The Apprentice (UK) - Series Three
From Frikipedia
Series Three of the bafflingly popular TV show.
Contents |
The Candidates
- Adam - Morose Northerner.
- Andy - Fat man.
- Gerri - Fat woman.
- Ghazel - Young, rather useless, PA.
- Ifti - A borderling depressive.
- Jadine - Always homesick and crying.
- Katie - Bitchy, annoying person.
- Kristina - Orange Irish woman.
- Lohit - Camp, nice, but too quiet bloke.
- Naomi - Foxy blonde minx.
- Natalie - Speccy blonde.
- Paul - Ex-army posh bloke.
- Rory - Ultra-posh cock.
- Simon - Nice-but-dim internet businessman.
- Sophie - Geeky physicist.
- Tre - An enormous angry ego on legs. He is right, apprarently.
The Show
Week One
The teams were tasked with the rather morose task of selling coffee in Islington, and it quickly became obvious that Andy was an idiot. Project managing his way to a useless stand location somewhere down an alley, his mass of sellers face an uphill task from the start. Adam moans, physicist Sophie overbuys milk and the whole thing fails. His team lost, and he was promptly FIRED!
Week Two
Design a product for dogs (the pet, not non-Geoffs) was the challenge second time up. Rory tried to make Tre actually do some work in marketing their "innovative" dog pouch thing. Nobody on his team is really convinced, neither are the retailers, and they promptly lose. In a fit of rage, Sir Alan turns to Rory AND Ifti and they're both FIRED!
Week Three
This week, Sir Alan gives each team £200 and asks them to do any business they want for the maximum profit. One team, led by foxy Naomi, opt for a kids face-painting stand, while Tre and the other team go for door-to-door gardening. The face painting is a disaster, and Naomi resorts to pimping members of her team as kiss-o-grams in a desperate late lunge for cash. The gardeners win and, possibly disgusted by the mere idea of someone kissing her, fatty Gerri gets FIRED!
Week Four
Off to London Zoo, to sell sweets to children. Well-meaning northerner Adam gets of to a bad start as team leader, by making a job lot of "natural" lollies which actually contain more e-numbers than a chemistry lab. Ghazel, leading the other team, went for the safe option of chocolate, but only made about ten bars of the stuff. Nevertheless, thanks to some clever pricing and the fact that Adam accidentally scares off all his customers by dressing up as a lion, the choco team wins. And physics lass Sophie gets FIRED!
Week Five
Next up is exhibiting art from up and coming artists and flogging it in London's poncy West End. Natalie's team opts to show off a load of weird pictures based around lips, while Kristina's team goes for the safer ground of artistic nudity and buys a bunch of tit shots. Unsurprisingly, the jubblies beat the lips (as it were) and Natalie takes full responsibility for her team's loss as she is FIRED!
Week Six
Selling food at a French market is Sir Alan's next task. Lohit goes for the English breakfast theme, though tea and smoked fish, rather than a greasy all dayer. It all sells badly, as the French customers act like Rosbif-hating stuck up French people, but not as badly as Paul's disastrous rival stall, flogging blocks of cheese they picked up in a cash-and-carry, and dodgy sausages that he attempts to cook on a weird Ray Mears-style army survival stove, without any success. If Sir Alan wasn't mad enough at his abject failure to make even a penny of profit, Adam and Kristina let slip in the boardroom that he's also currently nailing fellow contestant Katie. Now a penniless, broken mess, army boy Paul is FIRED!
Week Seven
Now Sir Alan gives the two teams a list of ten random items to buy, and one day to buy them by haggling their way down. Simon's team manages to do less haggling than a certain very naughty boy, ("ten for this, you must be mad!") but still wins because under-pressure Adam cocks up the rules and decides against buying the final item in favour of getting back in time, even though the penalty for missing an item is much bigger than the one for being late. It proves to be his decisive mistake. They lose by 10p, Katie gets revenge on his ousting of Paul by inferring to Sir Alan that he's a lazy alcoholic, and Adam, the car salesman from Bolton, is FIRED!
Week Eight
This week, both teams must come up with an advertising campaign for a pair of trainers. Jadine, who has taken time out from bawling miserably about missing her family, comes up with a message to local chavs to "reclaim the streets", and saying that 10% of all sales money will go to local charities to build skateboard parks and the like. It's a confused message, but not as confused as Ghazel's pun-tastic "music's in your sole" idea, which fills up a 30 second advert that doesn't one mention the trainers themselves. Sir Alan is getting irate that the teams seem to be getting more moronic as the weeks pass and Ghazel, who has failed to convince anyone that she is worth more than a receptionist's job, is FIRED!
Week Nine
This time, selling to trade. Tre leads his team out, armed with a weird-looking air purifier, some fluffy toys and a vacuum cleaner pipe, and they fail to do very much. Big-mouthed annoyance Katie leads her team to victory having flogged trainer soles, some lamp and a weird rug successfully. Sir Alan shouts at Tre, Tre shouts back. Simon looks baffled, Lohit smiles politely and calmly wipes Sir Alan's irate spittle from his chin, Jadine looks like she's about to cry again. And Jadine it is, who is FIRED!
Week Ten
Selling on TV now. Sir Alan lets the remaining teams of three loose on a daytime shopping channel. Katie-the-pouter, Lohit-the-quiet and team leader Kristina-the-orange choose woman's slimming pants, a foot spa, a floor cleaner and a chocolate fountain. They all mess up when put in front of the cameras, with Kristina even yelling "Jesus Christ!" on air, as she fails to turn the cleaner thing on. They're saved by rival leader Simon's utter child-like inabilities. He selects a hair remover, and a foldable wheelchair(?!) for angry Tre and lovely Naomi to sell. They manage to shift one wheelchair somehow, but then Simon gets in front of the cameras, flogging a trampoline and some little art stickers, and just dies on his arse. Task messed up, surely Simon must go. But no, Sir Alan has been watching the whole thing and starts another argument with Tre, maybe him. Guess again, Sir Alan shocks everyone in the boardroom by pointing his hairy finger at the lovely lovely Naomi, making Friki very sad indeed. It would have loved to throw one up her, you know. Still though, beauteous one, you have been FIRED!
Week Eleven
Interview time. The remaining five must brave one-on-one interviews with three thoroughly horrible people who happen to be Sir Alan's mates to convince everyone they deserve a place in the final. Three will go, two will stay. Drama. Unsurprisingly, Lohit is the first to be FIRED! The interviewers were thoroughly unimpressed with the way they couldn't hear anything he was saying.
Walking ego Tre is the next to feel the burn. He tries to claim that he's awesome, despite one of the interviewers sarcastically describing his home business as him running "an international conglomerate from your bedroom". Briliantly, Tre dislikes the word "bedroom", and describes it as his "home office". Nobody is convinced, and the deluded egomaniac is FIRED!
Katie bizarrely tries to win respect by boasting of the time she shagged a married man "because I wanted him", before awarding herself a modest "eight out of ten" for ruthlessness. She really is a hateful human being. Sir Alan initially sends her through to the final, much to Friki's disgust. But wait! Now she starts bleating on about being unwilling to move to London. Why is she even on this show then, the mad cow? Bristling with anger and flaky beard hairs, Sir Alan changes his mind. Wide-mouthed, horsey bitch queen, you're FIRED!
The Final
For the final challenge, Sir Alan rather smugly announces that he's bought the IBM building on London's South Bank for £115 million and, like all good property developers keen to cash in on the capital's hopelessly over-valued lust for property, wants to build a new building there. Kristina and Simon must present designs for what that building should be.
To assist them, they get some of the retards previously sacked to help out. Simon picks his lover Tre, posh twerp Rory, Little Miss Cry-a-lot Jadine and silent Lohit. Kristina is left with army boy Paul, token Northerner Adam, weird arty Natalie, and, joyously for Friki, the lovely lovely Naomi. Woo hoo, she's back!
Simon immediately starts messing up, scheming with Tre to design a massive boat-like building, despite there already being one of those just down the river in Hammersmith, while leaving the rest of the team standing around doing nothing. Meanwhile Paul, who has suddenly decided he's a trainee building surveyor, advises Kristina to build "a box" to maximise space, though she is unconvinced that such a construct would fulfil the "appealing design" part of the brief.
The teams soldier on, with Kristina and her lot pissing around with Lego and building a model of the "Phoenix", a building that looks identical to the Angel of the North, while Simon's team descends into anarchy, as posh nob Rory moans and argues with Tre a lot, though he eventually convinces Simon to go with his design, which looks like three massive penises rising out of the ground like some sort of post-modern Freudian nightmare.
Somehow, they bungle together a series of presentations, complete with impressive photoshops of the designs from an architects, and surprisingly, both presentations go very well, with even Simon failing to mess everything up.
Back in the boardroom, Sir Alan rubs his beard and pouts. Should he go with the reliable graft and billowing tan of Kristina, or the raw determination and spastic failings of Simon? He mulls, mulls some more, Kristina glows a deeper shade of orange and Simon contorts his face until it looks like he's actually crimping a length out onto the carpet.
The Result
Shock! Horror! Somehow, despite the fact that he's been a consistent mess up since week one, Sir Alan turns to Simon and points the finger of truth.....YOU'RE HIRED!
Simon cheers, Kristina perfects her reluctant smile, and Sir Alan has his apprentice. Despite the fact that this is the same man who, just two weeks ago, thought it was a good idea to flog a foldable wheelchair on the Shopping Channel, he's got the cash, the job, the lot. Unbelievable.
It's a result that leaves Friki disappointed. Partly for idiocy being so numerately rewarded, and partly because Naomi didn't get her kit off once. Though if you believe the rumours, there is a sex tape out there...
