Please Ricky, don't hit me again!
Lord Siralan has only given instructions to meet him "in the City". He may be hoping they just get lost, or perhaps this is this weeks task? First one to actually find Lord Siralan wins. Actually, it seems we have something slightly new. The teams will be working for a daily discount website and their job is to rustle up deals to put on the site. The site will host the best deals and the teams whose deals make the most money wins. Its essentially a variant of the scavenger hunt combined with selling to the trade in that it involves lots of running around and begging for discounts with very little leverage. On the plus side, there's real money at stake as actual customers will be buying actual products.
First up the teams meet with the manager of the site, which I think he says is called Quinoa, though I can't find it online. Apparently this site specialises in Luxury goods, so no cheap tat. This claim is slightly undermined by the fact that they appear to be meeting him in a back alley somewhere. I am slightly concerned that if the teams do badly they may find themselves conducting a meeting with him, two of his "boys" and some baseball bats.
The Boss
Next up is choosing project managers. After his rash promise last week, Stephen is in charge of Stirling. He starts off keen, but pretty quickly slumps into panic. His plan is to try and get multiple deals from each location they visit in order to boost their chance of success. He gets things moving pretty quickly, but there's more than a faint whiff of desperation about things. With only three people in the team, he decides to send Ricky off by himself and keep Gabrielle with him. He thinks that Gabrielle is creative but doesn't really understand business. This would be horrible condescending, but Gabrielle's attempts at handling the figures haven't exactly been impressive, see week two and the splash screen. That said, Stephen trying to give business advice to anyone is a bit like Lord Siralan getting work as therapist.
Over at Phoenix, Jade has been put in charge because she effectively does this stuff for her day job. True to form, the team haven't gotten moving yet. But there may be some logic in this as Jade thinks quantity over quality is the key to the task. She only wants good quality deals that will be certain to get on the site. With that in mind, she and Nick head off to a luxury spa and Tom and Adam are dispatched to a hotel somewhere. Don't let them anywhere near the mini-bar or we'll never see them again.
Stephen and Gabrielle quickly manage to wrangle a deal for £100 off tooth whitening from a dentist. But Ricky isn't happy as Stephen has planned to pack him off to a Spa in Tring which is an hour each way. Stephen is confident that he will make enough from this one trip to justify it, but Ricky is clearly worried about Stephen and Gabrielle grabbing the bulk of the deals. But Stephen is insistent-ish. To be honest Stephen never sounds very certain about anything. Gabrielle tries to help with a few impromptu negotiating tips, but Ricky is clearly not in the mood and tells her not to tell him how to suck eggs. Has there ever been an egg sucking task? I'm sure Ricky would win hands down.
Before his excursion to Tring, Ricky arrives at a High End Restaurant. He is keen to get down to business, but the Manager won't let him get a word in edgeways. No business until he shows him the restaurant, and the view, and has him try some scallops, and looks at the table cloth, and is introduced to the Manager's elderly mother, and arm wrestles a bear and travels through time to the 1640s in order to prevent the assassination of Oliver Cromwell, and painted a fence. Some of those things may not have happened, but by the time it's all over Ricky probably thinks they have. Eventually the sit down to business, only for the Manager to state flat out that he won't give any discounts at all, ever. This raises the question of why he agreed to take the meeting and what on Earth he thought Ricky was there for. Maybe he just wanted to get on TV.
"I will waste your time and give you nothing and give you a look of disdain as I do so."
Ricky tries to put a positive spin on this, which is hell of a feat. Apparently he has learned something from this. Presumably not to let Restaurant Managers even start talking. But he's even less keen to go to Tring. he phones Stephen who still thinks Tring is the way to go. But he changes his mind about five minutes later and relents. Ricky heads off in search of some less chatty Restaurant Managers.
Meanwhile, Jade and Nick have reached their spa. Everyone seems very friendly and welcoming until discounts are mentioned and it looks like everyone has just thrown up in their mouths. Jade is looking at a package that normally costs £200. They definitely don't want to give 50% off and Jade is just as determined that that is what they will give. Sheer persistence seems to win through and they eventually relent, possibly just wanting to get her out of the office. Jade seems enormously happy, the Spa management look a bit like people who have just fallen for a bad email scam.
Adam and Tom are having less success at their Hotel. They want to get 50% off dinner, but the management won't budge on 35%. Adam starts desperately trying to get them to throw in free tea and coffee. In fact he's so determined that I'm starting to wonder if he trying to make a deal or just desperate for a drink. In the end the management gives in. Free tea and coffee for everyone. Tom doesn't look very happy, but then he never does.
Stephen is now so stressed that he seems incapable of making decisions by himself. Gabrielle suggests a visit to a fish spa and Stephen goes along with it, taking advice from the woman who thought Union Jacks were very in. I'm starting to understand Gabrielle, her sense of the Zeitgheist is about two years behind everyone else. Stephen is given a sample spa treatment. I'm surprised the fish could be persuaded to go anywhere near his feet. They manage to get a couple of deals, but Karen Brady is clearly unimpressed. In fact, Karen's facial expressions have been drifting from dis-interest, through disapproval, to outright contempt. By the end of the show she makes it to out and out loathing.
Jade and Nick have a meeting with chef Marcus Wareing, a man who makes Lord Siralan look tolerant and accommodating. He seems receptive to their ideas, but is not impressed with their inability to give him any real figures. He has to give them five minutes to sort out their sums. I would expect this of Jade, but thought Nick was more competent. Ricky, meanwhile, is busy touring every restaurant in London, all of whom seemed determined to force feed him scallops. Has there been some kind of Biblical plague? Or is just that no-one order scallops and so whenever a visitor shows up they use him as a chance to offload them? But Ricky is having some success. In fact one restaurant is so keen they ask him how many deals they should offer. Poor Ricky doesn't have a clue and ends up pulling the number 100 pretty much out of his arse.
Adam and Tom seem to be a bit lost. Tom is clearly worried that he isn't contributing anything to the task and is so desperate he ends up calling Jade for help, not that it gets him very far. In fact, all the teams have now reached the part of the day where they are just running around frantically looking for last minute deals from anywhere. Gabrielle and Stephen are hanging out at some kind of indoor putting green. Karen Brady now looks like she will have be restrained by security from actually killing Stephen. Finally, after much frantic dashing about, Adam and Tom manage to secure a two for one deal on scented candles. Not much compared to spas and restaurants, but probably an improvement over fish nibbling your feet. The task over the teams drop off their deals with the website and await their fate.
Back in the boardroom the Apprenti are forced to justify themselves. Ricky scores immediate points for getting multiple deals from one restaurant. Stephen is practically crawling out of his chair and across the table to claim credit for this. Lord Siralan seems genuinely impressed by this. He is less impressed by team Phoenix, Jade gets credit for high quality deals, but Tom and Adam's candles don't impress, even with free tea and coffee. In the end, the website didn't go with any of Adam and Tom's deals, but Jade and Nick's restaurant deal netted £6000 and their spa deal £8000. On Stirling's side, Ricky also managed to net the lion's share with £6000 for his restaurant deals which totally sold out. Stephen and Gabrielle were less successful, their fish feet spa deal was dumped and their golf deal only attracted seven punters.
Phoenix are victorious. Tom doesn't look very happy though, he's realised that his contribution to the team's victory was effectively nothing. Adam either hasn't twigged or doesn't care. The team are packed off for afternoon tea. But not just any afternoon tea. As the menu reveals, this is the most expensive afternoon tea in the country. When you think about it, that's not a very impressive boast. Bridges cafe could claim that, all they have to do is raise the price of tea to £501 a pot.
In the boardroom, Ricky is blaming Stephen who he thinks panicked and lost the plot. Ricky is feeling fairly secure, after all, if it hadn't been for him, they wouldn't have made any money at all. But he still gets in trouble for only suggesting 100 offers to the restaurant and for taking too long at his first, entirely pointless, meeting. Ricky tries to counter by claiming he's learning, which is good for him, but not so great for Lord Siralan.
But it's Stephen and Gabrielle who are really in the firing line. Stephen thinks Gabrielle is out of her depth. She argues that she's a more rounded candidate than Stephen and has demonstrated skills, such as sales, that she didn't know she had. Stephen attempts his usual tactic of interrupting her every five second, but even Ricky has had enough of this by now and calls him out for being condescending.
But it isn't enough to save Gabrielle, possibly because her voice has now gotten so shrill that it's at a frequency Lord Siralan can't even hear. He has decided that Gabrielle is a nice girl but has gone as far as she can. He does give her a "with regret" but it only barely compensates for the level of condescension. But, Stephen's reprieve is short-lived. He promised to win and he didn't, so he's out as well. Lord Siralan tries to threaten Ricky with a triple firing. Nice try Lord Siral, but we know you need five for next week's task and the special episode next week is called the final five, not the final four. Even Lord Siralan must bow to the rules of scheduling.
So we have our double firing, but it was pretty anticlimactic. To be honest, it would have been better to keep all six to keep the teams balanced for next week. Speaking of which...
NEXT TIME The teams try to take a product from concept through to production all in a day. Success at this task just means something that won't actually kill the user.
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