etc

The two teams were given a space to create a shop style thingie to market their products in.
Phoenix had theirs packed full of sweets and it looked a bit like that tacky sweet shop that every UK high street once had that stayed open for about 2 weeks. Team Sterling went for the minimalist approach, stacking each of their store’s shelves with two little bottles of ‘Modern Gentleman’ goo for your hands.

The experts were brought in and the presentations were carried out. The two lads from Sterling did a good job presenting and discussed numbers which impressed the experts. Sadly, though, Team Phoenix didn’t do so well, with Adam speaking like a robot whose batteries were running down and having to glance intermittently at the notes he had written on the palm of his hand.

To the ‘blaady boardroom’.

After careful consideration, and with Karen being a bit of a tout, Team Sterling were declared to have won and Ricky and Tom went off to the house feeling like a couple of well groomed winners.

But who was going to go?
Well, in this task, Jade and her voice had thought of and done everything. She came up with the name, she made the sweets, she nodded her head, she disagreed when appropriate… It couldn’t be her. So it was going to be either Nick and his hair, or Adam. In the end Lord Sugar decided that it was Adam’s time to go.

I was a bit sad to see Adam go in the end. After 10 weeks, I’ve grown quite fond of the chap and his funny little ways. I would have loved to see him in the interviews…

My predictions for the final?

Jade may cough….
Exciting!

J

The final review of this years The Apprentice will return next week…