Sugar’s hopefuls are off to a cringeworthy start
The Apprentice BBC1, Thursday The Tourist BBC1, Sunday Outsiders BBC2, Tuesday
THERE are times when I think that candidates on The Apprentice have no friends. If they did, those concerned souls would surely tell them not to go on camera and say things such as: ‘I have the four Bs – beauty, brains, body, business.’ It certainly didn’t stop Dr Asif Munaf from making the claim, and it was the first cue for me to duck behind the couch to cringe in embarrassment. On past form, it won’t be the last.
Asif runs a wellness brand and is seeking Alan Sugar’s cash to help him expand a vitamin business, but he needs to learn a little more about business in the first instance.
In the boardroom, after a task selling teambuilding days out in the Scottish Highlands, Asif clapped when told of the money the team had made, but misunderstood the fact that they had been docked 52% on their overall expenditure by a disgruntled client, not their gross profit.
He thought they had won, but they lost, and it was the women’s team who triumphed.
That too was a close call, though. They had to prepare a meal for their guests and, in a spectacular cock-up, one of them dipped the fish in the crumble mixture prepared for the dessert, rather than breadcrumbs. None of us, I’m sure, have any idea what fish crumble tastes like, so now I, rather weirdly, want to try it.
On the men’s team, there was another culinary disaster, though this proved tiresome – it’s supposed to be a business show, not MasterChef.
Oliver Medford, a sales executive from Yorkshire, was tasked with making brownies, but was at an immediate disadvantage not knowing the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. He also decided, on a whim, to leave flour out of the mix so, just like the brownies, he was destined not to rise, and was first to be fired.
It wasn’t fair, because the man who should have gone was project manager Virdi Singh Mazaria, who urged his team to under-promise and over-deliver. Not only did they under-promise, they undered that again in a performance that can only be described as dismal. Virdi’s ambition is to run an event management company in Dubai, but if an event manager can’t even manage a day out in Scotland, surely he should have been the one to go?
Oh, well, at least our own Maura Rath, a yoga instructor from Co. Wexford, managed to stay in, because Irish candidates have been the first to go in quite a few series of the show. She didn’t get much air time and, since she was on the winning team, she avoided the boardroom too, so let’s hope she progresses through the ranks. Avoiding doing anything in the kitchen might be a good start.
The Tourist came to an end on BBC1, and went out on a slightly better note than the bizarre fifth episode, in which Helen Chambers (the excellent Danielle MacDonald) had a coma dream that lasted about 30 minutes and left me scratching my head until I finally realised what was happening.
The tale of warring families involved in the drugs trade in Co. Donegal ended – spoiler alert – with everyone realising they were related to each other.
Crime bosses Frank McDonnell (Francis Magee of Kin fame) and Niamh Cassidy (Olwen Fouéré, having the time of her life), turned out to be brother and sister.
McDonnell’s son, Donal, was murdered by Niamh, and therefore actually was her nephew but, years before, he had killed her son, so that probably counts as a draw.
Meanwhile, Elliot Staley (Jamie Dornan), was actually Eugene Cassidy, Niamh’s son, and also the biological father of Donal’s son, Fergal (Mark McKenna).
Confused? So you should be. After spending 20 minutes drawing up a family tree, I came away concluding that Elliot quite possibly was his own uncle, or something. It was mad stuff, but there was a delicious sting in the tail.
Elliot has been suffering from amnesia since the first series and, at the end of the last episode, he received a dossier from a person unknown that would fill in some of the gaps in his memory. Comfortable in his new identity, he decided to throw it in the fire but, as it burned, we saw that he actually was a special agent. For which intelligence service? Why?
Well, I guess we’ll have to wait for a third series to sort that one out. We might a crossover with Hidden Assets and enlist Detective Norah to have her whiteboard and markers at the ready to keep track. BBC2’s Outsiders brought back weird memories of the pandemic.
Made three years ago for the cable channel Dave (‘the home of cheeky banter’, one B even more cringeworthy than Asif’s four Bs), it clearly existed only because setting comedians loose in the wild was an easy way to maintain social distancing.
Host David Mitchell must have been short of a few bob in the absence of the acting roles and panel shows for which he mostly is known, because there surely can be no other reason why he would lend his considerable talent to something as flimsy as this.
Watching comedians cutting down trees, or offering first aid to a crash test dummy, was about as funny as developing ash dieback in a wooden leg.
Why BBC2 thought it deserved a wider airing, three years later, is utterly perplexing. Like the pandemic itself, it should be quietly forgotten as life has moved on.
There were two episodes back to back, but I couldn’t face the second one. Unless they had told us in advance that one contestant accidentally made a salmon brownie.