The Apprentice Week 10 recap: Del Boy, Santa and seduction are a bad combination

The Apprentice always requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

This week we’re asked to believe that the candidates sleep through a BBC camera crew walking into their bedroom, setting up their lighting, taking a statutory tea-break, and then shooting some footage of them in bed.

While downstairs a team of set dressers are putting up a Poundland’s worth of Christmas decorations and dressing a Christmas tree.

But as it’s not quite Christmas, The Apprentice is filmed in June after all, that elderly gentleman with the white beard who has turned up unexpectedly isn’t Santa. It’s Lord Sugar.

And he’s brought you another one of his crazy Generation Game tasks: making chocolates.

And of course we’re mixing up the teams again. Khadija joins Sabrina and Sîan on Collaborative and Dan joins Camilla and Sarah-Ann in Typhoon.

Choosing a lid for the chocolate teapot

Camilla, it transpires, it not just a nut enthusiast. She’s a chocolate enthusiast as well, so she’ s elected team leader.

Camilla decides to trust Sarah-Ann completely on the flavourings for the chocolates. Because we’ve all forgotten Week 3’s Donut Task and so we don’t really care how anything tastes.

And Sarah-Ann clearly doesn’t, because she buckles down to the serious task of drinking all the booze in the kitchen before she even thinks about kicking together any chocolate recipes.

The expert that has been assigned to guide her through the process suggests one drop of rum per chocolate so she starts with at least three. She’s totally Keith Floyding it.

Very little of the booze actually ends up in Sarah-Ann’s recipes. Because she drank it all.

In fact, Sarah-Ann isn’t quite sure what went into those chocolates. She tries to reconstruct the measurements after the fact by process of elimination. Which ‘totally impressed’ Karren.

Khadija goes with more of an explicit Christmas theme. Because, as she puts it, what’s more classy than a chestnut?

Claude was persuaded to sample Khadija’s recipes. He didn’t exactly seem impressed.

But the big question on everybody’s lips was – what was that hairnet doing?

Sex sells, ask Del Boy

Daniel and Camilla lead one another down a very porny path with the branding. XXXmas Treats? Randy Rudolph? We settle on Santa’s Choco Seduction.

Because nothing says ‘Christmas’ quite like the title of a hardcore adult website.

Sîan and Sabrina are going for an altogether more upmarket branding concept.

They’ve gone with ‘Remoir’ which is French for… well it’s not French for anything.

50% Apprentice, 100% Only Fools and Horses.

But there’s no time to mess around with minor details like the product or the branding, because Sîan and Sabrina need an acting class at the London Dungeon, for some reason.

The Apprentice goes to Elf School

Which seems ludicrous until you find out that their rivals Camilla and Daniel are going to Elf School.

They learn some genuinely cringey dances, finally explaining why Camilla has been wearing those socks with her high heels all day.

That’s not her weirdest wardrobe choice though. She also tries on a ‘Santa riding a reindeer’ costume and asks Daniel “is this sexy?” He says yes, which suggests that either he was lying to be polite or he’s a lot weirder than he looks.

Both Apprentice teams pitch to The Co-Op and online greetings card outfit Moonpig.

Typhoon invite team Co-Op up for an Elf Dance.They react pretty much the way that any rational adult might.

They also point out that the amateurish packaging for Santa’s Choco Seduction is more sex-IST than sex-Y.

Even though the disastrously tacky packaging offers no clues as to which flavour chocolates are inside.

They do better with Moonpig. Those guys, God bless them, even said yes to the cringey dance.

Collaborative’s pitch is mainly characterised by Sabrina improvising details of the packaging on the fly, and Sîan totally bluffing the amount of marketing spend that would be available for their ‘luxury chocolate brand.’

Khadija, not unreasonably asks Sîan where she got her totally made-up figures from. Sîan, to her credit, simply says “I don’t know.”

It was a bluff that paid off. In the final analysis Typhoon got 750 orders from Moonpig and nothing from the Co-Op while Collaborative struck out with Moonpig but scored a decisively victorious 7,000 orders from the supermarket chain.

The last Quality Street in the tin

Sîan, who clearly thought she had blown it with her fanciful promises, was overcome to discover that they had won.

She had recovered her composure by the time that the team gathered for their victory celebrations though, and was claiming all the credit for their success.

It’s notable that the rewards for winning the individual tasks have been very week this year. Afternoon tea? Really?

So. The final three members of the team gathered in the boardroom. Camilla put all her energy into backing away from Daniel’s ideas for the product. Ideas which, at the time, she had been delighted with.

Daniel fought his corner hard too, while Sarah-Ann just looked terrified.

Even Lord Sugar had spotted that their branding was a bit too ‘Carry On’

It could have been any of them that went, but it was Sarah-Ann that eventually took the taxi tide to oblivion.

So. Next week. The penultimate programme. The final five. Who’s your money on?

It’s got to be Sabrina to win, hasn’t it? Who ya got?

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