Dog's dinner
This week Sir Alan Sugar condemned the boys to losing by imposing a weak team leader on them and showed that the women could be led to victory with a good project manager. Their task was selling food in a pub for a day.
Ian promised his team as "much clear and concise management" as he could. Which was not very much.
Kevin and Simon were the kitchen staff. Simon, the ever dutiful NCO, recommended Kevin as the only head chef in the kitchen. Ian tagged along. Although this was the team Ian selected to bring back to the boardroom to face the firing line, it was the other four who lost the task by spending too much on supplies.
The boys spent £543 against the girls £191. Pizza bases were bought in boxes and bread was bought in delis. The guys spent a fortune on leaflets which were given away and on menus. The girls got tickets printed for free and then sold them for £5 each. They were in profit before they served a single meal.
And by getting the menus printed, Michael committed them to a low prices for soup. Presumably all the prices were pulled out of the air.
Sara did a good job in pulling together the girls who had been left demoralised after the previous task. She took a vote to decide which theme they should go for - Indian.
And when the ever-tearful Lucinda started wittering on about scheduling Sara made it clear that the first thing to be decided was the menu.
The girls were in trouble when they opened for business as the meals were not good enough to be served at lunch. But they nevertheless almost managed to catch up with the boys' turnover by the end of the day with sales of £795 against the boys £845.
But as the boys had spent so much on supplies and other costs the girls' profit was £604, twice the boys' £302.
Ian chose to bring Kevin and Simon back with him to the boardroom, sending home the ones he could have blamed for the overspending. Sir Alan had little choice but to fire him, showing he could say "loser" even if Ian couldn't.
Sir Alan would love to hire Simon but warned him he would have to show he could do more than chop onions to become The Apprentice. Sara had joined Raef as a candidate to have performed well as a team leader. But neither are sufficiently bland to become Sir Alan Sugar's Apprentice and so the field is still wide open.
Although The Apprentice and You're Fired runs for over twice the time of an episode of NBC's Apprentice, weak production standards mean that we were not given as clear an idea of why things went wrong as we could have been. Margaret and Nick hardly made an appearance. We were not told whose idea it was to sell the tickets - a key feature in the girls' victory - or who set the prices for the girls. And Adrian Chiles is too busy with other commitments to impose any structure on You're Fired.
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