The Apprentice: Sir Alan Sugar’s search continues

I pity the poor folk of Margate. They had eight would-be apprentices inflicted upon their town. I’m surprised it’s still standing.

The teams this week were led by the brutal brunettes: Deborah and Yasmina. Boy, those women are really something. Bossy, aggressive, ignorant and self-obsessed does not even begin to cover it.

The two teams were charged with the task of rebranding Margate. Empire, led by Yasmina, chose a safe family theme, albeit with a rather macabre slogan "See Margate through children’s eyes". Real Business really shouldn’t get flashes from the naughties horror flick Jeepers Creepers, but it does.

Ignite went for an altogether more risque option and pitched their marketing towards the gay community. Not everyone in the group was in favour of this however. Mona expressed her dislike for the idea of targeting "the gays", as she called them.

Bless her, though. She’s probably completely open-minded. She no doubt has many gay friends and relatives. She’s probably gay herself. The programme makers just "edited" the footage to make her look prejudiced and borderline homophobic. Probably.

We actually needed a bit of homophobia to inject some kind of life into the episode. Incest would have been better. Or at least an inter-house relationship. Anything to keep us from falling asleep during the programme. The task was completely uninspiring! Damn it, Sir Alan, you failed with this one. He couldn’t even be arsed to talk about what went wrong. He just handed it over to the scores: Ignite and Empire pitched their posters and leaflets to branding specialists and Margate residents and received a mark out of ten.

Of course Deborah’s team were going to fail. They left huge blank spaces on their leaflet, for crying out loud. And their "same sex couples" posters looked beyond saccharine. I had to go to the dentist to have my cavities filled after only a few second’s exposure. They got four out of ten from both the industry specialists and the locals.

I suppose it didn’t help that James kept referring to residents as "the blue rinse brigade".

Yasmina’s team managed a respectable, if pedestrian, seven out of ten on both scores and were soon zooming around the Lotus racetrack in tangerine sports cars.

Deborah, Mona and – yes, you guessed it – James ended up in the boardroom, fighting to survive.

It was a task to rebrand a beachside town. A task that left this team completely out to sea. With the indomitable Deborah swishing her jet hair like Blackbeard himself, James losing his oars but staying afloat, it was Mona who eventually walked the plank.

And so the series plunges on through the high seas. Mona’s been fed to the sharks. Real Business can’t help but be pleased that the hoity toity madam got her just desserts. In fact, it makes one feel positively… well… gay.

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