The Apprentice is back. It’s series eleven and there are eighteen power-hungry candidates all with the same aim: to become Lord Sugar’s business partner and to win a £250,000 investment.
Lord Sugar has a new advisor, Claude Littner, who joins Baroness Karren Brady in reporting back what the teams get up to. We’re introduced to this year’s set of candidates: from Joseph Valente who says his idol is Hugh Heffner and he is like the “godfather of business”, to Selina Waterman-Smith who was once a podium dancer, there is definitely a mix of interesting characters. As always, there is the fair share of over-confident, cocky candidates who will inevitably be put into their place by Lord Sugar. He reminds them that he doesn’t like suck ups and he said that if he were looking for love “I’d go to tinder”.
The first task was very hands on and was supposed to show the candidates how Lord Sugar started as a market salesman. They were up at 02:30am and taken to Billingsgate fish market to source fresh fish so that they could make dishes to sell to the general public during the lunchtime rush.
We are introduced to the two teams who are mixed genders for the first time, normally the initial tasks are split into gender groups. Some of the men aren’t too pleased with this, saying that women won’t want to touch the fish and men are naturally better at selling…This is interesting considering both project managers turn out to be women.The first group discuss possible names and Dan’s suggestion of ‘Sugar Babes’ is swiftly disregarded, and instead, they settle for the more appropriate name of ‘Versatile’. The other group go for ‘Connexus’, meaning united in Latin.
Both groups set out to source their fish; Versatile go for fish fingers and calamari whilst Connexus goes for fishcakes and a tuna niçoise salad – which is sold at an eye-watering price of £9 a salad.
After a crash course in how to prepare fish, they start to make their various dishes and one of the team manages to miss the lunchtime slot and only ends up with a profit of £1.87, which obviously doesn’t go down too well with Lord Sugar. The winning team get a sushi master class with a Nobu chef, whilst one unlucky candidate becomes the first to hear those dreaded words: “you’re fired”.
