IT'S A CRIME! (OR A MYSTERY...)

Tom Pellereau, the 2011 Apprentice Winner

Congratulations to Tom Pellereau (@Tom_Pellereau) this year's Apprentice winner!  I loved him from the start.  Here are some pictures of the jubilant Tom.

All earlier Apprentice 2011 posts can be found here.

The Apprentice 2011 – fast food to determine the final four…

Yes, to determine the final four it was a week of fast food.   And as the final is on the TV tonight, this week’s post of the speedy and truncated variety too.

Teams this week were: Natasha and Susan led by Jim; Tom led by Helen.

Task: create a fast food outlet. Something original, added the voiceover.

I loved it that man in charge of a Soho Mexican food outlet was a South African.  And the food.  Oh dear.  It just doesn’t look appealing does it?  What’s the black stuff?

Susan: ‘… and even though we had some problems before on the previous task, all the air’s been cleared…’  Not according to Natasha’s face, no.

Susan eats in a lot of Mexican restaurants.  So I have to ask: where’s the originality then Susan?

It could have been easy partnership between Tom and Helen but Helen soon asserted herself and made it clear who was in charge didn’t she?  A touch of control freakery in evidence there.

And now for a big ‘shhh’.  We should only whisper about the lack of knowledge of history in evidence when it came to branding British food.  Tom and Helen seemed to think that Christopher Columbus was British and, having discovered the potato, brought it to these islands.  I’d love to ask them where cherry genoa cake was first spotted and by whom.

Helen thought the pie and mash needed feminising by making smaller pies for the ladies.  That’s a higher proportion of the junk stuff (fatty pastry) in the smaller model, Helen!  But sales seemed to go well…

Jim thought it was 'another time for me to shine' but just escaped the taxi in the end.

We were told on You’re Fired that Natasha had been tired.  But she looked like someone who lost all interest when she didn’t get her own way in that final team of three.

And who will be the winner?   We will all find out tonight.  The final is on BBC1 at 9pm, immediately followed by a Dara O’Briain analysis.

I really would not be surprised if Helen wins tonight and MyPy hits the street within a year.   But without the Columbus mash.

The Apprentice – Week 9, Episode 10

Needing to strike the scalpel to produce the final five, this episode asked our candidates to go sell from wholesale and build the business on the evidence of bestselling products.  Simple, yes?  Well only if you’re Lord Sacch, Nick or Karren.  The candidates (some of them) may have seen this task differently.  Mistakes were multiple this week and quite serious.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 8, Episode 9

Written while viewing on iplayer…

Gosh, don’t they look different without make up on?  And the tiredness is showing too.  Even on Karren’s face!  So, it’s make a new biscuit time and it’s off to Wales to do some baking; who knew they had biscuit development boffins in Swansea?  The land of my fathers is the home of the science of crunch.

Let’s take a look at the teams first now we’ve had a little stir of the pot again.  Helen who has worked in the food industry leads Jim and Natasha.  Zoë who has done the same and takes a rolling pin to flatten Susie at the first opportunity leads Susie (nemesis alert), Melody and Tom.  Recapping, that’s Zoë, Susie, Melody (the harpie clan) and The Real Mr Nice, Tom.  This one is set for crumbs at dawn by shooting pistol.  Something tells me that Helen will pull a money-from-rubbish-week and handle with aplomb.

Er, did I hear that correctly?  Zoë said ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m probably more happy working with Susie.’  I think that probably translates as ‘I can walk all over Susie as I have done before, but Melody is one scary woman.  I can cut her off by sending her to the bakery and have her at the end of the mobile.  What’s more, if the product turns out to be crap, I have the bitch to land it on and get rid of her pronto in the boardroom.’  Ooh, I am tense already.  This is more on the edge than Luther and it’s even about biscuits…

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 7, Episode 8

 
‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, it was time to take some leading edge British product innovation to some chic shops in Paris; time for some young and rare business roast beefs to get the grenouilles on board.  Now down to the last eight ‘crème de la crème’ of budding entrepreneurs, our faux amis needed to hide their innate and developed froideur and just get on with it.  Difficult though eh?  (As can be seen in the pic above.)  We may have suffered endless opening streams of their raison d'être for being on the show, where they have professed their savoir-faire with no attendant humility, but now it’s the practical and the talons are out.

The Apprentice – Week 6, Episode 7

Freemium Week

This week our teams were tasked with creating a new freemium magazine: the magazine that is offered free to the consumer, funded by advertising revenue.  Given a bit of market research, Natasha’s team went  down the lads’ mag route, not of all them entirely convinced it has to be said.  But Natasha was and she explained this very well.  To camera.  Did she also pitch this to her own team?  Helen looked the most unconvinced and as if such work would sully a recent premium manicure on her clean hands.  But lads’ mag it was.

On the other team, project managed by Jim, the lucrative market of the over sixties was identified and targeted.  Struggling to come up with a name for the magazine, Zoë suggested ‘Be Hip. Hip Replacement.’  Jim, suddenly looking like someone had switched on the light bulb in his head said into his mobile ‘Zoë’s come up with a good one: Hip Replacements.’  Really? Didn’t the addition of the ‘replacement’ actually ruin the play on words?  And when it came the cover proved to be the coffin for the mag.  Has anything else ever looked quite so destined for the coffee table in a Harley Street hip replacement specialist orthopod’s waiting room?

The Apprentice – Week 5, Episode 6

‘… If it sounds too good to be true in terms of price then it probably is …’

 

Oh boy, was this one of the most inspired and hence hardest tasks we have yet seen on The Apprentice.  If you watched ‘You’re Fired’ later you’ll know that the man with the rubbish business who gave the briefing to the candidates is an ex-banker with an MBA: neither of which he likes to draw attention to at the workplace.  But oh, the subtleties of such a business where items can be salvaged.  There’s providing a clearance at a cost for service.  There’s doing it for free knowing that some items can be salvaged at an ongoing revenue return.  And then there’s the margin end of the business…  (Watch the programme for an explanation of that last one as I’m not sure I ‘got it’.  But then, our candidates were not always 100% on the ‘got it’ front either, which led to some dramatic viewing.)  Oh, I forgot one other aspect to this: being screwed by builders. But that’s the business they’re in, innit?

The Apprentice 2011 – Week Four, Episode Five

Opener: clearly Glenn is one of those men who is more attractive clothes off than on.  Which made for an injection of interest before last week’s recap… 

And the task this week?  Make and brand a unique pet food and then produce a TV advertisement to sell it.  Pets across the globe would no doubt have been salivating at Lord Sacch’s words.  Could he be the new Pavlov?  Tinkle, tinkle little bell, Lord Pavlova will serve you now.  No, I can’t see it.  Not even at Battersea.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 3

Who’d have thought we’d see a story with a massive character development arc in beauty treatment week?  Leon – the I am butch, I have a girlfriend boy – ended the programme a fully blown metrosexual man.  Will he be swapping beauty product tips with Vince by the end of week four?  I bet his suitcase will be far heavier on his departure from The Apprentice compared with arrival time.  Lotions and potions weigh a tonne.

Felicity’s team made a quick decision about location and it was thank you to the Birmingham girls time, with even Tom piping in.  But he subsequently had some concerns to raise and he raised them gently.  It was just one treatment room and it was on the third floor of the department store, a bit far away.  He was also concerned that the selected location had enough basins etc.  But all was fine because Melody – an expert, as she’s a Birmingham girl, said so.  She didn’t say why though.  And we all knew the debate was over when Felicity ended it with a curt ‘… So if you can just put that down Tom.’  Not a listening team leader then.

The Apprentice 2011 – Week 2

No double helping this week, it was back to the normal Wednesday run.  But the frisson of excitement came from the first mix of the teams.  The boys – twice the losing team – must have thought this was a great opportunity.  Gavin certainly did, putting himself forward for, and winning the role of team of captain.  Vince looked disappointed, but that’s the equivalent of a motorway services sign with flashing lights: ‘I’ll show them who the real boss is in this task.’

On the other team, young Susan quickly took the reins and showed some pretty decent organisational skills.   Her team management and strategic tour de force was to come just a little later on the creation of the sub-team.  With a couple of staccato clicks of the tongue, her nemesis from last week – Edna – was despatched like a rocket into collection mode with the sub-team.  Like Susan, we didn’t see much of Edna later, or her gloves and we all escaped nightmares once the show was over.