This, I thought, was good. Advertising tasks make a nice change from the bellowing-like-a-market-trader episodes of The Apprentice. And it does seem to actually test something other than an ability to flog stuff. Be careful what you wish for, however, is a wise prophecy. Also giving a silly vox pop was Christopher, the other team leader. He was a marine, and was thus off to shoot everyone. Something like that, anyway. He, crucially, got Nick following him too. The same Nick who wanted last week’s task back. That much was clear. Alex quickly vetoed The Germ-O-Nator as a product name, instead leaning towards Helping Hand. His team was swiftly divided. The prospects continued to look grim. The Germ-O-Nator would be back, I swiftly concluded. Alex’s team were still brand name hunting, though, leaving Karren Brady skulking around the corridors of Asda. Laura, then, came up with The Blitz. Alex nearly cried. Chris, therefore, moved in with The Germ-O-Nator once more, and put his neck on the line. Even though the market research suggested this was not a good name. The design brief followed, then. This is always fun, because you get to work out which designer looks the most pissed off with the team behind them. It was a score draw here. Octi-Kleen, instantly, looked like a kids’ drink to me, while The Germ-O-Nator bottle looked, er, fairly terrible. And Laura correctly raised the fact that the product had to be kept out of the reach of children, yet it was a child that was being featured in the advert. Alex overruled her. The programme editor was pointing us in a very pronounced direction here. Octi-Kleen, mind you, was a terrible looking product, but at least the radio advert were fairly solid. Meanwhile, for the Octi-Kleen TV advert, Nick appeared to have woken up. It appeared that he was approving of Christopher’s choice of wife, although he did then did a rant to camera about stereotyping women. I noted he didn’t have such comments to make last week, but Christopher soon addressed Nick’s concern, by dressing his ‘wife’ up as an octopus. You can’t say he doesn’t act on feedback. But heck, at least they hadn’t cast a child, one who was holding the product he wasn’t allowed, according to the label, to hold. In fact, the kid was The Germ-O-Nator of the advert, stepping through a smoky kitchen, and surely leading Alex to a showdown with Baron von Sugar. It couldn’t go any other way. Never mind cutting to shots of Nick cringing at Christopher’s outdated commercial, and bad gags about eight hands being better than two. Christopher was surely safe because he at least stayed within the rules and regs of the product. He didn’t do well. But he wisely stayed more towards mediocre, as opposed to outright terrible. Onto the pitch, then. Laura spent ages preparing a pitch, and Alex promptly appointed Sandeesh to do it. By this time, to be fair, he may as well have stripped stark bollock naked from what I could see. The man was doomed. And Laura was pissed off. “Have you ever seen me this pissed off?”, she ranted. Well, yes. Quite regularly, from what I can tell. The pitch was to marketing experts, and you could see the car crash coming a mile off. In fact, I spent the next five minutes cringing like I’d never cringed before. “Hasta la vista, gravy”, and comparing a product to e-coli? Or saying it’s like an ugly man? Crikey. I usually complain that the task bit doesn’t make enough of the episode, but here, I was cringing so much that I was glad they called it a day. I’d have been happy with a shorter episode and a couple of Tom & Jerry cartoons by this point. Bluntly, it looked like neither side was going to win. Multiple firings? It was impossible to rule it out. But that wasn’t how it turned out. Up came Alex’s Germ-O-Nator first, and the Baron liked the name, not the execution. With Octi-Kleen, meanwhile, he took little time discovering that the advert was something off Nick’s DVD shelf. “You were all over it like a tramp on chips”, said Nick of the choice of name. He’s had better lines than the Baron this series. The cringing continued as Baron von Sugar’s scriptwriters got worse. His Titanic line was a genuine contender for worse line of the series. But there’s been lots of competition. The final showdown saw Alex, Sandeesh and Chris. Alex was given lots of camera time to shout and rant and stuff, but this was surely the most obvious firing of all time. And had been since five minutes into the episode. A very traditional episode of the show, in all. But heck, for cringe television, it’s had no equal in some time… Read our review of the fifth episode here.
