MORE APPRENTICE!

Another cavalcade of laughs, thrills and utter cringing embarrassment this week. The task is to create a charidee calendar for Gt Ormond St Hospital and pitch it to retailers. Spineless Samuel is head of the boy’s team and phrosty pharmacist Nargis heads up the girls’ team.

Samuel immediately goes into brainstorming creative overdrive and starts drawing loads of complicated diagrams on the blackboard explaining how your branes work when you have an idea. He is a product developer for Ford IRL so probably spends his working life thinking up cunning new designs for those little trays in cars where you put your loose change. In the end Margaret steps in and tells them to get their act together and actually do something. Samuel is reduced to nodding and looking wan as the rest of the team decide to do a calendar showing babies dressed up in adult jobs (all the jobs they think of stereotypical male jobs by the way – dicks!). Samuel later has a manly repressed crying session (as featured in the trailer). What ev uh. There is a noticeable schism between the boys this week, with Samuel, shaolin monk lookalike Tuan and tall gaydar triggering Mani forming one camp and cockfarmer Syed, beefy ex millwall player Ansell and Paul Tulip (tee hee) in the other camp.

The women do some research on teh interweb and deduce that cat calendars sell the most. Emotionally unstable Jo starts shouting that kittens have nothing to do with Gt Ormond St and they ought to do shots of tubercular babies whose lives were saved by the hospital. Everyone else disagrees and eventually they start doing their cat calendar while Jo goes off to have a little cry.

Cue montage of kitten/baby photography. All the babies seem to be crying and cockfarmer Syed tries to cheer them up – perhaps relieved that he has found someone on his own level to relate to. It looks like a disaster but they get some decent shots (tho they decide that babies hand cuffed together would be a bit weird for the police baby month!). Meanwhile, kittens do cute kitten things for the camera. Ahhhhh.

Tuan is left in charge of calendar design while the others discuss pricing and prepare a sales pitch. The other blokes’ personalities emerge a bit - Paul is smug and irritating. Mani seems to be overconfident but wrong a lot. He is a total knob but he hates Syed and keeps shouting at him for no reason so he can’t be all bad. Ansell seems quite sensible and voice of reason – final four candidate??? Meanwhile the calendar is totally hideous and looks like something I would knock up in my work lunchtime on a graphics package I had not been trained on. Garish background colours and ill placed wacky logos in comics sans serif font a go go! Tuan is taking too long to decide the exact shade of hideous puce for March so he is stripped of his job and the rest of them get it sorted out quickly instead. Tuan goes to another office to cry – dude, you’ll never make it through the 35th Chamber of Shaolin if something like that gets you down.

Why is everyone crying this week? It’s only week two!

The girls’ calendar is v smart and tasteful. Someone with a northern accent (Ruth Badger??) complains that there is no space to write things down and record dates etc (the highly artistic naked French rugby player charity calendar is like that too though! – also call me pls Frederik Michalak) but Nargis tells her to shove it.
Pitching time – to Harrods, Virgin and “Calendar Club” (some kind of seedy online dating forum for calendar fetishists – perhaps!). Mani pitches for the men and is truly awful. He faux emotionally talks about the “self evident right” that babies have to go to hospital and “talks them through the calendar” saying things like “Ha ha ha. There’s a baby playing cricket! Awesome! I love that shot!” Oh shut up. They seem to have forgotten to set a price and the man from Harrods sneers to their faces. It’s not looking good.

Nargis decides to pitch for the girls and is so utterly utterly awful that I have to wrap my jumper round my head to hide from the TV screen. I will try and record it verbatim:

Nargis: (whitters on about cats a bit)

Bloke: Can I just ask you something!

Nargis: CAN YOU LET ME FINISH PLEASE!!!

(Everyone is aghast – tumbleweed blows across meeting room)

Nargis: Do you have any questions?

Bloke: How much does it cost?

Nargis: (freezes like rabbit pinned down by headlights of HGV. Long excruciating pause) C…C… Can you repeat the question?

(Nick winces as though someone has just stabbed him in the kidney)

Etc

The exact same thing happens at all three pitches – why did no-one talk to her in between them???

When the results come out it turns out that the boys have sold no calendars to Harrods or Virgin but won out overall by selling loads to Calendar Club – gasp!! The men go off to have dinner and make smug hateful comments about their vanquished foes. The women come back for the post mortem and Siralan complains that the calendar is rubbish, has nothing to do with hospitals, isn’t branded properly and has no space to write down important dates (eg “Feb 26th – give up on Amstrad emailer finally”). Bu bu but Siralan! The boys’ one was SHIT! Just look at it! Are you blind, man??? He also points out that the presentation was aggressive and rubbish too. Nargis picks Jo (of course) and Icy Lawyer Karen (why???) to take back in with her and someone is going to be fired.

Jo starts shouting that she had the same thoughts re kitten/baby dichotomy as Siralan but of course spoils it by ranting and erupting into heaving sobs etc. Siralan says that he likes her moxy but tells her to calm down ffs. Karen says she has no idea why she was chosen and Nargis says that Karen sabotaged the presentation through telepathy or something that doesn’t really make sense. Nargis came up with the shit calendar idea and gave the worst presentation in the annals of presenting – Nargis is fired!!! In the Cab of Firedness she says it is all Karen’s fault and that she didn’t do anything wrong. Yes, keep telling yourself that, you delusionoid.

Next week: they have to do the “buy ten random things for the least money” task! Oh Jesus help me, is Jo the girl’s project leader??? The blokes pretend to be getting married soon to blag free stuff. Someone is a lightweight (cough* Samuel??? *cough) and is fired.