Week Eleven - Interview with the Vampires

Ten weeks and fifteen candidates down and we're on to the interview round. I have written before about how much I dislike this round. I enjoy watching a bunch of disagreeable imbeciles spew business bollocks, trip over their own shoelaces, fall out over the most trivial things and sacrifice their dignity on the altar of their own hubris, the Interview round is something else entirely.

 No Laptop for you Solomon

Instead of watching the Apprenti fail dismally because of their own personal flaws, we watch four people even more obnoxious than them abuse them to their face without any recourse or means of escape. CV's that we're written to attract a BBC casting director six months ago are pored over like citizenship documents and lies and distortions that the program makers have known about since day 2 are flourished like major scandals.

Or at least that's usually how it goes. Whether because of a conscious effort to tone down the bullying or because this year's candidates are simply more credible than normal, the episode seems to lack the usual spark. We have a few exaggerated achievements, some small scale lying and a couple of business plans not up to scratch, but no-one proclaims themselves to be the son of a god, or the greatest human being to ever live. No-one introduces a business plan that would require their competitors to actively put themselves out of business or reveals that their business plan actually belongs to someone else. Consequently, the abuse is toned down as well. We only have one moment of real excitement, of which more below, the rest is depressingly pedestrian.

Plus the interviews are a pain in the arse to recap because the program-makers like to jump cut around the candidates and interviews so you lose all sense of time and any attempt at a sequential account collapses into an explanation of which candidate is with which interviewer at any given moment.

The interviewers vary year on year, presumably because there is only so much concentrated hatred the body can take. Only Claude Litner has been around for all ten years, which says a lot about him. This years interviewees include the aforementioned Claude Litner, Lord Siralan's formal global troubleshooter, whatever that means, though I like to think it includes leading bands of mercenaries in South America. Mike Soutar is another old hand whose line is more smug pedantry rather than outright abuse. Claudine Collins is a psychologist of some kind who is supposed to "expose the people behind the plans" or allow them to cry at length about their life story. Margaret Montford has been a fixture of these things since she quit full-time Apprentice watching, but she's absent this year possibly persuing opportunities with BBC4 and, instead, we have erstwhile Apprentice and self-proclaimed God of Thunder, Ricky Martin. Ricky's in recruitment, which justifies his inclusion, but the real question is will he sympathise with the Apprenti or take vicarious revenge for the indignities heaped on him two years earlier?

Mike Soutar's job appears to be trolling the Apprentii with the bits of dirt the production office have dug up. He starts small with the revelation that Daniel didn't win a salesman of the year award, he just had the best sales figures of the year. This is less a lie than an admin error. Slightly more fun is his digging out of Solomon's phone and making him pitch the ideas he claims to have noted down in the middle of the night. These include a weird concept for an internet-based breakfast delivery service and a singled-bed hire service for mid-afternoon naps, which Mike summarises as "online shopping" and "a hotel". Which, while technically true, is a bit like describing the Apprentice as a TV show and declaring the concept redundant as we have plenty of those.

Mike Soutar looking typically suave

Mike's best moment comes with Roisin. Her business plan is to produce a range of healthy ready meals using something called konjac root, which apparently has no taste and few calories but can fill you up. Roisin is treating this ingredient like the discovery of penicillin and is convinced that she will revolutionise the world. Mike pulls out a bag he got from a health food shop and dumps on the desk in front of her. But of course no-one has made a ready meal using it have they? Turns out they have, and Mike has one to show off. Roisin is left saying she "was not aware of that" as her business plan collapses around her.

But you can't get it as a ready meal...

...oh apparently you can

Claude Litner is an old hand at the interview round and his role has generally been to be as actively unpleasant and offensive as possible. I have previously compared him to Baron Greenback and the Goblin King. But Claude seems to be losing his edge somewhat. We have seen on "You're fired" a couple of times where as he comes across as perfectly reasonable, if a bit grumpy and his rudeness increasingly comes across as a comedy persona with no real bite. This year, he actually says to Daniel that if he keeps talking rubbish he "will have you". Is he actually planning to start a fight over the desk? By the time Mark gets into the room, he's given up and actually complements him on giving a good answer.

 Claude in a characteristically cheerful mood

His only moment of real flare comes from Solomon. He lulls him into a false sense of security by telling him his CV was a pleasure to read. Apparently Solomon had declined to go down the usual route of claiming to be the son of a God and King of the Universe in favour of just listing his actual achievements. Okay, this is praiseworthy, but anyone finding pleasure in a half decent CV really needs to get out more. But the tables are turned when Claude looks at Solomon's business plan. It's only eight pages long and one of them is devoted to a page of multi-coloured logos that look like sail boats. Claude is outraged, in fact he bangs on about the sail boats so much it looks like it may be the boats specifically that are the problem. Was his family killed in a tragic boating accident? Claude throws Solomon out of the room, and he's in such a hurry to leave he almost heads out the window until Claude redirects him. It just shows that Claude's gone soft, a few years ago he would have let Solomon jump.

 Solomon is shocked to receive a compliment...

...and now we're back to normal

Claudine Collins was introduced last year and her job is to evaluate the candidate psychologically. This leads to Daniel treating it like a therapy session, complaining about the hot tub incident at length before going on about how much the Apprentice has made him a better person. When Bianca gets into the room she bangs on about her professionalism to the point where Claudine questions if she actually has a personality. She thinks she may be hiding behind a mask. Bianca doesn't respond to this very well, and ends up crying in the lift. One advantage of the ridiculously massive building is it gives the Apprenti plenty of time to reflect between floors.

 Claudine Collins...

 ...makes Bianca cry

Ricky "the Fitness" Martin, former Apprentice winner and self-proclaimed son of Odin, is very much a junior partner in all of this. He tries to score some points of Mark by claiming his CV is deceptive because it implies he was a Sales Manager for the entire time he worked for his last company, when he started as a consultant. He then makes him role-play a sales call, in which he feigns disinterest and then tells Mark that there are things he hasn't thought about. His best moment is really a hold over from Claudine, when Bianca bursts into tears mid-way through the interview. But then if her whole personality is just a mask, maybe she's just crying as a tactic?

 The Thunder God Thor

Mark and Ricky are basically the same but with different hair

Back in the boardroom, the interviewers and Lord Siralan are all very chummy, they seem to be the only ones who find his dismal puns even slightly amusing. Its fifty-fifty whether their simply a bunch of arse-kissers or if years of the business world have left their senses of humour as stunted and dessicated as Lord Siralan's.

 Boardroom levity

We really don't learn anything hear we didn't already know. Solomon has achieved quite a lot for his age, but is quite immature and his business plan is barely a suggestion. Roisin is a good candidate with a wildly over ambitious idea. Daniel is a bit of a chancer, but his idea to expand his pub quiz business into an events business is quite a good one, even if the plan to get customers to plan their own event via a website is a bit far-fetched. Bianca has hit on a really good idea for skin-toned tights, but there is some question over whether she understands the manufacturing side. Mark is a good candidate with a solid, even slightly boring business plan, but there's some question of whether he will crack under pressure.

The candidates are brought back in and Solomon is the first to be dispatched. He goes out smiling, thanking Karen and Nick, and keeps his dignity, of which he never had an ample supply, intact.

 Solomon goes out smiling

Roisin comes next. She falls into the same trap as James from last year, of refusing to modify her plan and insisting that it's so brilliant that the world will fall at her feet. The last straw seems to be her plan to blow through the initial £250,000 in three months and then go to the bank for half a million more. Lord Siralan seems to think of this as the business equivalent of an open relationship and he isn't into that sort of thing. It doesn't help that her experience of the industry consists of eating food, speaking to six people and her immediate family. Roisin is gone.

 And now Roisin is gone

With the ludicrous characters gone, and who would have thought that Roisin would turn out to be one of them, Lord Siralan sends the others out while he has a chat with Nick and Karen. Karen still doesn't like Mark, she thinks he'll collapse under pressure.

Back in the boardroom Bianca turns out to have done her manufacturing research and it looks like her proposal is solid. Daniel is willing to drop his website plan and argues that he is the only one with experience running a business in the industry he wants to enter. Lord Siralan actually thinks that's a good point. In the end, Daniel's improvement over the past few weeks isn't enough to get him to the final, he gets a fired with regret and Lord Sirlan says he is a better person than he was eleven weeks ago. Daniel is magnanimous in defeat wishing the others good luck.

 Daniel falls at the final hurdle

Back in the cab, Mark says he can't wait to win. The trouble with Mark is it's hard to tell when he's joking.

 The finalists

Next Time: The candidate pick teams from the eight losing Apprenti who have nothing better to do with themselves than come back and suffer further humiliation. Daniel claims he's motivated by his hatred of Mark, so much for magnanimity. And will Mark choke in the final presentation, I think I can hear a cough, though it may be a death rattle.

Week Four - Fat Daddy

We kick off this episode with some violin music, because Lord Siral is dragging his Apprenti to Wilton's Music hall, London's oldest Victorian music hall. The Apprentice has always liked to introduce a task by talking about an old thing and establishing a tenuous link to a new thing, and the modern equivalent of a Victorian music hall is apparently YouTube. We now get to watch Lord Siral, a man who didn't full understand computers when he ran a computer company and who is responsible for the Amstrad Emailer, explain YouTube to a group of mostly twenty-somethings. Karen Brady seems unusually irritated by his performance for some reason.

Happy to be here

The teams job is to set up YouTube channels and the winner will be the team that gets the most hits in 48 hours. Jemma is moved to team Summit, because she hasn't done anything for four weeks except put on her lipstick. Lord Siral has realised that when he makes suggestions people don't realise they're actually orders and so he decides that the Project Managers will be Solomon for Team Summit, because he knows about the Internet and stuff and Ella-Jade for Team Tenacity because she wants to be a documentary film maker.

At the Team Tenacity brainstorming session, Pamela says she did a great video at work involving rugby players and hand cream, which is already starting to sound suspiciously euphemistic so Ella-Jade rapidly moves rapidly on. Pamela is less than happy and this dismissal will colour her and Ella-Jade's interaction for the rest of the task. This is a bit of a problem because apart from the fact that Pamela has slightly wavy hair, she and Ella-Jade can only be distinguished from one another by the accents. So we're now stuck watching two basically identical women argue, like a pair of identical twins at a family reunion. Ella-Jade says her strategy is to be herself. Maybe she was worried that she might accidentally be Pamela.

Katie, apparently, already has a YouTube channel showing fitness videos. Is there any aspect of life she doesn't have experience with already? Last week it was home smells, this week it's YouTube. Felipe suggests that as the least un-fat and oldest member of the team he could play "Fat Daddy", attempt to get fit and bring some comedy. Lauren and Daniel are worried that this may be offensive to fat people. Though if we remove all the potentially offensive videos from YouTube we're pretty much left with a logo, and that'll probably be taken down soon.

Ella-Jade doles out tasks. Felipe and Katie will be on camera, she will direct with Pamela acting a first AD, or something. Lauren will take charge of the sub-team who will be responsible for editing and other miscellaneous tasks that we will get to later. Sarah is put in charge of timing, because she's "very organised". Which sounds a bit like giving the special needs kid the stop watch on sports day because you can't trust them to run in the right direction.

Over at Team Summit, the team wants to do something funny involving food. Solomon is thinking of reaction videos to people eating odd-looking things and has come up with the name "Gut Reaction." Someone is worried that word 'gut' may be offensive. Between this and Team Tenacity worrying that they may offend fat people, I think this year's Apprenti may be too timid for the Internet.

 James' magnificent physique

In the end, Solomon puts Roisin and James, wearing an apron, a chef's hat, a funny accent and very little else, in front of the camera. Roisin's job is essentially to present a fairly dry life style video about cookery while James jumps up behind her with plastic fangs and generally gets in the way. The team think this is hilarious, but their sense of humour may have been stunted from too much exposure to Lord Siral's boardroom jokes.

 There really isn't much I can add to this

Meanwhile, at Team Tenacity, Ella-Jade is trying to direct. Pamela thinks she is doing a terrible job and that she assumed that someone who wants to be a documentary film-maker would know how to make films. Though, to be fair, it's probably quite hard to make a film while you pissed-off doppelganger yells across you. Karen Brady, who started the episode in a bad mood, now looks solidly fed up to be there.

There may be something in Pamela's complaints, though. For their second video the team put Felipe and Katie along side a personal trainer who, due to lack of clear direction, seems to think his job is to abuse Felipe to his face. It's one thing to refer to yourself as 'fat daddy' in a self-deprecating way, and quite another when an obviously fitter, younger man calls you that as you lie on the floor exhausted and gasping for air. Karen reckons that the whole thing is "quite cruel", which coming from someone who works closely with Lord Siralan is really saying something.

For the following day, the teams will be making a video with an established YouTube partner and so the sub-teams are having video conferences with potential collaborators. On other tasks, the teams usually meet their potential partners face to face, but as this is a YouTube task everything has to be done by laptop and the end result is, like most virtual meetings, a bit like shouting at a hobbit through a faulty magic mirror.

Team Tenacity quickly choose a couple of fitness themed comedians, but Team Summit face a dilemma. The team have to choose between Barry, who makes food themed videos and Ollie, a 19 year old the purpose of whose videos is not established, but has twelve and a half million teenage girls watching. Mark favours Barry because of thematic consistency, but Solomon overrules him and goes with the numbers. Mark responds to this by deferring to Solomon's judgement as project manager and resident Internet expert in a calm and professional way. This is the sort of sensible, normal behaviour that usually indicates a megalomaniac who, when he gets to be project manager, will spend the episode bellowing insane orders and demanding respect.

 Twelve and a half million teenage girls can't be wrong

The Tenacity sub-team are trying to edit their video, but are struggling because what was supposed to be a comedy fitness video has ended up like something leaked by the US military. Sarah tries to keep the time and when they ignore her, tells them not to blame her when they run over, The team spend so long on the editing that they forget to give their video either a heading or a name. When Ella-Jade calls, Lauren is left apologising, but, naturally, the team decides to blame Sarah, whose role has been expanded to scape-goat.

For the last day the teams will be divided again, with half making a final video with their collaborators while the other half pitches their channel to representative of Buzz Feed in attempt to persuade them to give the channel a mention. Which is not so much begging for scraps as begging for someone to put in a good word for them with the scrap merchant. Ella-Jade doles out individual tasks, but forgets about Sarah. Sarah thinks she is being left out and she's taking it personally. Probably because everyone on the team thinking you're useless is fairly personal.

Tenacity seem to be having a better time filming having gotten rid of Ella-Jade, they're certainly enjoying themselves more. Summit's collaborator, Ollie, is having a competition with James to see who can eat a cream covered banana the fastest. Fortunately, that is in no way a euphemism for anything. Jemma, who we haven't seen much this week or any week, says her job is to manage Ollie. So nothing again. Ollie, seems happy with the final result and promises to mention it on Twitter and his Channel. This could potentially expose a million teenage girls to James in an apron and nothing else. In the current political climate that may be enough to put you on the sex offenders register.

To the surprise of team Summit, Buzz Feed don't find their video funny. One of them thinks it might be better aimed at 8-10 year-olds. Another has written "kill James" on their pad. A few more weeks with Lord Siral and he may be willing to take them up on the offer.

Steven is rehearsing his pitch in the back of a taxi. He's a bit too fond of the phrase "the hardest part of a journey is the first step" and repeats it so often that it looks like the rest of the team are going to strangle him with a seat belt. Steven's over earnest pitching style doesn't go down well with Buzz Feed, especially as he's rapidly using up the Earth's supply of oxygen and still hasn't actually communicated anything.

Buzz Feed do laugh when Felipe introduces himself as "fat daddy" but the laughter dies away as they discover they are essentially watching someone being bullied. Sarah tries to salvage the pitch by claiming it's self-deprecating, which is a defence that more bullies should try. "We weren't bullying him when we flushed his head down the toilet miss, we were self-deprecating him." Sarah suggests a whole fat franchise, 'Fat Mum', 'Fat Sister', 'Fat Dog'. I think when your videos look like torture, the solution isn't to offer to torture many more people.

In the end neither team gets a mention on Buzz Feed. James find this surprising because they built the channel based on what Buzz Feed would like. Which Buzz Feed should probably take as an insult. Solomon feels he let his team down, but did everything he could, which is weirdly self-contradictory.

Back at the boardroom the team's watch both videos. Lord Siral is less than impressed saying that James comes across as a "grade A pillock". Which, to be fair, is true and very much the point. But he does think Solomon made the right choice of collaborators given Ollie's hit rate and the team think Solomon did a good job as project manager.

Lord Siralan doesn't like Fat Daddy at all, thinking Felipe is as fat as James is funny. But he does like the idea of torturing a lawyer, which is pretty much the entire video. If the team had re-named their channel "Lawyer Torture"  it would have been a hit. Pamela thinks there was a lack of leadership from Ella-Jade. The team also think that Steven's pitch was terrible. He responds by repeating the first line of it, as though we haven't heard it enough times.

In the end Summit got 3532 views and Tenacity 3314. So Summit wins for the first time and the team are flown off to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. That's a bit odd. If they're flying them out of the country you would think it would be for a task. I'm not convinced it's real. The BBC probably stuck on them on a set they use for Doctor Who. Still, it does allow for gratuitous swim suit shots of the other half of the candidates.

 Unconvincing

Back at the cafe Katie thinks that 3,000 views proves their videos weren't offensive. Because the collective response of the online community to offensive material is not to watch it. Ella-Jade is already gunning for Sarah and Steven claiming they didn't contribute. Fair enough for Sarah, but Steven definitely contributed, albeit doing more harm than good. Steven says if he'll highlight all of Ella-Jade's faults and "she'll look like a fool, not me". Steven, I'm sure you can both manage to look like fools.

Back in the boardroom, the team, and Pamela in particular, put the blame on Ella-Jade for a lack of leadership which left them not knowing whether they were making a comedy or serious video. Lord Siralan is less than impressed because in Sugar World, making documentaries is exactly the same as YouTube videos so this task should  have been perfect for Ella-Jade.


However, he also wants to know why the video went out without a name or a description and the team blame Sarah. Sarah objects that Lauren was the sub-team leader and all she did was timing, but this just emphasises how little she had to do. Sarah questions why the team don't take her seriously and Katie points out that it's because her week one sales strategy consisted of wearing short skirts and makeup. Honestly, all you do is claim that women are better at sales than men because they look nicer and suddenly no-one takes you seriously as a business woman.

Ella Jade brings back Steven and Sarah because anyone else would eviscerate her in the boardroom. Lord Siralan thinks Ella-Jade is educated but has no experience. Karen, who seems to be in a particularly bad mood this week, says that no-one can be bothered waiting for Steven to get to the point and that although everyone ignores Sarah, it may be because she has nothing to say worth hearing.

Lord Siralan hits Ella-Jade with the claim that she has never had a proper job and isn't impressed by the number of University societies she apparently ran. Unfortunately, in Sugar World, if you weren't paid to do it then it doesn't count. He also wonders if the team are patronising Sarah because she used to be PA. It turns out she also used to be a Hypnotherapist, though that revelation doesn't do wonders for her credibility. She does have a great plan to set up a dating website, but Ella-Jade points out that her experience of the industry consists of going to dating websites.

Lord Siralan turns to Steven, but his pain thresh hold must be very low this week because he's barely offered to be Project Manager next week before Lord Siral boots him out of the door. Steven looks like he's restraining himself from saying something rude. The one time he doesn't have to restrain himself is the one time he does. I'd really like to hear Steven say "well Fuck You Lord Sugar".

But with all these extra candidates no-one is safe. Sarah is booted next because no-one has confidence in her. Sarah thinks Lord Siralan wouldn't have made a good business partner for her. Too late Sarah, Lindsay already pulled off the "you can't fire me I quit" last week. With only Ella-Jade left will Lord Siralan make it a hat-trick for the first time in Apprentice history? Ella-Jade begs him not to, but to no avail, the record is to tempting and she is fired. But with only her dignity left to lose, Ella-Jade pushes out a plane in the amazon jungle without a map, begging for another chance. She's half out the door when she has another go. Lord Siral has to deploy the finger for a second time to get her to leave, making her the first candidate to be fired twice and taking the total firings to four.

Back in the house, the surviving candidates are waiting for three people who will never return. Lord Siralan phones them up to put them out of their misery. I was hoping he might send Francis from reception to let them know. It would be nice to see her out of the office for a change.

Next time: the Apprenti are orded to set up coach tours. Are the program-makers insane? They've done bus tours before, but this relies on finding a group of people willing to spend an extended period of time with the candidates. No wonder they got rid of Steven, if he'd been on board it would have led to a homicide.