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Who should win The Apprentice?

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As the eighth series of The Apprentice comes to an end, Lord Sugar is now left with only four candidates to choose from to make one his business partner.

On Sunday the remaining contestants will have to pitch their business idea to the board and go through a number of excruciating and embarrassing interviews. So let’s take a look at who is left and has a chance of winning.

Jade Nash

The business development manager likes to get the job done but sometimes doesn’t really think about the best way to get the job done. For example when she had to do the maths for the Groupon task she couldn’t add numbers together unless they ended in a zero.

She was maybe a bit annoying at the beginning because she wouldn’t listen to anyone, but recent successes in the tasks have shown that she might be alright.

Nick Holzherr

The technology entrepreneur has been quiet throughout the series. During the final task Nick spotted when their chocolate company was going off track but didn’t do much anything about it.

However, when he is in charge he is quite calm, collected and knows how to get the best out of his team as he did with the selling tat to the people of Essex task.

Ricky Martin

The recruitment team leader with the most inappropriate name for a business man is in with a good chance. His inspiration is Alan Sugar and throughout the series enjoyed having the chance to show off. He even referred to himself as “the reflection of perfection”.

My Ricky highlight from the series has to be watching him force lumpy, horrific looking tomato sauce into glass bottles so that they didn’t waste any of the mixture in the condiment making task.

Tom Gearing

Tom is the youngest contestant in this year’s final, aged 23, and is the director of a fine wine investment company. He was also the only person brave enough to stand up to Adam when he wanted to make top quality food using the cheapest products available in the street food task.

He has quite an artistic approach to the competition and when he doesn’t like the direction that the task is going pulls a face like he is sucking a lemon.

Head over to our Facebook page and vote for who you think should be the winner.

The winner will be revealed on Sunday when Lord Sugar points his finger and says “You’re gonna be my business partner”, which isn’t as catchy as “You’re hired”.

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Smelling the success on The Apprentice

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The budget was quite clearly blown on The Apprentice this week, as the contestants were given a van and £150 and told to make as much cash from selling cheap tat.

If you just want to know who was fired this week then click below, otherwise we’ll get on to ridiculing the contestants.

Show spoiler »

 Azhar Siddique is the latest casualty after getting on the wrong end of Alan Sugar’s finger.

It is a bit of a lazy day in The Apprentice household, as Lord Sugar calls them at 5pm to tell them to get over to wholesale warehouse in Essex. They meet Lord Sugar in a darkened car park, where he explains that each team has £150 to buy products to sell to the people of Essex, whilst keeping tabs on what is selling and when to get more stock.

Lord Sugar plays around with the teams a bit, bringing Stephen to Sterling and Laura over to Phoenix. He also points out that some people still haven’t been project manager, and hints that this might be the week they give it a go.

Jade, from Phoenix, gets the hint and decides to be project manager. However, Ricky Martin over on Sterling sees a chance to be a bit of a suck up and puts himself up to be project manager even though he has no background but it is what Lord Sugar would have done. Ricky seems quite miffed when Nick puts himself forward and the team go with him instead.

Sterling choose the best places in Essex to set up a stall and start browsing the shelves to see what tat they could sell there. They seem keen on beard trimmers, fake tan and nail kits. Meanwhile Phoenix aren’t off to the best start; they are taking a long time to choose a place to set up a market and manage to find vibrating toys in the warehouse. They also find the fake tan, as well as hot water bottles and little plastic insects.

While Sterling seem to have a plan and are thinking about what is best to sell at their different locations, Phoenix have bought a variety of things and don’t really know what to do with them. Azhar starts to mention that they should have a strategy, but gets ignored. He seems a bit miffed.

The next morning, as preparation for dealing with customers in Essex, Stephen and Ricky try out their best TOWIE impersonations.

The teams set up and start to awkwardly interact with the public. Ricky and Stephen create an odd script for their products to bring in the customers and Nick offers free haircuts for life with a hair trimmer. The most popular product for Sterling is the tan, rather surprisingly. Jenna, in an attempt to sell the beard trimmers, ends up talking to a beardless man who seems to think the only person he knows with a beard is himself. Team Phoenix are having problems with selling their odd mixture of items, yet Adam is doing well on the market and shockingly getting people interested in their tat.

Coming up to lunchtime the teams are running out of stock and plan another trip to the warehouse. As Jade and Adam set off to buy more products Azhar calls again wanting to know more about the team’s strategy. Jade gets annoyed and ignores him again.

Once the stock has been replenished, each teams have their own squabbles, they try to make good use of the rest of the day. They attempt to sell as much as possible before the end of the day and do their best to impress Lord Sugar.

And so we come to boardroom time. Nick explains Sterling’s approach to the task with their Essex kit, Lord Sugar looks horrified as to what they think Essex is all about. Overall Nick is seen as a good project manager, although Alan Sugar says it is “shameful” that they had a period with no stock. Over on team Phoenix Jade is immediately criticised for taking a long time to choose where to go, but she loved the effort of her team and has no complaints about them. Azhar says there was a lack of strategy, and somehow this is the first time Jade seems to have heard about this.

Both teams seem to think they have done well, but based on the figures Phoenix assets comes to £838 and Sterling’s assets are worth £955. Nick and the rest of the team get a night of cocktails as a reward, and Phoenix get to visit Bridge Cafe again.

Jade says that everyone did well, and as they lost the task with her as project manager then she should be the one going home. Surprisingly she does not say this in the boardroom. Instead she goes for Azhar and flounders when having to pick someone else to get the wrath of Sugar. In a panic she brings Tom back with her. As he was one of the best on the project this decision annoys Lord Sugar.

On paper it looks certain that Jade is going; she was in charge of losing the task and she panics. However, Azhar keeps mentioning strategy and wasting time so Lord Sugar decides to fire him. Yet again another silly decision made, I think. We are now down to the final nine, and hopefully some of the candidates who should have gone earlier in the series will be given the boot soon.

Next week the candidates will be turning their hand to modern art, which I am guessing will go very well. Before then you can catchup with the rest of the series of The Apprentice so far on iPlayer.

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The Apprentice is back

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By now you would have thought that Lord Sugar would have found his perfect business partner, yet every year he gets the BBC to commission another series of The Apprentice. And every year he seems to find 16 businessmen and women who are as useless as the previous lot. Nevertheless we are stuck with them now, so we should make the best of it.

As it is only week one all the contestants are eager to point out why they are brilliant, and rather than just saying why they come up with pointless phrases. Last night’s example of this was one contestant, called Ricky Martin, declared that he is “the reflection of perfection”. That’s nice dear.

Their first task was to create their own printed goods, so they had to come up with a design and print it onto some blank products. As it is early days in the show they split of into a group of boys and a group of girls and come up with their names. The boys went for Phoenix, so if they went wrong and put it right they could rise from the ashes and the girls went for Sterling, because one of them had a dream about it.

Early on it seemed that the girls had the advantage as one of the contestants, Gabrielle Omar, has started her own print company. So whilst the boys came up with awe inspiring products like a teddy bear with a union flag t shirt on and a tote bag with “This is a” written on it with a picture of a bus to complete the sentence and in the process of managed to colour almost all the bag with the dye, apart from where the design was supposed to be. But the girls knew what they were doing as far as making their baby themed products which had a picture of a rough sketch of some zoo animals.

Although this is where any advantages the girls team had quickly disappeared. For some reason the women started bickering and pointing fingers at who wasn’t doing their work rather than doing their work. Meanwhile the boys were knowingly selling crap products to people for a ridiculously high price. Although they did get picked up on this as someone who had bought ten of their bags for stock in their shop pointed out the imperfections, so the boys sheepishly gave them a refund.

However, the girls who for some reason spent time at the zoo in attempt to sell to anyone then started walking the long back streets of London led by Bilyana Apostolova who insisted she knew where she was going. Eventually they arrived at some shops where the staff weren’t really interested in their products, and ended up getting the hard sell from the entire group leading to them being told off. Honestly if these are the best entrepreneurs we’ve got then we should stop trying to make Britain a place to do business.

After their long, hard day of selling they all met up in the boardroom to be given a dressing down by Lord Sugar. And this is what really annoys me about the show, the boys who didn’t know what they were doing but could sell a broken vacuum cleaner as if it was brand new and just off the shelf won this week’s task, whilst the girls who made a better product lost.

So the boys went off for celebratory cocktails and the girls argued about who should go. Now to be honest I skipped most of this to get a bowl of ice cream. But from what I can tell Bilyana, who walked them round London for no reason, talked herself into a bit of a hole and was the first of the series to be pointed at by Sugar and told that she’s fired.

The whittling down of contestants continues next week on BBC1 at 9pm where they will be making a new household gadget. In the meantime you can catch up with this episode on iPlayer.

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