Apprentice - Final

[zico]

It’s Scarlett v Carina in the final. Both are competent, capable, determined and good at dealing with people. The main difference between them is probably their eyebrows - Carina's are blacker, but Scarlett's are wider. As usual, their task now is to market their planned businesses by creating a digital screen and TV screen before presenting to 200+ industry experts. Lord Sugar says that Carina needs to show him her current single family café business is scalable, while Scarlett needs to show him a USP for her business, as he’s already got two recruitment business partners.

Lord Sugar has “laid on” 8 eliminated contestants to help them, which they pick one-by-one. Carina picks Pamela, Thomas, Jemelin and Ryan-Mark. Scarlett picks Marianne, Lewis, Dean and guess who’s picked last – yes, it’s Lottie.

We’re asked to believe that neither Scarlett nor Carina has ever given a moment’s thought to their business name, so we have “brainstorming” sessions, though given the lack of depth of ideas, these are more like “thought showers”. Lottie's suggestions are immediately rubbished by Scarlett, while Marianne has a different line of thinking along the lines of “what’s that animal that builds things?” but when the combined wisdom of the group comes up with the answer “beaver”, spoilsport Scarlett doesn’t want to call her company anything like “Scarlett’s Beaver Specialists”.

Scarlett’s USP is to supply the engineering sector with top recruits from women, minorities and diverse groups, so she wants a name to capture all that, and she eventually decides that "Stanton Lily” fits the bill. Her reasoning is that Lily is Scarlett’s middle name, and Stanton is the surname of one of the first ever women to get an engineering degree. Not a lot of people know that, and maybe not Scarlett’s potential clients. She creates a logo of a head with clockwork cogs inside, and Dean shocks us all by making a sensible comment, saying the image is often associated with mental health issues. It’s too late to be useful, but even so, some sense from Dean after all these weeks.

Carina starts by organising a team tasting of her café’s bakery products, and they all tuck in enthusiastically. Jemelin says the products taste “insane”. Carina works with Thomas to create her brand name, ending up with “Lepore’s Bakery” because her name is Carina Lepore and she’s running a bakery, though with the funny font, it's not clear whether it's Lepore or Lepone, and it's not clear how you'd pronounce it either. Not exactly an inspired choice of name, but then neither were Mr. Marks and Mr. Spencer, or Mr. C and Mr. A.

Carina makes her bestie Pamela the subteam leader, and sends them off with a brief of “nothing too silly, and focus on freshness”. They do a video clip of Ryan-Mark enjoying the bread and swatting away someone’s stray hand because “Lepone’s bread is too good to share”. They need to do quite a few takes because Ryan-Mark’s eye-rolling enjoyment of the bread is deemed “too orgasmic” by Pamela.

Next, it’s onto the TV ad. This is pretty entertaining featuring Jemelin as a tough US-style prison guard and Ryan-Mark as a comically unlikely hardened criminal, who spits out the poor-quality bread she gives him until his release date from prison when he is instead given Lepore’s bakery bread and it’s so good he stays in his prison cell to eat it. It’s a really good idea, and executed really well by all concerned. This is good enough to be a real TV advert.

Scarlett gets Lottie, Dean and Lewis to do the digital screen and TV ads. They kick off with an idea of Dean waving an expansive hand inside a factory to Lottie, which is supposed to signify a chief executive welcoming a top executive (Lottie) but looks like one work placement kid (Dean) happy to welcome the new junior work placement kid because she'll now have to make everyone’s cuppas. The TV ad isn’t any better because Scarlett wants them to pretend to be in an imaginary car and then be joined by a top female executive (Lottie again) who gets into the pretend driving seat which reassures the other passengers. Clearly, this sounds naff to the sub-team when Scarlett explains her idea, and to every single person watching, The sub-team upset Scarlett by doing exactly what she told them to do. When she sees the results, she is surprised that the naff idea she wanted looks naff, and tells the team she thought they would somehow have made it not naff. According to Scarlett they could have achieved this with superior acting skills. Even if she’d used Brad Pitt, Laurence Olivier and Meryl Streep, this would still have looked naff.

Market research time, and Thomas is bombarding the public with open questions like “Isn’t our tremendous advert the absolute best you’ve ever seen in your whole life?” Scarlett’s market research isn’t going quite so well, as the public have no idea what the ads are about. Lottie is clearly enjoying this negative feedback, and says they’ll just give Scarlett the honest feedback and then she can do what she wants with it.

So far, Carina is streets ahead, with far better branding and advertising. We see Scarlett do a podcast with two successful female minority entrepreneurs, interviewing them and exchanging tips about how to get ahead. Karen is very impressed by this. Carina’s dad is the baker in her business, but Carina has to prepare a new type of bread to accompany her pitch, which sounds a bit unfair, but she manages to produce something good.

Next it’s the crucial pitch to the big audience after a long nerve-racking walk down a big open spiral staircase in full view of the audience. When preparing, Carina looks to be getting herself extremely wound up and could be about to make a complete mess of her pitch through nerves. Scarlett is nervous, but more in control and she delivers a competent pitch despite her terrible adverts. Carina gets stage-fright at the start, even saying she needs to start again, but then gets into her stride and is helped by the adverts going down very well.

Back in the boardroom, and Lord Sugar tells Carina that given Thomas was involved in the branding, he’s surprised that her business isn’t called “Thomas’s Brilliant Bakery”. Thomas showed his customary enthusiasm in supporting Carina, and cemented his position as nicest bloke in this year’s bunch. Lord Sugar tells Carina and Scarlett they’ve both underestimated how difficult it will be to grow their business and he’s concerned about scalability. He sends the two candidates out and Claude sings Scarlett’s praises, saying how well she’d done in all the tasks, and what a good candidate she is, while Karen goes into bat for Carina, saying that all she really lacks is the business knowledge and advice that Lord Sugar would provide, and also points out she’s looking for new stores which would fit in with the Lord’s property empire. He brings the candidates back and tells them they are both start-ups. Scarlett fights hard for the win, saying she has much more experience in her business than Carina has in hers.

Lord Sugar thinks aloud for a bit about what a difficult decision it is, saying he already has two recruitment companies but no shops, then finally making his decision by saying “I like the idea of more bread” which isn’t the most convincing business argument the world’s ever heard. Carina wins and she flashes a delighted smile at Scarlett, before realising that of course her gain is also Scarlett’s loss. Scarlett is disappointed, but is a classy loser, and there’s obviously a fair bit of mutual respect and maybe friendship between the two. Quite a canny decision by Lord Sugar as Carina is based in South-East London and what a small family bakery cafe really needs is a vast amount of free publicity on national television, so Carina seems destined for business success.

(1 edit - to take account of point raised in Kiloran's reply)

[kiloran]

Carina works with Thomas to create her brand name, ending up with “Lepone’s Bakery” because her name is Carina Lepone and she’s running a bakery.

Brilliantly entertaining write-up as usual, zico, except it's Lepore's Bakery because her name is (surprise, surprise) Carina Lepore

Roll on the next series, which will be as boring as ever except for your write-ups. Many thanks

--kiloran

[zico]

Carina works with Thomas to create her brand name, ending up with “Lepone’s Bakery” because her name is Carina Lepone and she’s running a bakery.

Brilliantly entertaining write-up as usual, zico, except it's Lepore's Bakery because her name is (surprise, surprise) Carina Lepore

Roll on the next series, which will be as boring as ever except for your write-ups. Many thanks

--kiloran

Thanks - I almost put in my original post that the font they chose didn't make it clear how it was spelt, and I inadvertently proved my own point (i.e. the one that I didn't make)! I've edited my OP now to take account of that.

[AsleepInYorkshire]

I began this series thinking this was probably one of the worst line ups I'd seen.

However, the final programme turned that on it's head and I think Lord Sugar has probably just bagged an exceptional partner and I genuinely believe she will do very well indeed.

She's a down to earth hard working, smart cookie. What more do you need

AiYn'U

[redsturgeon]

Lottie and Thomas made this series...the beauty and the beast.

John

[swill453]

Lottie and Thomas made this series...the beauty and the beast.

Not sure I'd call Thomas a "beauty"...

Scott.

[redsturgeon]

Never heard of , "Me ole beauty", as a compliment?



John