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Apprentice - wallies with lollies

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zico
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Apprentice - wallies with lollies

#259423

Postby zico » October 22nd, 2019, 12:32 pm

It’s pitch dark, 4am and the candidates are woken with only 20 minutes to get ready, and 3 bathrooms between 14 very vain people, but they somehow leave on the dot at 4.20am in full daylight. Yeah, right. They head off to Alexandra Palace, and presumably at 5.10am Lord Sugar arrives to tell them they’re standing on a ice rink just so he can make a feeble connection to this week’s task – ice lollies, 2 days to design high-quality, high-end lollies for high-quality, high-end corporate customers, and also rustle up different lollies to sell to the public.

Shahin tells the group “I specialise in alcohol-infused ice cream”. He also tells us “I have played with lollies” but let’s not go there. He’s obviously the ideal PM for this task and only an idiot would think otherwise, so Riyonn’s counter-bid to be PM is duly defeated. Anyone who’s never watched the Apprentice before might think Team Boastful couldn’t possibly lose with a PM so well-suited to the task. Shahin allocates his teams and sub-team leader without consultation, and after a bit of complaining, the standard Apprentice line “It’s your decision, and if anything goes wrong, it’s on your head” is delivered by Ryan-Mark with added prissiness and petulance. They quickly decide on weird ingredients (beetroot, really?) for their luxury lollies and on healthy lavender lollies for the public. Shahin is very keen on controlling costs and creating a luxury product with dirt-cheap items.

Carina is in the bakery business so becomes Team Infighting PM. She appoints Lottie as sub-team leader, but Lottie overrules her, appointing Marianne instead as sub-team leader on the grounds that Lottie’s skills are more about disrupting leaders and telling them what they are doing wrong, rather than taking actual responsibility. They go for lollies with flowers and herbs for their luxury market, and retro sweets (cola and liquorice) for the public.

All 3 in the Team Boastful client team could pick a fight in an empty room, but a taxi is even better and they fight before even doing anything. Dean tells the beauty salon client their lollies are “very, very luxury, if I’m being honest” but you just know they won’t be, and he’s not. The client offers to buy 75 lollies for £3.30 and he tells her if she buys 150 she can have them for £3.85. “So you’re doubling the quantity and increasing the price?”. “Er……..”. Eventually she agrees to buy 90 lollies. Dean agrees to meet the client again “first thing in the morning”. In the inevitable post-meeting spat, Ryan-Mark tells Dean he did a u-turn and a 360 degree turn, which would make a 540 degree turn in total, or maybe 180 degrees if the turns are in opposite directions. A 360 degree turn is actually OK because you still face the same direction. Anyhow, enough of geometry.

Team Infighting client team has Marianne as an indecisive leader. They negotiate, are offered £3.50, and leave the client for a team discussion before going back with their revised offer which is, oh look, it’s exactly the same - £3.50. Clients take 90 lollies at £3.50 and ask what the total price will be, sparking mass confusion before they take a hopeful punt at £325 and the client has to point out the correct price of £315.

Back in manufacturing, Team Boastful’s “very,very, luxury if I’m honest” lollies come out looking like the cheapest scrattiest lollies you’ve ever seen that a 4-year would be ashamed of producing. They added edible glitter in the mix for extra luxury, but who knew the glitter would just sink into the middle and disappear? If only they had a PM with experience in ice-cream who knew all about this sort of stuff. The purple lollies for the public look a bit classier, and someone (Ryan-Mark I think) suggests swapping the 2 products, which is a good idea, but meets the fate of most good ideas on the Apprentice, which is to be completely ignored.

Team Boastful sub-team go out to sell the luxury lollies, but nobody knows what time “first thing in the morning” actually is, so they hang around for hours. Ryan-Mark says the product looks like a penis. When the client turns up, she is obviously appalled by the product, says it definitely isn’t luxury and they look a bit rude, so inevitably there’s a shot of her sucking a lolly. She tells them there’s no way she’ll pay over £1 for them. Dean offers to drop the price to £2.85 which she describes simply as “bold” with classic British understatement. Ryan-Mark makes a last-ditch attempt to get £1.25 out of her, but by now she's had enough and just tells them where to stick their lollies and places zero orders. PM Shahin acts all shocked and appalled that the sub-team haven’t managed to sell the horribly cheap and crude lollies that he produced.

Team Infighting have managed to produce 2 lollies that do actually look a bit out of the ordinary, and a bit classy. The luxury lolly is very innovative, being the world’s first ever booby-trapped lolly, with large spikes protruding in some, but hidden in others. These turn out to be rosemary spikes, and in a surprising act of self-criticism, Lottie says she may have overdone the rosemary. They trim a few of the sharper spikes and head off to the clients, who reject 10 as being overly spiky. They have an argument about whether they should work out the revised costs before going back in to the client, decide not to, but then the mean old client surprises them and causes huge confusion by asking them to solve the riddle “what’s 80 x £3.50”? They eventually get it right, and Lottie then tells Pamela in detail what she did wrong.

Time to sell to the public. Before heading off, Jemelin emphasises the importance of correct packing, telling Lubna exactly how they should be packed. Lubna replies “Yeah, yeah, whatevs” which doesn’t sound much like the response of someone who’s going to take care to get it right. Sure enough, when they arrive at London Zoo, they have a heap of mushy, falling-apart lollies that taste of liquorice, which would be a severe test for even the best salespeople, which these are not. Lubna says her packing must have come loose in the car somehow. “Yeah, yeah, whatever”. Meanwhile Karen Brady is wearing a cowboy hat and a disgusted look.

Team Boastful are selling to the public in Regent’s Park and Thomas is a natural cheeky chappie seller, who impresses Claude. You feel he wants to say to the punters “Who wants to get their lips around a big thick purple one?” but if he does, it gets left on the cutting room floor. We have the usual last-minute running around with mad discounts.

In the boardroom and Lottie’s machinations are exposed, to the Lord’s displeasure. Lottie says she is a librarian and nominated Marianne as sub-team leader because Marianne has corporate experience, to which Marianne retorts “So are you only going to be PM if there’s a task in a library?” Good point. Team Boastful’s terrible “very, very luxury” lolly is displayed which cheers Team Infighting up no end. Turns out that Boastful made a profit of £371 while Infighting made £545, so the girls are sent off for an only-in-London treat of having their backs whacked with branches in a spa.

Shahin takes Ryan-Mark and Dean back into the boardroom, on the grounds that they failed to sell a shocking product. Lots of tension as we wonder who will get sacked in the losing team led by an ice-cream specialist who produced terrible “luxury” lollies that the client refused to buy. Surprise, surprise, it’s Shahin who gets frozen out.

dionaeamuscipula
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Re: Apprentice - wallies with lollies

#259925

Postby dionaeamuscipula » October 24th, 2019, 5:43 pm

Shahin must be the worst candidate in Apprentice history, managing to get sacked in week 1 AND week 2

DM

zico
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Re: Apprentice - wallies with lollies

#259995

Postby zico » October 24th, 2019, 9:36 pm

Oops. Edit, Replace "Shahin" with "Kenna" all occurrences.
I'm catching up from a while back is my excuse.


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