(by Mark, with interjections by Sarah)
Hurray, another 12 weeks of toe curlingly hilarious TV to make you feel annoyed and resentful about the brightest young business branes of the day! There are the usual shots of people riding up escalators, doing their best Blue Steel looks, and clips of them saying toolish things about how ace they are at selling and stuff while the nation wonders what an International Car Trader does. Does that mean she has ads in Loot in 15 countries? One of them even uses the word “tool” in his clip, which is just asking for it, in my opinion. Another says that he can't say the word loser in case he...umm...melts or something.
We learn that Siralan has sold Amstrad (wot, no emailerphones???) but is still super rich – he is mates with Gordon Brown, woo hoo. In the intro he says that he isn’t Mary Poppins. Damn, my hopes of seeing him dance around with chimney sweeps are dashed FOREVER!!! Margaret and Nick are introduced. Margaret's hair has got whiter and her left eyebrow seems to have been paralysed in the "Oh Reaally?" position. Nick's puzzled fish pout is primed and ready to go.
It is Girls Vs Boys again. The boys are called Renaissance, after the popular historical period, and the girls are called Alpha, after the popular evangelical Christian thingy. The girls’ project leader is a plump lady with pencilled on eyebrows and a Croydon facelift called Claire, and the boys’ is a catalogue-modelesque pretty-boy called Alex, with rather 4-year-ago touselly hair and disturbingly pink lips.
For the first task, they are given £600 of wet fish and told to identify, price, and sell it at a market. They all flap about uselessly and don’t really know what they are doing, but the girls start doing it quicker than the boys and get the best pitch at Chapel Market in Islington (which, verily, is my manor). All the locals spot a bunch of numpties when they see one, and clamour round to buy underpriced fish, without giving anyone any time to price anything.
Vague impressions of the candidates:
Girls: there is a very tall ginger one! There is one who wears a weird fuschia twin set and beret ensemble all day (quirk alert!), there is another sensible Irish one (Kristina mk 2)! There is a bubbly black one! There is a pushy asian one with mad staring eyes! Um, that’s all I can remember.
Boys: there is a tall sexy rough one who looks like someone off a shaving advert, there is a really posh effete one who looks like an evil ventriloquist’s doll (Nick), there is another posh one who looks v smarmy and has weird wiggy hair (Rafe (!)), there is one with very blue eyes, there is a salt of the earth type one, there is a Greek looking one who keeps nearly crying, there is one who looks like Matt Lucas in a wig!
Highlights of the tasks:
- Nick pricing lobsters at £5 each, instead of per kilo. One nice lady even apologised for ripping them off as she ran away with her ¼ price lobsters.
- Rafe's little face when the boys went for a Ruff boy's suggested name of Renaissance instead of Rafe's, which was...ummm...I can't remember. That's how good it was
- Rafe identifying all the fish wrong
- Nick crying over his B in GCSE French.
- The boys splitting into Posh Numpties vs Barrow Boyz.
- The girls shouting at everyone who they want to help them, like a bunch of maniacs. The fishmonger ended up pointing randomly at Chapel Market just to get these screaming harpies out of his shop.
- The girls starting to sell without knowing what anything is and how much it costs.
- The girls realising they have sold ¾ of their stock, without making a profit yet.
- Greek boy selling £130 of fish in a solicitor’s office for £50
The boys make a profit of £20 on their £600 (LOL) and the girls are slightly less crap and make £120. They get to go back to their fancy factory conversion and have a nice tea cooked by a famous chef. Siralan says that in his day factories made stuff, but now they're being converted into homes for poncey Apprentice types. Go Siralan!
Nick and Rafe whinge to Siralan about how the ruff boys formed a clique and excluded the posh ones by talking about football and treating working class people as equals. They admit they cocked up but say it is Alex’s fault for not realising they were rubbish (It’s not as though I labelled a shark a hamster, says Rafe, surreally). Greek boy nearly cries as he whimpers that no one gave him nuff respect for his “selling stuff at half its value” skillz.
Alex picks Nick and Rafe for the boardroom. Nick puts on some hilarious fascist-Cartman-from-South-Park sunglasses. In the boardroom, the evil poshos do all the work for Alex as they smarm on about how they were too well educated and didn’t like football, so no one liked them. (Do they nothing about siralan at all? Have they never watched the show before??? Are they 12 years old?) Alex sensibly points out that he only just met them and it doesn’t matter who likes whom. Also that, although he is from oop north, he can actually read and write etc, and he has a 2:1 in Business Studies. Actually, I'm not surprised he kept quiet about that.
Nick is fired for his lobster pricing disaster, and also for being an insufferable little prig. Hurrah for Alex! Hurrah that we get to see Rafe be incredibly unctuous and hateful for another week.
I am already imaging the fun that Charlie Brooker and Harry Hill are going to have with this lot.
