Online Previews The Apprentice (UK) 8x13 Why I Fired Them

Series 8 of The Apprentice (UK) was a British reality television series which was won by Yasmina Siadatan. Free Download Video The Apprentice (UK) 2nd June 2012 Episode On BBC One (UK) Tv Online Tv Live Streaming Video . The series began airing on BBC One on 25 March 2009 Online Watch The Apprentice (UK) Full Episode Watch Stream HD Video on Internet TV. and ran for twelve weekly hour-long episodes, as in all previous years. Auditions and interviews took place during July 2008 in London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham. There were fifteen participants; one more dropped out prior to the first boardroom briefing.Sir Alan Sugar, Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford made appearances, as in all previous series. Spin-off show The Apprentice: You're Fired! also returned, airing on BBC Two immediately after the main show.Sixteen candidates were selected however only fifteen candidates were announced for the start of the series. The sixteenth candidate, Adam Freeman, withdrew from the show the night before recording of the series was due to begin, and could not be replaced in time. As a result, the series went ahead with only fifteen candidates. In the first episode, Sir Alan Sugar described Freeman (whom he did not name) as having "bottled it".The team names for this series are Empire (initially the men's team) and Ignite (initially the women's team).It’s the same regular format. I review The UK Apprentice, 2011 season and look for any business lessons that are worth remembering.This episode brought the team to my birth city, Birmingham. They were each given a choice of plot from where to sell and had to choose from a number of cosmetic products. The cosmetic products were introduced to the teams and they then had to secure two which they liked the most.The twist with the plot of course was that they would be performing the lucrative cosmetic treatments themselves alongside selling add ons.The teams by now are completely mixed so it’s very hard to keep track of who is on each team, and to be honest yesterday I did not really care as it was such a boring episode that if it wasn’t for this blog I would have switched off.

So one team choose the ‘Bullring’ in Birmingham and I have no real idea where the other place was as the show really focused on promoting the Bullring.It was mentioned once, but so fast I never clung onto it. Poor marketing for the second venue.

Anyway the products and treatments chosen are really irrelevant and the business lessons focused on something else.

The key money-maker in this task were the cosmetic treatments. They had the most lucrative markup and a winning profit per minute combination.

Naturally, both teams seemed to lose sight of this fact with one team in particular not pushing or selling any treatments for over three hours. They did however have a little disadvantage, their treatment rooms were some three floors away so although customer were told where to go, they neither took a deposit to ensure they would get there or took the initiative to escort them there.

There was only one moment of genius in the show, which was actually quite bizarre. Leon used a little finger technique to beckon girls over and entice them into product sales. Fun and laughable at the same time but it worked. Something confident men might use in a club really…

So we got to the boardroom and one team actually made a loss. disappointing considering the markup on cosmetic treatments is so high. It was naturally the team which did not concentrate on the cosmetic treatments and instead concentrated on selling add ons.

The boardroom again was irritating to watch and ultimately the project manager took the chop as she was both indecisive and failed to take a step back and look at the big picture.How many people sat there last night, dumbstruck, when Sralan gave the job to the bloke who’d seemingly bumbled through the last two or three weeks, and thought if that’s what you have to do, then maybe I can win it too? Because surely – surely! – if the rancid Katie Hopkins hadn’t pulled out because she forgot to ask mommy first last week, Simon – the winner! - wouldn’t even have been in the final two.

Certainly there was little evidence in this tepid final episode to suggest why he would get the job, although to be fair, it was vague enough to let Sralan do pretty much what he wanted. It focused, after all, more on the old contestants bickering and playing with Lego and looking at fishes and stuff than the task in hand.

Kristina, meanwhile, picked a solid team, and organised them effectively. It’s a sackable offence.

Simon didn’t just look like a rabbit in the headlights for much of the show. He looked like a rabbit realising he was in Glenn Close’s house with no chance of escape. The way the episode was edited, we saw Tre assume control of the key idea of a building in the shape of, er, a boat, along with his team continually bickering, and changing ideas when the penny dropped that the boat thing was, ahem, ‘challenging”.

It took, if anything, some classy management from Jadine to pull him back into shape, which resulted in him ranting back at his team, then promising to take them away for the weekend. Personally, I’d have given Jadine the job there and then, and brought this sorry charade to an end.

Simon’s promised incentive did, at least, give Tre the line of the episode, as he wryly noted that "Going on holiday to Barcelona with Rory, Jadine and Lohit for a weekend is like being stabbed in the eye with a rusty screwdriver".

The rest of the episode meandered on in the same way, with Simon’s building resembling two malformed penises on the South Bank of London, and Kristina’s looking impressive enough until you realised she called it The Phoenix. Hopefully it wasn’t just me who wondered if she was about to hire Brian Potter to front her presentation.

And so it came to the boardroom. We’re led to believe that both potential endings were filmed, and the finalists – gamely waiting in the You’re Fired studio with Adrian Chiles – had no idea which would be used, and thus, who’d won. And like the majority of viewers last night they were reportedly dumbstruck when Sralan made his decision. If you believe the tabloids – who’ve had to move the aforementioned Katie Hopkins’ sex life back a few pages as a result – there was a near walk-out, so unhappy were some of them with the final choice.

Realistically, you can see that Simon, as a mid-20s man, is far less the finished article than late-30s Kristina, and thus more likely to be an apprentice of sorts.

But why go through the whole charade of the last twelve weeks then? If I was Kristina, I’d be wondering what the hell I had to do, and if she ever stood a sporting chance of winning. Was Sralan veering towards a male apprentice after his heavily-charted problems with last year’s winner? Or was it an age thing? Perhaps there was something he saw that we didn’t, that was killed in the editing of the programme?

As a viewer, I can’t help feeling cheated. Appreciating this has been the weakest series to date, with the focus far more on individuals – nay, scrub that, pretty much one individual – than any other, and appreciating the man is a risk-taker, you can’t – surely? – say “you’re not a good leader of people” then employ them to, er, lead a project.

Mind you, if Sralan is making his decisions on the basis of the evidence shown on the telly alone, you can pretty much appreciate why Amstrad are in the shit these days.

I’m off to fill in my application form for series four, anyway. I was going to write “can organise, manage, motivate, work hard” and stuff like that. But now I’ve seen what he’s after, I’m going to put “can’t look people in the eye, easily overridden by strong characters, am already loaded and drink shandy”.