Former Apprentice candidate turned business consultant Aleksandra King, from Bucks, looks back on this week’s episode, casting her eye over the leading protagonists. She writes:

Lord Sugar sent his candidates on a little trip to Bruges, Belgium in this week’s episode.

Their task was to create a high-quality tour of Bruges, sell tickets for this tour and then also make money selling souvenirs on the cruise ship back to England. Sounds quite simple, right?

Well it wasn’t for the poor candidates… As always with The Apprentice things went from bad, to worse, to extra, extra bad rather quickly.

So, what went wrong? Erm… for starters there were issues around ticket sales. Certain staff members, i.e. Andrew, completely oversold the tour promising the punters ‘ever flowing beer’ when of course customers were only given a little ‘tasting’.

At least this is what The Apprentice production made it seem like. The truth is sometimes what we don’t see on camera.

This is something I know first-hand as a candidate on The Apprentice last year. It isn’t something I can elaborate on however when I see overly basic ‘errors’. I now understand there is always more to the story and I watch with reservation.

A ‘historical’ tour was promised when, unfortunately, very few ‘historical facts’ were remembered by candidates Charles and Anisa. To be fair, Anisa did warn her project manager, Sarah-Jane, that she wasn’t good at history or remembering facts!

But hey, this is The Apprentice and when a candidate says they can’t do something they are asked to do that very thing!

Moving on to further errors, tour guides got lost, could not find the entrances to historical sites and even joked about this in front of their tour group. Hardly good practice.

Over on the other team, an overly efficient Elisabeth treated her tour like little children asking them if they have all ‘been to the loo’ before marching them around Bruges and not allowing them enough time to take in sights or purchase chocolates that would have added to the team’s ‘profit bucket’.

However, her style seemed to work bar a few fines and her team won. Sarah-Jane’s team was not so lucky, and she selected Andrew and Charles to come back into the boardroom with her.

Lord Sugar seemed to get very annoyed with both Andrew and Charles, less so with Sarah-Jane.

At one point, he sat back in his chair, glared angrily at Andrew and said, ‘there is no way you are ever going to be a business partner of mine!’.

He then turned to Charles and barked ‘your CV talks about what a great business man you are… I ain’t seen any of that!’ As annoyed as he was with the other two, he ended up firing poor Sarah-Jane.

There is a fine line between love and hate and I guess if you don’t feel ‘fire’ or ‘love’ towards someone then what is left really? A firing, I guess?

I feel bad for Sarah-Jane. She did not seem to be Lord Sugar’s ‘cup of tea’…