How can they want Katie to win? I'm shouting that quote like John Mcenroe here!

Love it! I want to spread her like JAM myself...

Just like Naomi, I haven't got too many conscructive "witticisms" to add today. But the comments on this thread have been almost as good as the eppy itself!

Lohit and Naomi aren't exactly 'big guns'. In fact very few of them could be described in that manner.

Based on what?
Her international product marketing expertise demonstrated on the show we have just seen?
Her loss of control in the boardroom when she starts ranting like a fishwife?
Her 6 out of 8 losses on the losing team?
Her last two visits to the boardroom?
Jay?

It's almost become a cliche that Katie is supposed to be so brilliant.
It's as bad as Lohit being described as a possible winner because he's 'nice'.

And lose 6 out of 8 times?

It's the people she gets close to who often get fired.

3 team leaders on the trot now who have been fired with Katie on their team.
I wouldn't want her anywhere near my team. Not only would you lose, you'd probably end up getting fired as well.

"There's a fine line between a good dancer and a shite bollox dancer".

But Jay was a stroke of genius! Don't all 14-year-old boys wear white plastic trainers while lingering in smoky clubs chilling to soulful but indistinct easy-listening tracks? So much more fun than hanging round draughty shopping centres or killing people on the X-Box at home.

They may well do, but it's probably not a good idea to make them aware of that reality if you're trying to sell 'cool' to them by telling them that they are just like the sensible Jay.

The way Katie was going on about Jay I half expected her to say that he neatly put a hot water bottle in his bed and put on his Harry Potter pyjamas, just before he put his trainers tidily away in his wardrobe the last thing at night.

If he was wearing trainers like that, he probably would. Even I could see they weren't cool, and I'm a 45-year-old Essex housewife.

It was really sad that the teams thought they were being cool though.

The way they were talking was as though they were 'down with the kids' and were all trying to show off how 'cool' and trendy they were.

I think that considering Katie and Naomi's apparent experience their input was pitiful.
That Jam logo just looked as though the wearer may as well just scribble it on themselves with a biro.

My 16 year old son thought the programme was the funniest thing he had seen in a long time.

His idea was to call them "Catalogue" trainers (because that's obviously where you buy them) with the logo of a cat sat on a log and the tag line "Stop pussyfooting around". He then decided to call them "Catastrophe" trainers (because that's what they were) but it all started getting a bit too rude from that point onward and I had to shut him up.

Very low profile so far, tonight was the most I have seen of Naomi but I missed the Kissing task, make money from £100?


Exactly, it is all based on her claims as SAS pointed out tonight. No evidence.


From the mouth of babes......except he would be insulted, but he got to the heart of the matter, Apprentice 10 candidate?

Very possibly. I have told him to put he is a global brand manager on his CV. It might help him get a Saturday job.

FOUR team leaders:

Natalie
Paul
Adam
Ghazal

And Katie was buddying up to three of them.

I think people are missing the point of the actual trainers used, of course they were cheap and uncool, they were just white generic trainers it would be easy to put the logos on. The point was could the teams come up with a coherent strategy and ad campaign.

I agree with you 100% that she was a poor project manager and that she was definitely never ever going to win. I'll even concede that her contribution to-date has been pretty well non-existent. But you've got to admit that the three girls set her up last night to fail. As soon as the "JAM" sketch was held up to camera by Kristina, I knew that they were going to hang their project manager out to dry - they never even tried to come up with a winable idea.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Next week, I'll know you're coming and switch my PC off.

Just kidding

I'm annoyed by the spolier in the 'next time on The Apprentice'

It looked clearly as though

I thought a coherent strategy and campaign would have involved playing to your product's 'strengths', whatever they may be. If you've got something boring-looking and cheap; you could make it look less boring if poss (the logos can help here), and you perhaps focus on the price point. Jadine's team did give theirs a pretty low price point and tried to make its non-flashy, non-corporate look a positive, alternative 'feature'; Ghazal's team put a crap logo on it (though no worse than the other one) and tried to convince everyone it was really cool and something to do with music. Jadine's (or do I mean Tre's) team's idea was very good, I thought, and the idea of putting something back to the community and being anti-corporate could go down well. It reminded me a little bit of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbury (though there's not exactly cash-for-the-community angle here).

To be honest I thought the girls' team was doomed from the moment Jadine split the teams on gender lines... the boys instinctively understood the trainer market, particularly Tre and Simon who have obviously spent their formative years as suburban b-boys. They knew they were being asked to sell the unsellable but turned the products negative aspects into positives and came up with a good strong original concept. It probably wouldn't work that well in the real world, especially with the awful graffiti logo, but in the real world they wouldn't have two days to do everything from scratch an for the academic purposes of the task I thought it was all pretty impressive. Jadine didn't have much to do really, but to be charitable part of good leadership is letting people have their head when they're on a roll. You could seeTre really wanted to do the pitch and she seemed to let her ego get in the way by not letting him and/or Smon present, but mayb she wanted to avoid accusations that she'd been a fifth wheel.

The girls were even more lost than the boys were in Top Shop last year, their concept was woolly in the extreme and i think most of them knew it.

Not that Tre and Simon's homeboy hubris didn't provide some comedy gold along the way - I loved Simon's priceless woolly hatted Gil Scott Heron moment - The Apprentice will not be televised brother, the Apprentice will be live!

The wife and I noticed this before in the Richmond task, but Naomi only really comes into her own in the boardroom. Interesting that most of the time she looks like a chipmunk faced sloane but, perhaps sensing a suralan weakness, every time she goes into the boardroom she looks like a cool Hitchcock blonde. Sneaky. Under pressure in the boardroom she always maintains her cool and is extremely articulate. In fact, the blondes may have been out of their depth with trainers but in the boardroom fighting for survival they were in their element: with three of the most articulate and ruthless people on her team Ghazal was doomed from the off.

On You're Fired I thought Trevor Nelson was a bit overly down on the boys efforts - I'd like to see him do better, and some of his favorite trainers were AWFUL. His favourite pair of all time were sme manky pair of Pumas your dad would wear to do the gardening. PUMA!? Man alive! Not the Voice Of Youth he thinks he is.

I've heard the Cobra beer Lord on radio 4 before and he always comes across as brilliant. I'd lke to go for a pint of his product with him and pick his brains.

Do we know for definate that Sir Alan writes the column in The Mirror?


From today's article it certainly sounds like loses next week and that he really has it in for

Simon? I don't think so! He put on a good act, but I'm sure that's all it was - acting! I'm thinking he's a nice middle-class boy really. (Tre had a real chance to shine at this task, but again he didn't - he really is all mouth, I've decided.)

Katie's attempts at being 'hip and cool' when presenting were laughably embarrassing - as was that grotesque fake smile pasted on her face. (She's so transparent - every word she said was negated by the underlying expression of contempt on her face - she just can't help it!) And anyone who thinks she's terribly successful at her job should be asking themselves why she's working for some two-bit outfit down in Devon - very nice, but not really the centre of the commercial universe.

I think the wrong person went this week - Ghazal should really have been given another chance (she's hardly been given a chance yet), and 'fake' Katie should have gone. I find it interesting that when Alan and Margaret try and gently steer Sir A in the direction of who they would like to see go, he stubbornly digs his heels in and does just the opposite - egocentric old goat that he is! (You can tell he's a "no-one tells me what to do" character, just by looking at him!) I can't see his reasoning for keeping Katie though - unless the spoilers are true!

As far as the final goes, if you take out the loudmouths and the stronger, more opinionated characters (however much we may like them - this is Sir A, remember) - you are basically left with Naomi and Lohit, the 'quiet ones' (and possibly Simon). Who knows?

LOL...thanks for the correction of my error. Not 3 team leaders,...but four.

Natalie, Paul, and Ghazal were her closest allies as well.

Going by those stats it might suggest that the quickest way to get fired is to become close friends with Katie.

Funniest series of posts I've read in a long time!