Apprentice - Finnish frolics, falls and fails

[zico]

An appropriate opening venue for our hopefuls, as they are sent to the stadium home of perennial underachievers West Ham, to see Lord Sugar on the giant screen, as he’s been called away on his old favourite “urgent business”. I always thought Finland welcomed visitors, but apparently not, because for this week’s task, the Finnish Tourist Board have asked Apprentice candidates to develop marketing campaigns to attract foreign visitors to Finland in summer. The Lord splits up the teams and sadly, the hugely entertaining Odd Couple of Lottie and Thomas are parted.

Team Unison – Lottie, Scarlett, Dean, Carina, Lewis
Team Empower – Thomas, Marianne, Ryan-Mark, Jemelin, Pamela.

Unison are heavily handicapped from the start because Lord Sugar suspects Dean is useless and so has given him a last chance to prove himself by making him PM. The team initially focus on backpackers, but Lottie makes a well-reasoned case for empty-nesters having lots of time and money, and looking out for unusual new places to visit, but because it’s Lottie, nobody else supports her idea. They ask Dean for a decision, and he acts decisively by asking the team what he should decide, before they eventually plump for backpackers.

Dean randomly allocates his teams, making Lewis the sub-team leader for the Finland TV advert, with Scarlett and Lottie. Dean and Carina work together to develop a logo and branding, plus a Piccadilly Circus video clip. Well, truth be told, Carina does all of this, occasionally pausing to say “What are your ideas Dean?” Tumbleweed. “Do you have any suggestions you’d like to add Dean?” Time passes. “OK Dean, let’s do this, shall we?”. But Dean does finally do something. He falls out of a hammock. Hey, at least it’s something. Carina creates a nice green on white logo, but a horrible black background for their video clip.

Team Empower have a brief battle for PM supremacy between Jemelin and Marianne. Jemelin makes one of her typical arguments that she should be PM because she likes travelling and you have to travel to get to Finland. Ryan-Mark has the casting vote and picks Marianne, confiding to us later that Jemelin was a catastrophic PM last time she managed him. Thomas tells the team he’s going to make such a great campaign that people all over the world will flock to Finland after seeing his campaign ads. Someone remarks that Helsinki has a summer Gay Pride festival, so they go after the pink pounds of the LGBTQ community.

Marianne and Thomas go off to create the logo and video clip, and Thomas quickly comes up with a good logo and also has other ideas about combining shots of the Gay Pride festival with him and an actor dancing about. Marianne mentions the need to show at least a little bit of the countryside to which Thomas replies “we’ll just stick a bit of grass on it somewhere”. Marianne is sub-team leader and tells us that she’s cleverly managing Thomas by fooling him in thinking he came up with all the good ideas are his. From where I’m sitting, it looks exactly like Thomas is the one coming up with all the good ideas, but maybe Marianne is using Jedi mind-control techniques to put her ideas into Thomas’s head. Or maybe she’s just bigging herself up.

Lewis has the standard approach to making a commercial – plan it, do a storyboard and then shoot scenes. Jemelin prefers a vague idea of “let’s make it look really nice and relaxing” which Karen derides as wishy-washy.

Lewis executes his plan of 18-30 types jumping into a lake, canoeing within 5 feet of a jetty, drinking too much, yelling at each other, using a droning drone for photography and generally shattering the peaceful calm of a Finnish lake and driving the locals crazy. Lewis also subjects us to his ghastly body tattoos. Meanwhile, Jemelin turns into a disorganised control freak (always the worst kind) and has a shouting match with Ryan-Mark of all people, when he makes a minor suggestion, yelling “I’m the director” every time someone express an opinion. Ryan-Mark also falls out of a hammock and complains petulantly about getting grass on his suit. For their shoot, Ryan-Mark lolls in a sauna with his LGBTQ actor friend, then lolls by the side of a hot-tub with the hem of his dressing gown perilously close to getting wet, then for a short stroll in the woods to Finnish. Fun and games in the editing suite, as stressed-out director Jemelin barks out “focus more on the sauna” and is not best pleased when the video guy takes her literally and gives her a close-up of the sign saying “sauna” in the sauna room. Lewis fancies himself as a music expert and adds a crass noisy backing track that appears designed to irritate the peace-loving Finns.

Teams are reunited and get to see what their other halves have done. Lewis really doesn’t like the logo and video clip and lets everyone know about it. Dean could justifiably point out it was absolutely nothing to do with him. Next, Dean inspires his troops and develops a great pitch strategy. Only joking. He just sits around looking out of his depth as usual, but he does stir himself to say he wants to be in on the pitch.

The pitches are for travel and advertising experts plus the Head of Finnish Tourism who is probably a bundle of laughs underneath his gloomily impassive exterior. There’s a new angle to the pitches as the two team members not pitching get to watch the pitch on an outside TV and comment on how bad it is.

Team Unison have PM Dean stumbling around lost for words and totally out of his depth, then present their noisy backpacker advert and the Finnish tourist guy asks why they picked such horrible music that is totally untypical of their country and is totally the wrong choice. The Finns have a well-deserved reputation for asking straight questions. Another expert asks why they picked a gloomy black background and Scarlett says “Thanks for your feedback. We thought it was great. But again, yeah, thanks for your feedback.” which just sounds like “We’re right and you’re wrong”. The expert is clearly not impressed with this blatant fobbing-off.

Marianne has decided that as PM, she needs to be in the Team Empower pitch. She explains to the panel that because of Helsinki’s Gay Pride festival, they decided to focus on the LG Bee Gee, no the YMCA, no RAC AA QED before her fellow presenters finally step in and manage to arrange the letters LGBTQ in the right order. They show their video of a packed festival square and two guys dancing. One expert asks why their video is just like a festival advert, rather than advertising Finland. Thomas replies by thanking her for managing to pick up the Gay Pride theme – it’s literally the entire advert, which was the point of her question. Marianne gets a few more Finnish facts wrong to the horror of Pamela and Jemelin outside, and post-pitch feedback from them is that Marianne was a bit rubbish and shouldn’t have been there.

Lord Sugar decides that the backpacker campaign was the least awful, so a very lucky Dean makes it through to next week. He was surely a goner if he’d lost. Thomas is shocked that Finland have rejected his wonderful, terrific, smashing campaign and passed up this golden opportunity to become the world’s leading tourist destination. Jemelin’s TV advert is panned for being disorganised and formulaic. Ryan-Mark comes in for criticism in the boardroom for the half-hearted way he puts himself forward for PM, which people have started to notice. An embarrassing moment in the boardroom where Marianne is talking about people who just hang about in the background and don’t contribute. Pamela interrupts to defend herself and Marianne says “I was talking about Ryan-Mark” missing a good chance to say “But now you mention it, Pamela, what do you actually contribute?”. Pamela is rather adept at flying under the radar.

Marianne brings back Jemelin and Ryan-Mark, and after a couple of weeks of just hanging in, Jemelin is finally out. Thomas and Lottie look to be head and shoulders above the competition, both have lots of good ideas. Thomas has the interpersonal skills and charisma that Lottie lacks completely, but once he gets an idea, he defends it to the death, no matter what, whereas Lottie is more coldly analytical.

[wheypat]

You missed out the dead body at the end of the episode

https://thetab.com/uk/2019/11/14/the-ap ... oor-132109