Bem#fheÓb[ _i 9^Whb[iÊi ^_]^ fe_dj
SAVAGED BY Lord Sugar in the boardroom for ineptitude but given an 11th-hour reprieve last week, the stakes were high for Charles Burns as we entered episode seven of The Apprentice.
He had won only one in six of the tasks so far — a seventh fail would surely mean curtains.
Sensibly (and that’s not a word readily associated with Charles), it appeared he had decided to keep his head down during the traditional advertising challenge, allowing other contestants the opportunity to be fully appreciated by Lord Sugar.
Charles and the rest of Team Vitality had the benefit of Michaela as nanny/ project manager, along with the evercapable Jade as second-in-command, as they attempted to promote a new model of a car with a TV commercial and Tube poster.
If Charles was indeed trying to avoid the spotlight, he could be grateful to Michaela, whose approach to managing him seemed simple; fob him off with small but fiddly tasks, or if that didn’t work, ignore his opinions entirely.
Team Vitality’s ad turned out to be Charles Burn (left) and his Vitality colleagues have a watching brief as the rest of the team pitches to industry experts
more Magaluf than Mad Men thanks to Anisa — supposedly a PR and branding expert — who appeared to think she was flogging holiday vehicle rentals. But it did appear to make some kind of sense.
Team Graphene’s offering was, by contrast, a total car crash. Deciding to set their advert in a chocolate-box English village, they pitched up at a pretend “Norman” settlement in Essex, complete with mud huts and squawking birds.
So, naturally, the candidates ran around like headless chickens, creating a commercial stuck in the middleages
to complement a very 21st-century digital campaign.
That they called their family hatchback the “Expando” was also the source of mockery, with the suggestion that the name was better suited to functional underwear.
Lord Sugar only fired one member of the team, but it was easy to see why he considered sacking a couple more. It was a pile-up of disasters, from Elizabeth, demonstrating a Tony Blair-like inability to relinquish power, to James, who was supposed to take charge and didn’t, and Joanna, who had picked Bushra as her punching bag of the
week (at one point Bushra delivered an excellent rant back at her, and I almost cheered).
Ultimately it was Sajan, the director of the ill-fated ad, who got the bullet. His claim of being a “creative” and his failure to produce anything remotely so proved too much for Lord Sugar.
Sajan’s departure was inevitable in the long run but unfair in this instance, I felt, given so many others contributed to the team’s defeat.
Chutzpah of the week: Elizabeth, for claiming to Lord Sugar that “it wasn’t the Elizabeth show” when it so evidently was.