Ordinary Gweilo

It’s fairly obvious that when they choose contestants for The Apprentice it’s more about casting than it is about picking the best candidates.  In the early weeks the "characters" provide some entertainment, cause trouble, and then get fired.

Hence (as I mentioned before), this time around we had a fat bloke with glasses (Brent) and a Russian (Lenny), who won’t be around very long.  Each thinks that he knows more than anyone else, and is very happy to let you know his opinions (uncomplimentary almost without exception) on his fellow team members.  If only they would listen to me, they cry plantively, blissfully unaware that their colleagues have long ago decided to ignore them. 

Even Brent’s thick skin and small brain don’t seem to have prevented him from noticing that he was being sidelined by the project managers (in week 4 he was given total responsibility for organizing the clothing to be worn by the team members when they did their presentations).  If he had any common sense he would just have kept quiet and realized that he could hardly get fired if he was never in charge of anything important.  He didn’t, but Sean is obviously a lot brighter because he started worrying that this might enable Brent to survive.

Or not, as it turned out.  Brent couldn’t keep his mouth shut in the boardroom, and when he launched an over-the-top (and unwarranted) attack on Tammy he opened himself up to a barrage of criticism from the rest of the team.  He responded with largely incoherent attacks on people who had upset him, much in the style of a petulant seven year-old.  As with his misunderstanding of ‘brainstorming’, he appears not to have realized that saying the first thing that comes into your head is not the way to win an argument.

Even after Trump fired him, he still seemed to believe that he was better than the rest of the team and that Trump had made a big mistake.  I don’t think so.   

In week six, Bryce said almost exactly the same thing as he was being driven away in the taxi.  To be fair, it might even have been true, but he had so nearly managed to leave with his dignity intact.  Had he stuck to his line about being unwilling to betray his team members he could have achieved it – so close and yet so far. 

Less charitably, perhaps he realized that having been 25 minutes late for their meeting with the customer and then not even explained or apologized, it was always going to be difficult to persuade the same "talented" executives to choose their jingle. So Bryce would get the blame as the PM and it wasn’t worth trying to get someone else fired instead. 

Very odd not to try, though.  Trump had already got significant doubts about Charmaine, Lenny and Tarek, so Bryce could surely have persuaded him to fire one of them.  Having not done so, he was never going to persuade Trump not to fire him (and bringing Lee into the Boardroom when he had missed the task to observe Yom Kippur didn’t help him one little bit). 

I’m not at all sure how Tarek (yes, the "Man from Mensa") survived the previous week, which was yet another creative task.  He was quite determined that their dreary commercial should not have a voiceover, and that was the main reason that the executives gave for preferring the other team’s effort.  Trump fired the PM (Dan), and one of the reasons he gave was that he hadn’t brought Lenny into the Boardroom even though the concept for the commercial was his idea.  However, it would have been a grave injustice to fire Lenny for that reason – at least he had come up with an interesting idea, and the rest of the team had endorsed it – and there will surely be plenty more (and more legitimate) reasons to fire Lenny before very long. 

Of course there are still plenty of other deadbeats to fire, and with Bryce out of the way there only looks to be one winner.   

You’ve gotta admire Mark Burnett & Donald Trump for what they can get away with – here is a TV show about the filming of a TV commercial.  No messing about with subtle product placement – just get the teams to film the commercial!