Splash Down; Apprentice Series 8, Episode 2

You snooze, you lose.  In the tough world of The Apprentice selection sleep is for wimps, losers and obviously purple eyed restaurant owners.

Whether it was a dastardly use of Sith powers by Katie (see last week’s blog) or a badly timed one woman sleep experiment, you got the feeling there was always only going to be one candidates head on the chopping block once ‘Sleepgate’ occurred.  After all, 1^st reply to everything in the boardroom to Maria O'Connor...”well at least I wasn’t asleep”.  Game, set, matchsticks!

It was another loss for the girls in a task they collectively failed to impress on.  From the original idea generation where they pretty much ignored the brief to create a gadget and instead created some kind of plastic waterproof force-field, to the disastrous pitches and a frankly terrible boardroom defence.  There was a lack of any quality in the team, and it wouldn’t have been surprising to have lost more than one of the girls team.  The particularly broad Lancastrian tones of Jenna were as pleasant on the ear as the sound of an angry parent scraping waterproof crayon off the rest of a bath not covered by Splish Splash screen.  (and that’s coming from a proud and broad Lancastrian!)

Fundamentally their product solved a problem that wasn’t even there; in fact they may just have created two more.  Their genius idea was to create a shield to corral children into a corner of the bath whilst distracting them with waterproof crayons.  I’m not sure if the London riots were happening at the time of filming, but that solution may be something worth considering by the Met should anything happen again. 

Of course, the inability of the girls’ team to make an early decision left them with a poor choice of rooms for solving a problem in.  The boys quick choice of kitchen certainly left them the better options, and thanks to Duane the created an ideal kitchen gadget.  Ideal in the sense that it’s one of those “must have for a month” kind of gadgets.  You know the kind, the ones that we all see in the Betterware catalogue, decide you cannot do without and then within 2 months it’s gathering dust at the back of a cupboard (hopefully with crushed cabbage already removed). 

The boys brought home the victory mainly due to the complete disarray of the girls, whose project manager Jane must win the prize for most ambitiously flawed pitch to a buyer ever.  1 million units...only if he’d been drinking that many before the meeting.

The boys also won despite the poor project management of Azhar Siddique.  In another week of animal references Azhar ‘committed’ killer whale went head to head with Ricky ‘The Shark’ Martin.  It was a battle that the producers of Frozen Planet will no doubt be looking to add to the schedules.  That would be if it wasn’t for the fact that neither the shark nor the killer whale resembled anything like their predatory cousins. In fact for those of you that saw the awe-inspiring BBC documentary, both Azhar and Ricky are more akin to the poor seal trapped on the ice flow by the team of Killer Whales.  It really is a matter of ‘if not when’ a wave of reality will smash them off their fragile ice home.

In such tasks the product is key, and getting great ideas initially is the only chance you have of getting a good product. 

Star of the Week: Duane Bryan – He’s the first really star of this year’s series. Saved a dying pitch with a passionate sell of his idea.

Got Lucky: Jenna Whittingham. The Preston girl completely messed up the figures, and only ‘sleepgate’ really saved her.

Heading for a Fall: Katie Wright. Her Sith powers could be fading, named again in the boardroom fight-out.

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