Reviews of episode one

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Flossie
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Reviews of episode one

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Flossie
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Post by Flossie »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... lyana.html

A rather annoying review given that the reviewer erroneously identifies the object of Sugar's comments as Bilyana rather than Katie. Anyone who vageuly watched the programme could not have made that mistake.
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Post by Flossie »

From the Times
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Lord Sugar, in his annual pep talk cum pre-emptive bollocking to his new candidates on The Apprentice, varied the rhetoric a little yesterday. He was not looking for a friend. If he were, he said, he would get a dog — a statement, you might think, that speaks a complete set of encyclopaedias about his love for the human race. Nor was he looking for Lord Lucan, he added, conjuring the image of the moustached fugitive doing a stint selling garden products on QVC under the watchful eye of Nick Hewer: what he meant was that there would be no hiding place for candidates whose strategy was not to be noticed.

And so it came to pass, some 50 minutes later, that he reprieved Katie, a contestant whose profile was so low in the first task that it might as well have been subliminal, and instead fired Bilyana, whose one crime had been to make herself friendless. Consistency, one was reminded, has never been Sugar’s strongest point; ask anyone who bought the Amstrad 2386.

To be fair to the old boy, it did look as if he was going to give Katie the chop. She was saved only when Bilyana, a risk analyst from Bulgaria, piped up during Sugar’s not-to-be-interrupted summing up. “You don’t do yourself any favours, Bilyana. You’re fired,” Sugar told her and she was gone, ranting like Mr Burns during her cab ride back to obscurity that her “business plan” remained “excellent”.

As always, the fun of the initial episodes of an Apprentice series is to compare the competitors’ self-assessments of their worth with their performance during a task, in this case the selling of printed T-shirts and associated tat to mugs. The girls’ project manager, Gabrielle, for instance, had compared herself to an animal who would “roar her way to the top”. In the boardroom, she instead yelped like a tigress about to lose her whelps. In weeks to come we shall no doubt see Ricky the self-styled alpha male (by day a business superstar, by night “also” a professional wrestler) demoted to omega status, Azhar “the puppeteer” get all wound up, and the reputation of that “reflection of perfection”, Stephen, severely tarnished.

The Apprentice is more formulaic than Formula 1. We know, for example, that editing will ensure that the team that appears to be doing well in the task will lose in the final reckoning. Yesterday the girls had the only product worth selling, having lucked out on one of their number’s talent for cartooning, but still lost to the boys’ vacuous “This is a bus” bag business. No opportunity for humiliation is ever missed: we saw three of the girls ticked off by a store holder for badgering (disgraceful), and Sugar bullying one of the boys for “sweating” (all good fun). The suspicion remains that the producers leave less to chance than it seems: What sort of coaching produces those opening soliloquies? Is someone employed to make sure Sugar’s tie-knot is perfect and everyone else’s just slightly wrong? But The Apprentice remains high-octane fun and I duly welcome it back for another spin round the track.
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