Thursday 30 April 2009

Apprentice... big rug, big rug


“You open your mouf like that again, then don’t even bovver to come back in this boardroom.”
The above Sr’Alan rant has been ringing in our ears for weeks now, ever since a clip of it was aired in episode one.
Who was he yelling at? What on earth had they said?
We pictured abuse… certainly verbal, possibly physical. A bit of swearing or something. Perhaps they’d gone too far and called Sr’Alan a dyspeptic gnome.
In the event, it was nothing at all, was it? Talk about a tempest in a tea-cup. Slab-faced Debra having a bit of a “who closed the sale” bicker with Nick. “It wasn’t ‘im, it was me, it was me.” Yawn.
We don’t know what it was, but last night’s task really failed to ignite (pardon the pun). The budding apprentices had one day to hare around London hawking random wares that might be valuable or might not be. These included a skeleton, a first edition James Bond book and a rug that was worth more than £200 but you’d feel gutted if you actually paid that because nobody in the whole of London seemed to like it at all.
The apprentices seemed baffled; in fairness, so were we.
At the end of the task, Sr’Alan compared the actual prices of the items with what the Apprentices got for them – and both teams had made a loss. So, let’s get this right? They could have just sat around all day with a cup of tea, brought back all the items back unsold and won the task, yes?
In their first rubbish deal of the day, Team Empire got ordered to trade Kate for Noorul.
Then, led by cocky little Ben, they sold off everything for knock-down prices.
Team Ignite, led by the equally obnoxious Philip, seemingly spent their day wandering around London shouting: “Big rug! Big rug!” Philip was followed by a little procession of people including sour-faced Lorraine, who was (rightly) convinced the rug was a gem, and an equally fed-up Margaret, who clearly had sore feet and kept grumbling: “This is the stupidest thing they’ve done so far”.
Eventually, Phil found a buyer but, despite winning, was taken to task for not listening to “Cassandra” Lorraine.
Cassandra? Ha! Whingey, more like. Our own startling powers of prediction suggest Lorraine will be fired in the next task she loses.
Sandhurst Ben decided he was going to take Noorul and James back into the boardroom. No, wait! Noorul and Debra.
“Are you thinking about James there must be a village missing an idiot?” asked Sr’Alan. James looked quite flattered.
Much though we’d have liked to see Sandhurst Ben or Old Slab-face get the boot, Sr’Alan wasn’t going to miss the chance to give Noorofen the boot. The firing was every bit as dull as the rest of last night’s show.

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