[AUK] Scrubbing Up

TV Programme: The Apprentice (UK)
Season: 5
Episode: 1
Date I watched this episode: 25/03/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 9 months, 14 days.

Team Leaders: Howard (Em-1) and Mona (Ig-1)
Winner: Empire
Ignite Boardroom: Mona, Debra, Anita
Fired: Anita
The One That Got Away: Debra

As I said in my pre-season post, there has been no candidate reels released for this season as yet. So...I feel as though I don't really know the characters that well. Last year I had something of an edge - I watched those candidate reels over and over, and reposted them to my YouTube channel, it really increased my level of hype. You see, the bad thing about an Apprentice season premiere is that there are just so many candidates...and not really any time to get to know them. For that reason, some of the candidates had practically no screentime in this episode, and when you did get a glimpse of them, you wondered "who is that?"

Nevertheless, it is quite a good strategy to keep your head down and not really do much in the first few episodes. It's no coincidence that the people in the boardroom were the team leader, the second-in-command, and the person in charge of figures. Anita made a fundamental mistake when she piped up during the boardroom post-mortem "I was the one with the calculator" - she really put herself in the limelight there.

My first impression of these candidates is that, particularly among the boys, there are no real strong characters. But it really is too early to tell. In the early sequences, like the cars on the way to the purchasing stage, or the video clips that were played, the guys seemed to actually have at least some character to them: particularly Noorul and Ben. It's pretty normal that these characters would be a bit supressed early on. The girls, on the other hand, have plenty of obviously strong characters: particularly Debra, Yasmina and Kate; others such as Kimberly have some potential but weren't shown much in the episode.

Howard does not seem to be a particularly interesting character; he seems to be a bit of a lightweight. Despite the fact that he claims to run 10 pubs, he has no control over the situations that arise. He says in an interview clip "people would be wrong to think I'm a pushover" - well that's exactly how he came across. Phillip seemed to be the real leader of this task; his negotiating skills looked good, and he seems to have more to him than the boring side, though we haven't seen much of this yet for the reasons outlined above.

This episode followed the now standard tradition of a girls team and a boys team, led by Nick and Margaret respectively. The teams have the names "Empire" and "Ignite" respectively, I think they are both good strong names, which is more than can be said for some earlier rubbish names ("First Forte" and "Invicta" come to mind). The music is the same as ever - I really love the soundtrack, it adds a very cool atmosphere. And Alan gave his usual introductory speech...though I'm not sure how much of it he wrote; some of the metaphors (Elton John, diamonds) seemed a little over his head. Definitely loved the repetition of the memory of the "matey" who "bottled it" though.

It was also good to see the "Bridge Café" location back - an absolute staple in The Apprentice's traditions; involved in the sequence at the end where the losing team eats at a dingey location while the winners enjoy their treat. As for that, the house they are in this time was really well-decorated, looks great, and the candidates were suitably impressed. It gets better every year!

Now down to business - the boardroom. I actually think Alan made the right decision. Anita clearly wasn't in this for the long-haul; she didn't know how this works. And she didn't seem to want to get her teeth into the task. Mona...wasn't that bad a team leader; she was actually quite nice with Kate and with Debra when they called up and gave her bad news. The main fault of Mona's was not making a business plan. Debra...well Adrian Chiles thinks she is evil, but I disagree. I think she is ruthless, but that's what you have to be to win this show. Claire Young from last year was ruthless, Katie Hopkins was evil, there is a difference. But then again I thought people were wrong about Katie to start with, so I'm prepared to be wrong again.

I think the dilemma here was quite intriguing though. Alan is someone who doesn't really like to be challenged on things, he is something of a control freak. If he asks someone to do something, I don't think he'd be happy if they contested it or stepped beyond their bounds. But he got annoyed with Anita for not challenging. In fact, as Adrian Chiles/Rufus Hound pointed out, Sir Alan seemed to change his tone when Anita said she should challenge more. In reality, she'd been asked to do a simple task and she did it, which is what Sir Alan would expect in his own business.

A couple of administration points for my reviews. First of all, the episodes of The Apprentice (UK) don't technically have titles. However when they are posted onto BBC Online they are given a title on there (though not on iPlayer, strangely enough), and that is the title I'm using to distinguish the episodes. Secondly, I'm going to denote people's teams by brackets after their name, followed by a number showing how many episodes they've been in that team during this season. This is just to give an indication (not necessarily a perfect one) of how strongly they are bonded to the other people in their team.

Overall this was not the best Apprentice episode ever; but I may change my mind on it in future when I've got to know the characters a little better. To promote this I'd like to see more screentime on the characters sitting around discussing things and less on them running around like headless chickens.