As usual for The Apprentice, there are too many personalities at this early stage to get a good handle on everyone, or to remember names. Only the brashest, funniest people shine through. The task was boringly simple for Week 1: the team's were split into girls ("Ignite") and boys ("Empire"), each given a £200 budget, and asked to set-up a cleaning service of any description. The team that made the most money, wins.
Howard Ebison, a 24-year-old Retail Business Manager, was the project manager for the boys, who split their team into two distinct groups – one cleaning a taxi hire firm's fleet of cars, while the others shined shoes at St. Pancras railway station (for £4 a pop!) It took the car-cleaners seven hours to clean one car to the desired standard of their customer, although they eventually whizzed through half the fleet once the shoe-team rejoined them.
Mona Lewis, a 28-year-old Senior Financial Manager (and onetime Tanzanian beauty queen), was PM for the girls. They all focused exclusively on cleaning cars; earning £120 for doing three large Hummers (after working out how to use a pressure washer), before being sacked by a classic car retailer for only cleaning four out of fourteen cars to the required high-standard. As Sir Alan's eyes-and-ears Margaret summed up: "never before in the history of car washing have so few cars been washed by so many people in such a long time." In a late attempt to claw back some cash, they moved onto curbside car cleaning for passing trade, which worked much better.
In the boardroom afterwards, Sir Alan was told that Empire had made a profit of £239 -- more than the girls, but only because Ignite had eaten into their start-up budget and wasted cash on materials, leaving them with a profit of £160.55. The guys swaggered back to their luxury penthouse, for an evening of cocktails, leaving Mona to bring Debra and a grumpy-looking Anita back into the boardroom to explain themselves. The latter was eventually fired because she failed to notice the overspend on materials (i.e., she was handed the calculator, so blame her) and didn't show any business acumen. To be honest, she looked so miserable throughout that it probably came as a relief to be sent home in a taxi.
Overall, this was a decent start to the new series. Sir Alan's script contained more jokes than usual in his opening boardroom monologue ("I know the words to 'Candle In The Wind'; doesn't make me Elton John"), and it's as well-constructed as ever. The task was perhaps too simple, leaving a huge amount of time focused on the boardroom shenanigans, and The Apprentice always takes a few weeks to settle in. Right now, there's no way 15 strangers can all make an impression, although it feels like there's a good mix there. Noorul (an aristocratic teacher) already appears to be this year's Raef. But who else thinks the New Yorker lady should just pack her bags now?
25 March 2009
BBC1, 9pm
