The candidates are starting to look a bit board: Apprentice Week 6

Apparently New Yorkers are getting increasingly annoyed with TV crews filming the latest HBO production in their telegenic city, come summer time I imagine London tourists could sympathise. For some explained but still inexplicable reason, our heroes were allowed to take over HMS Belfast for the morning in order to create their own board games. For Team Summat Roisin came up with a tautological ‘educational’ game called GeoKnow, where players have to describe a country using a variety of different clues. It quickly became her brain-child as ‘dictatorial’ PM James passed complete responsibility for it over to her.

Meanwhile over on Team Tenability they decided to piggy-back on the popularity of er, online dating in order to create a relationship themed game, which had no relation at all to online dating. The Apprentice lives and dies on its villains; some such as Sarah and Stephen are apparent from the outset and everyone loves to hate them, others such as Mark take time to show their dislikeable sides. This arrogant antipodean is quick to criticise others and make comments such as ‘I would really like Pamela to show her leadership skills to me’, he clearly believes his own hype but as yet hasn’t given anyone else much reason to. Up until now he has seemed sensible and charming, and it may be that in future tasks he proves to be a very capable and intelligent businessmen, but with his almost unique ability to belittle even Lord Sugar, this week he showed himself to be just as irritating -albeit far more subtle -as any other antagonist of the series so far. In the end Dictator James (he was a king last week – will he be a Dark Lord of the Sith next week?) lead his team to a crushing victory and the hapless Pamela was fired on Team Tonality.

Head Burying Moment of the Week: Pamela- who refused to accept that negative focus group feedback was anything other than the sub-team ‘covering their own arses’ (but said in a lilting Irish accent, it somehow didn’t seem like she was criticising them).

Salesperson of the Week: Bianca- who accidentally gave exclusivity for the whole of Westminster- which has one of the largest concentration of shops in Europe- to a store which bought six units.

Misjudged Focus Group of the Week: The group of middle-aged board game enthusiasts to whom Team Torosity tried to pitch the ‘Relationship Guru’. Their bafflement at the concept was not entirely unexpected.

Quote of the Week: Any one of the question cards from ‘The Relationship Guru’.