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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Apprentice series 5

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17:30 / 23.03.09

Yes, that's right. Another series of The Apprentice with Siralan. It starts this wednesday, the 25th. I'm guessing Siralan will mention the current economic climate within five sentences, and underline how generous he is by allowing them to compete for this job.

This series there are fifteen instead of sixteen candidates, as one jumped off before the filming of the first episode started. "It makes my job easier," concludes Sir Alan. forgetting that the guy who quit was in all likelihood the sole sane candidate to have been accepted into the competition.

Whisky Priestess

18:58 / 23.03.09

Literally having breathing difficulties, so excited about this am I!

09:01 / 24.03.09

Tis pleasing!

18:32 / 25.03.09

Oh, Boo!! I'm going to miss it this year as i'm out of the country but i'll be following this Barbelith thread avidly which will be an interesting experience i'm sure!

Closed for Business Time

19:26 / 25.03.09

You must be joking, ghadis. Excitement? Barbelith? Naaaaaaaarrrrrr.

Any hoo.

La missus is trying to make me watch the 1st ep tonight. I wanna watch the Lost ep I'm torrenting. Bablith - whither must a man go?

19:35 / 25.03.09

Watch Siralan! You know it makes sense. Lost is rubbish.

21:04 / 25.03.09

Man, it took almost 10 minutes for them to mention the resession. And it didn't even come out of the mouth of siralan himself. On the other hand "spanking" came out of Nick's mouth within 15 minutes, so I guess it all balances out. Yes, I think this will be another enjoyable series.

And I really wonder who's job it is to find all these sad looking cafes for the losers to sit in and drink coffee. It was a particularly dour one this time.

Closed for Business Time

21:12 / 25.03.09

They're not sad, they're classic Lahndahn greasy spoons innit! Didn't watch it btw, Lost rules as always. BTW did noone get the boot? Heard that they started off with -1 contestant??

21:38 / 25.03.09

Yes, one guy dropped out before it even started, but that didn't stop siralan from firing someone. This week it was Anita, who (while sitting in the fired cab) predicted that siralan would regret his decision in 10 years time.

07:11 / 26.03.09

Favourite quote for me was "I have a rainbow of skills".

08:12 / 26.03.09

Better than "I had the calculator"? Surely not.

08:29 / 26.03.09

Out of curiousity, do they still try to squeeze a shot of the Amstrad E-M@iler in to every scene involving a phonecall?

12:59 / 26.03.09

Unless Amstrad decided to kidnap a designer from Bang & Olufsen and had them redesign the whole thing, no. Siralan has a sleek thing standing on the table now. Here's a still of it in the boardroom.

13:33 / 26.03.09

You can always watch it on i-player, Glen.

Whisky Priestess

13:43 / 26.03.09

I think poor Anita suffered from terminal sadface, which is one of the quickest ways to get fired, especially if you've kept in the background a bit and aren't gobby or mental. Smile, even if your heart is breaking, candidates!

She also took on far more blame than Siralan was actually trying to put on her (or even than Deborah and Mona were, amazingly, who seemed to be having a private little catfight of their own). Plus, she was a bit older, had a natually miserable expression and quite a boring voice, and just - what can I say? - wasn't as good telly as a 6ft Amazon with piercing eyes and a thoroughly chippy sense of entitlement, or a Tannzanian beauty queen. Anita might as well have painted a FIRE ME sign on her forehead.

I would have been GOBSMACKED if it hadn't been her to go, although it clearly wasn't at all her fault. Deborah's team fucked up, so she was the one that got away IMHO.

14:34 / 26.03.09

Poor Anita seemed doomed from the off; diffident, posh, older, depressed and a lawyer to boot. She didn't look comfortable with the whole scenario (I'm guessing she hadn't watched the show much in the past, and was maybe put up to applying by her 'mates' at work) but I was surprised how close Siralan came to firing Debra, when she's exactly the kind of manic streetfighter he normally adores.

On the boys team, (Empire, no less) the one to watch seems to be the Geordie estate agent, who looks a good bet to crash and burn horribly in the later stages of the competition, having alienated everyone around him. He just wants it too much -

'Has anyone, like, ever valet-washed a car before? No? Right then, I've sourced some contacts! Let's go!'

They'd have been better off sticking to shining shoes.

(Glenn, it's worth staying with the show. It's not really about business, is more to do with the human tragedy; give it a couple of episodes, and you'll be hooked.)

10:31 / 29.03.09

I felt the geordie was a little too keen to push the "just an ordinary bloke" dollar. However, business is the new rock and roll and he is Elvis Presley according to his quote on the BBC website.

I'm hoping for a good villain this time round and that the Brent like tragedy of that army guy on the photography task last time can be surpassed. (is this even possible?)

02:20 / 30.03.09

Hm. Well, I was never sure the army guy was going to last either, but he did have his fans. Notably in the Bear community.

Whisky Priestess

18:21 / 30.03.09

Ah, poor Simon. His problem was that he didn't have an aching void where his conscience and humility should be.

19:25 / 01.04.09

Right then, so the Olympics 2012... that's in three fucking years, you stupid dickheads

19:28 / 01.04.09

Canapes are not bloody baguettes!

What! Cheddar on a fucking stick! It's not Abigail's fucking party, you bloody steeeuuuuupid imbeciles.

19:36 / 01.04.09

OMG, that was ghastly

08:43 / 02.04.09

Oh my, that was hilarious. You know what else would have been a great theme? Birthday! Because everyone loves birthdays, right!? Or New Years Eve, everyone loves that as well, and there are always lots of new years parties in London! I can't believe that seven guys sitting in a room all think "Yeah, Olympics, that sounds like a good idea." Rocky seemed to be the only one to admit that he had any doubts about the theme.

Still, I don't know what is more embarrasing: being the team to choose "The Olympics" as a theme and sending out guys in togas, or being the guy who hired that team to cater a business event. I loved how Nick talked about how the law firm was a big international company and expecting only the very best. If that were really true, wouldn't they have hired actual caterers? It's a bit like that French market, where Nick talked about how those French would only accept the highest quality goods, and where that one team sold 15kg of Makro cheese (okay, so they brought double that and had to throw lots away at the end, but they still managed to sell a whole lot).

About last week:
I don't quite get how Debra was in any danger. So her subteam didn't pull in that much money, but that was just because they sucked at washing cars; almost everyone sucked at washing cars. I would have been surprised if siralan had said "Debra, you're terrible at washing cars, and because of that you are fired."

01:49 / 03.04.09

Warming slightly to Philip; to be sure, he's beneath contempt on pretty much every level, but he seems so consumed by his own bile that it's hard not to like him.

Also a fan of depressed, dirty blonde Irish(?) lady, with specs.

10:41 / 09.04.09

I only watched it in bits while doing other stuff so I missed some bits, but the best part for me was siralan complaining about how ugly the losing team's thing was, and how the ugliness was a bad thing. Bet he was glad the E-M@iler (or any other Amstrad product) wasn't sitting in front of him anymore.

Whisky Priestess

13:06 / 09.04.09

Or, indeed, a mirror.

I am confused by ... er ... Lorraine's accent (depressed red lips and specs dirty blonde, see above). Half the time she appears to be from London and the other half she's channeling Father Ted. I have therefore decided to call her accent Mickney, unless people think that's too offensive to Irish people, in which case someone has to come up with a better name.

Anyhow - the bum roller thing looked a lot like an alarming sex/incontinence aid but the DeathBox - as Maj christened it - was an absolutely CLASSIC Argos cheap shit exerthingy that gets bought at Christmas, used once and left in the garage as a home for mice for the rest of eternity.

I really thought they missed a trick there, not going immediately to Argos HQ and just saying "You know and I know, squire, that no one's ever gonna use this - but that don't mean we can't flog a couple of thousand at 30 nicker apiece? Have we got a deal?"

Anna de Logardiere

14:07 / 09.04.09

Yes, my partner Randolph said much the same on viewing the item. Something along the lines of "they need to pitch it to Argos".

Janean Patience

12:51 / 10.04.09

I felt slightly cheated this week, as an admirer of magnificent anti-fashion radiating spoke beards, by the result. It was all decided by the design companies, wasn't it? Debra's team didn't have a fucking clue what they wanted to make but had a designer who came up with something that at least looked like the kind of exercise item you'd use once and then bury in a cupboard. In contrast, James's designers' torture-chamber-in-a-box was fully brutalist and combined 70s exercise aesthetics with no charm whatsoever. Everything after the products were unveiled was a foregone conclusion.

Shame they didn't go with the strap-on sexerciser Ben kept pushing for. An arrogant young stockbroker losing his cock to crushing springs in an easily foreseen accident would have made this the best telly of the year.

15:28 / 10.04.09

watch what you say or he'll 'bite your teeth out'.

10:27 / 14.04.09

While I guess you could say that it was all decided by the designers, I think you need to take into consideration what they had to work with.

For both groups they had very little time to both put together a design and then produce it, but for Debra's team they could probably spend almost all time messing around with computer modelling, because they could probably just send over the computer model to some machine that then molds the finished design overnight and then stick a sheet of rubbery stuff on top. For the other they'd have to build it all by hand, finding suitable springs and rubbery things for a suitable amount of resistance, making sure nothing would spontaneously fall apart and so on. Sure, it would have been nicer if the box looked a bit more like an Apple G5, but I'm not sure if it would have been enough for DeathBox to win.

00:07 / 15.04.09

I'm beginning to think that if Debra met me, she might reslly like me.

Certainly, she would show me a thing or two. Even if they were things I didn't particularly want to know ...

06:23 / 17.04.09

Ooh, this was a great episode. I started out thinking Noorul was done for, but as the episode went on I became less sure. First because of the product choice (I really thought honey would go over better than seaweed, if I had an idea what the finished products would look like I would probably have been less sure) and then the killer: 450g of sandalwood oil at £1000/kg. The scene where Nick told them how much they've spent on the oils... oh my, that was just wonderful. It sunk in, and then Nick, cheerfully: "Anyway, I'll leave it with you." Nick, exit right.

One reason that I also liked this episodes was because it highlighted for me that while it might look like it's a business task, it really isn't. You send out unprepared and unqualified people to do something, the best you can do is make the smallest mistake possible. For instance Nick's comment that if they'd gone with cedarwood instead of sandalwood, they'd have won is totally off. Not just because the sandalwood made the team double their selling price (which they wouldn't have done if they'd used cedarwood, which would have cost them ~£15 instead of £450), but I'm not sure they'd gotten as many sells with cedarwood. I'm not a big sandalwood fan, but cedar is a trickier scent (and it can come off a bit bonfirey, as Yasmina & Paula pointed out).

Quote of the week: Philip: "I think apples are awesome. Berries are awesome."

09:18 / 23.04.09

I've watched a lot of this show, and I can't remember a time when it was quite so obvious, in the first ten, or possibly even five, minutes, which team was going home in an ambulance.

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Philip really did a number on her, didn't he? In terms of forcing through his ridiculous idea, and then hiding behind the 'I was proactive' defence. His boardroom ass-covering seemed suspiciously well-rehearsed.

Does he have a g*meplan?

Certainly, 'face down Siralan week 4/5 - show him not afraid, afore stakes get 2 high' would be on my 'to do' list, if I was so lost in a strange, dark world as to actually want a job in Siralan's decaying empire, the value of which hasn't been mentioned this series.

Are a lot of the others this year trying to use the show as a springboard to better things? A management consultancy series on Sky 3, for example, in the manner of the Badger?

At the moment, the blonde lady from Birmingham to win, but I bet she shoots herself in the foot if the job offer starts to look too ominously real. The competition this year seems to be about getting to the last three, and thus noticed for telly/business acumen. Is the actual contract considered toxic? And in this way, is Siralan possibly being made a monkey of, again?

Because if so, he won't like it. That's really the thing he fears the most.

10:09 / 23.04.09

When Siralan said he'd come up with a cereal they'd have to brand and advertise, the first thing that popped into my head was something like Amstrad Cereal (unfortunately I don't have a font like the one in Amstrad's logo, but you get the idea).

As for Philip, this isn't the first time he's forced or really tried to force through his ideas, isn't it? I can't remember exactly, but I get the feeling that I had seen Philip do the same thing before (including tantrum when not everyone agreed with him immediately). I think he's definitely's got a plan. His forcing is probably a reasonable strategy in the beginning, if things go wrong and he got his way he can say that everyone else was on board, and if he doesn't get his way he can say he wanted to do things differently. And when they found out they'd lost he was surprisingly supportive of Kim which to me felt a lot like trying to get friendly to avoid getting dragged into the firing boardroom.

Is anyone else feeling sorry for Noorul? Every week Siralan takes a snipe at him in the boardroom, and you just know that Siralan will fire the guy as soon as het gets a chance.

Janean Patience

16:19 / 23.04.09

Noorul was in a play called Tracey and the Troy Boy in Oldham with my partner's sister in Oldham many years ago. He was in the chorus and no-one could quite fathom how someone so spectacularly clueless had made it into the show. I imagine his fellow Apprentices know that feeling.

The blank green box was wonderful, like a Communist regime's first stab at marketing.

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