The Apprentice (UK) - Series Four

From Frikipedia

Sir Alan and the gang return for another series of wanton awfulness, as 16 fresh-faced, big-headed, uppity cocknoses perform tricks for the furry one in order to luck into another megabuck job cleaning the bins in Amstrad's Essex bijou.

1 The Contenders
2 The Challenges

The Contenders

A collection of career-driven go-getters, to a man (or woman) the most annoying person you will see on that specific day. Friki is not ashamed to admit that if it met any of them in the street, it would kick them as hard as it could in the shins and run away.

Raef - Improbably-coiffured public schoolboy nobsack. Talks like Leslie Phillips after a stroke.
Jenny - Shouty ginger single mum who uses every opportunity to drone on about her miraculous career in the face of adversity.
Nicholas - Posh barrister with less business knowledge than a palsied snail. Looks like a budget David Cameron action figure.
Sara - Talkative car saleswoman devoid of any significant personality trait, or the ability to shout in an obnoxious manner.
Lucinda - Vaguely hippie type. Angers people by her lack of fashion sense. Despite working in IT, cannot extract a set of photos from a digital camera.
Jennifer - Quiet Irish type. Wins votes from male viewers thanks to her ability to "make a shamrock with her tongue".
Lee - Shouty annoying cockney type. The product of a mad experiment which attempted to splice the DNA of Danny Dyer with the population of Clapham.
Lindi - A dyslexic descendant of Zulu royalty. If such a thing is possible. Makes Friki go a bit tingly in it's special place.
Kevin - Hilariously obnoxious West Country weirdo. Manages to look more like Little Britain star Matt Lucas than Lucas himself.
Simon - Former soldier who fixes satellite dishes for a living. The token "hands-on" candidate, who will be forced out early on.
Michael - Works in telesales. Is hollow inside.
Helene - Mad bully with no redeemable features at all. Except sometimes she's not in shot.
Ian - Pouty and over-slick. Looks like the sort of twatty bloke who loudly orders bottles of champagne in All Bar Ones. His face has been put on sideways.
Shazia - Rubbish.
Alex - Dog-eared northerner. Played by Paul Kaye of Dennis Pennis fame.
Claire - Shouty, mercilessly annoying bitch-type. Plans to secure victory by suffocating other contestants with her bingo wings.

The Challenges

Week 1

For the opening task, the candidates are split into the boys and the girls, and given a job lot of fish to sell down Islington market. The girls start selling stuff before they've even decided on the prices, while Nicholas on the boys team messes up the prices totally, and they start selling lobsters for around 26p. A last mad dash to shift stock sees the boys flog a load of crates of sea bass to a local office for £50, and unsurprisingly, this poor bit of haggling leads to the boys losing. Sir Alan fires Nicholas for not knowing how much to sell a turbot for, despite the posh loser's attempts to turn the whole exercise into a class war.

Week 2

The second challenge sees the teams tasked to run an industrial laundry business for a day. Despite the stereotype inferring that girls should be better at washing clothes, their attempts are a total disaster, as orders are mixed up and some lost entirely, while the boys complete their work without too much fuss. With the girls forced into flogging some items of clothing on the street in an attempt to avoid being fined in the boardroom, they promptly lose and Shazia is fired for being the one who messed up the most obviously.

Week 3

For week three, the teams have to run a snotty London gastropub for a theme night. While the girls decided on an Indian Bollywood theme, even going as far as recruiting a local takeaway worker to perform an authentic Bollywood dance (which is a frankly bizarre, shirtless mess of an exercise), while the boys go for Italian. Stupidly, the boys end up buying their products from the local Tesco, including frozen pizza which they attempt to pass off as authentic. They also employ Kevin to do the cooking, despite him admitting he has no idea what a carbonara is, though he does give a hilarious, David Brent-esque "pep talk" in the kitchen before they serve dinner. Things go from bad to worse as they run out of food towards the end, and attempt to compensate by presenting diners with half a pizza instead of a whole one, which goes down predictably badly with the customers. They lose out to the girls and Ian, the project manager, is fired for being useless.

Week 4

For the next task, the teams have to set up a photography pitch in the Bluewater Shopping Centre and try to flog professional photos to members of the public. With the teams mixed up for the first time, Simon spends much of his time arguing with Claire as he tries, and largely fails, to organise glamorous photos of people, including crap-looking tiara props they source from a Poundland or somewhere. While he sweats on the shop floor, Claire spends the rest of her time bitching about him to Alex, as they completely forget to bother printing any of the photos for collection. Meanwhile, the other team led by Helene, employ a rubbish David Beckham "lookalike" and coerce small children into getting their picture taken with him. Lucinda, despite constantly affirming that she doesn't even "use the camera on my phone" is put in charge of processing the photos off the digital camera, and fails totally. Even when they do manage to get an image off the thing, Raef manages to stick the sticker of the shot onto the "collectable mug" upside down. In the end, they print the whole lot off on normal A4 paper and, somehow, manage to sell them at £15 a pop. Meanwhile, Simon's team fails to even make a profit. In the boardroom, despite Sir Alan getting so bored with Claire's constant moaning that he sends her out the room, he fires the harangued Simon "with regret".

Week 5

Next, the teams have to make two new ice cream flavours and sell them around London's pretentio-retailers. Lucinda leads one team, who make Avocado and Toffee Apple flavoured concoctions, while Claire's team make a Cider and a Berry flavoured one, though their product testing extends to asking two random pub drunks what they think about the flavours. Despite Lucinda's team nicking an order with a cinema chain moments before Claire's team try the same thing, they end up losing after Claire's lot get a last-minute restaurant order. With her team having thrown around "exclusivity deals" left, right and centre by mistake, Lucinda survives a verbal lashing from her team mates, and Friki favourite Lindi gets the boot for failing to control the motormouths of her sales team.

Week 6

The teams are now asked to "create an occasion" and market a set of greeting cards for it. Which is a bit of a silly task. The perma-comical Lucas-a-like Kevin takes Jenny's idea for a "Save the Earth" week, and they make a series of cards designed to help explain to people that they should be wasting less raw materials, like card and stuff. Yes, they really are that stupid. The other team, led by greasy Michael, decide to pitch the idea of a "National Singles' Day" to occur the day before Valentine's Day, which again is really stupid, but crucially very slightly less stupid. Despiter wasting around four hours deciding where the grammatically correct placement of the apostrophe is in "Singles' Day", they manage to force Tesco and other card purveyors to take more stock off their hands than Kevin's team manages, though by this point, the willfully egotistical Kevin has chosen to take charge of the whole pitch himself, and dies on his arse. Unsurprisingly Kevin gets the boot. The fun and games doesn't end there though, as the non-fired losers return to the house they all share, and a massive slanging match preaks out surrounding the uselessness of contestant Sara, who to Friki's mind has done nothing wrong other than not being a singularly redeemless twatmunch, but has to sit there as all and sundry effectively call her a waste of skin, nerves and muscles. Harsh.