THE HARDEST TASKMASTER

Who will be hired and who will be fired as The Apprentice returns? MARION McMULLEN looks at some of Lord Sugar’s challenges

THE Apprentice returns to BBC1 next Wednesday at 9pm with 16 more candidates kicking off series 15 and hoping to impress Lord Sugar. They will be thrown in at the deep end for their first challenge as they jet off 6,000 miles to Cape Town in South Africa to try and set up and run their own safari and vineyard tours. It is one of many tricky tasks that have tested the business skills of Apprentice hopefuls over the years. THE first task of the first series in 2005 was more basic – sell £500 worth of flowers. The teams had just a day to complete the task with the men victorious with a door-to-door sales approach. Rival team leader Adenike Ogundoyin, left, became the first person to hear the fateful words “You’re fired”. THEY say cats have nine lives but a kitty calendar theme saw Nargis Ara (below) get her marching orders the following year.

The teams had to design the charity fundraiser for Great Ormond Street Hospital and the guys proved winners by featuring children in fun costumes for their calendar while the women went for cute cats. Not a purr-fect choice. SACRE bleu! Selling British bangers at a French farmers market proved a mistake for male team Stealth in 2007. They also tried to flog chutney and processed cheese to the French – without much success – and ex-Army Lieutenant Paul Callaghan (above) ended up being sent home. TRYING to sell wedding cakes and dresses to brides-to-be proved the downfall of barrister Sara Dhada, below, in 2008. Lord Sugar told her: “If I had been one of the recipients of your sales pitch, if it’s anything like you’re doing now, I would have gotten hold of your head and pushed it in the bl**dy cake.” WHAT could go wrong letting the teams run their own brewery and coming up with a new brand of beer? The season nine challenge proved a stumbling block for the male team as they sent non-drinker Zeeshaan Shah to the brewery.

It led to Lord Sugar pointedly asking: “How do you send people to a brewery that don’t drink? In Zee’s case particularly, he’s as dry as a cream cracker in the bl**ding Sahara Desert.” INVENTOR Tom Pellereau won series seven, but nearly got axed at the start as his team suffered defeats in tasks including a mobile app challenge. His head-bobbing in the boardroom also started to annoy Lord Sugar who warned: “If you nod your hear any longer I’m going to put you on the back seat of my bl**dy car.” 8 CLINICAL development strategist Scott McCulloch (pictured) and marketing manager Robert Goodwin were both fired in series 10 after the second task to design fashion with in-built technology. Lord Sugar told Scott: “Never mind the bl**ding Wolf Of Wall Street, you’re more like the bl**dy Poodle Of Petticoat Lane.” 9 LORD Sugar also did not mince his words when it came to a burger challenge two years ago. He described one of the offerings as resembling “a constipated tortoise” while Anisa Topan (pictured) described her own team’s Angus steak burgers as being “full of meat”. 10 SAUSAGE manufacturer Oliver Nohl-Oser, above, got fired in 2016 when a sweet business challenge turned sour. He was the project manager trying to sell seaside rock and fudge in Brighton, but the sweets failed to attract large sales. Lord Sugar told him: “Your best hope for £250,000 is to buy yourself a scratch card.”

Lord Sugar