Childrens' Sugar intake boosts ego

I have been a huge fan of The Apprentice since the UK version debuted back in 2004. I’m certainly not the only one, with the finale of the last season having more than ten million viewers. I suspect that for most people the main draw has been the consistent incompetence of the candidates and the resulting boardroom meetings with a furious Lord Sugar. While the tasks in last year’s Junior Apprentice were generally of the smaller scale and Sugar was far more restrained than usual, there was no shortage of what made the original great. The second series of the show, which began this Monday and has now been wisely renamed Young Apprentice, looks set to continue in the first’s fine tradition.

As always the show opens with a montage of generic shots of the candidates walking away from home, luggage in hand, culminating in a group shot of everyone marching down a deserted Millennium Footbridge. I wonder how many commuters and tourists were inconvenienced by closing the bridge to film a scene that lasts no longer than five seconds? This is all intercut with the candidates’ over-confident and pretentious quotes about themselves. Highlights include: “I’m not focused on making friends. I’m focused on getting to my goals”, “I’m a risky person. You like it or you don’t. I’m like marmite.” and “I got eight A stars, two A’s. No one intimidates me because I know I’m better than them.”. This is becomes doubly hilarious when we move to the boardroom and see Sugar telling them not to “pretend [they] know it all because it will be embarrassing”.

Here we first get to the return of another Apprentice staple, Lord Sugar’s atrocious jokes, as he continues on to say that it would be “as embarrassing as if Nick and I put on a cap and started to rap”. Of course, all of the terrified sixteen and seventeen year olds laugh. Eventually Sugar reveals the challenge, which is, as the episodes title suggests, to make and sell “frozen treats”. We soon learn that bad comedy isn’t the sole preserve of Lord Sugar as the voiceover informs us that “ice cream [is] a market worth a cool one billion [and] to scoop some of that up they’ll have to think up something special”.

With the teams chosen, as always in the first challenge it is girls against boys, they then go to their new house to plan their strategies. Here we get to feel the feel the editor’s hand when the only things the boys ask each other on their car journey is where they live, what business experience they have and what skills they possess — unless they really are that boring.

The teams’ first decision is what to call themselves. The boys quickly settle on the name ‘Atomic’, an interesting choice for a company that is going to be selling food. Apparently one of reasons for the choice was because it sounds “mysterious” and “dangerous”. The girls consider ‘Sixth Sense’ and ‘Core’, one of them suggesting that the latter is a good idea since “the Earth and the Sun have a core and for you to have the Sun you need a core”. Eventually though, they settle on the more generic name ‘Kinetic’. The girls then manage to convince Hayley to project manage since she “really enjoys cooking”. The boys have less luck with Lewis who, despite impressive sales experience, decides that he doesn’t want to lead the team. The job is taken by Harry instead.

I got eight A stars, two A’s. No one intimidates me because I know I’m better than them.

When it comes down to making ice cream the girls came up with the interesting idea of mixing something “healthy with chocolate”. This resulted in, amongst others, a chocolate-banana flavour and an eye catching, if not entirely accurate, slogan of “treat the lips – trim the hips”. They decide to make as much ice-cream as they can manage in the time that they’ve got but a miscalculation means that they don’t buy enough fruit and have to bin thirty litres of their mix. They make up for this however with exorbitant prices, including charging extra for a cone, and other rather unethical business practice such. These include adding expensive toppings to ice cream even if the customer doesn’t ask for them and letting small children pick out the most expensive options while their parents aren’t looking.

Despite some early problems with the cream machines and a rather unusual apple-watermelon frozen yogurt flavour, the boys do manage to come up with a quite effective pirate theme, complete with a mobile kiosk painted to look like a treasure chest – all quite appropriate for their seaside selling location. I do, however, have to admit that their “Shiverrr me timbers” (misspelling apparently intentional) slogan was quite cringeworthy. They go for the opposite strategy to the girls, undercutting competition on the beachfront with £1.50 for one scoop and £2 for two.

Back in the boardroom it is revealed that, despite the boys selling out of stock, the girls’ profits exceeded theirs by almost £150. Perhaps they should have tried exploiting their customers too. Harry decides to bring James and Mahamed back into the boardroom with him to face being fired by Sugar. Of the two, James managed to prove that being joint first in Ireland in Economics doesn’t make you a good businessman by having suggested at the start of the day that prices should be slashed to £1 while Mahamed was the worst salesperson despite claiming to have been the best. It’s a shame that somebody had to be fired as I’m sure that both would have been very entertaining in future episodes but, unfortunately, we did have to see Mahamed go.

All in all, this was a typically brilliant episode. You won’t normally learn how to run a successful business by watching The Apprentice or its spin off but you’ll certainly learn what not to do and have a good laugh.