It didn’t make as good a television watching experience as last week’s episode but BBC’s Young Apprentice is now over for another year, with Lord Alan Sugar’s latest disciple finally chosen from his original flock of twelve. Read on after the jump – expect spoilers.
This final week opened with James and Zara living alone in the house (I’ll bet that, that was equally joyous for the two of them) and being summoned to County Hall, the once-centre of London’s government; now an entertainment and video games hub, for the unveiling of their final task: create a video game and sell it to some of the biggest viral leaders of our time.
As their journey began I found it mildly cruel that the two of them were made to take separate cars, but then, they are still meant to be mortal enemies I suppose. As always, after being shepherded into their groups by Sugar’s Magical Wagging Finger all our favourite previous candidates are invited back to mope around gloomily and help their new leader unquestionably. This is when you realize how insignificant or just plain rubbish some of the prior runners were as people like Mahamed were verbally bashed for being an idiot, even by Sugar – not that Mahamed was smart enough to actually catch on to this.
In terms of how the teams actually fared this week, they did remarkably well. Even though it seemed that most of the work behind creating the actual product of the candidates was left to others, our entrepreneurs still got stuck in with their “mind maps” (why is the term “brainstorm” not PC again?) and other general creativity, before successfully selling their products with the eight weeks of business oompf that the youngsters have learnt in the series.
Eventually, the boardroom came and the fates of the businesschildren were up in the air. After watching the contestants stab each other in the back constantly, it’s always a breath of fresh air when The Fired back up their designated leader as Zara and James continued to verbally bash one and other into the ground.
Sadly there was no real tension in this episode and it generally felt lacklustre. None of the finalists were favourites and didn’t really have the chemistry that should have made the final decision exciting. When Sugar ‘hired’ Zara there were no woops and cheers, there was only “well, one of them had to win…”
It was another decent series with another bunch of potentially great minds accompanied by some not so great minds with a relatively absent climax – but we’ll always have normal The Apprentice to look forward to come next May.
You can rewatch some episodes or catch up with the final episode over on BBC iPlayer here.
Mild Concern 