The Wally With The Lolly? Really?

The second instalment of The Apprentice aired at 9pm on BBC1 last night with 15 candidates poised for their next challenge in a bid to win a deal with Sir Alan Sugar.

This second episode started at 4am and on an ice rink where the girls’ and boys’ teams were told to create ice lollies – two flavours were required, one for a high end corporate client and one to sell to the public. A manufacturing task, again hooked on profit. 

Kenna, who talked about his deep knowledge of ice creams, was chosen as project manager much to Riyonn’s disappointment. The girls chose Carina, who has a bakery business – there was no argument in making that choice. It was interesting though that bossy Lottie, ducked out of being sub-team leader.

She volunteered someone else, Marianne, who proved to be pretty colourless, though I did admire her for telling Lottie off for being such a bossy boots. 

The girls went for retro flavours and the boys chose healthy options. Flavours being thrown around were lavender, cinnamon, liquorice all sorts, strawberry, cream and coconut. 

First impressions early on was that the boys were on top of their numbers and the girls less so – the latter being very embarrassing with their corporate client walking out to discuss, yet again, the prices they were looking for.

However they did get a real sense of what the corporate client wanted and had a fairly decent brief to work with back in the kitchen. Unlike the boys, who had a looser brief which they then failed miserably to deliver. The client asked for glitter – there was no glitter in sight. 

For the girls, their high end lollies, with edible flowers and overladen with strong-tasting rosemary, did not impress moderator Karen – she said it was like eating ‘a garden’. However the girls did manage to sell 80 for their agreed price of over £3 per lolly (75p per lolly to make). 

The boys’ corporate lolly was utterly laughable – it looked rather rude, cheap and nasty. They had gone cheap on ingredients (15p per lolly) and it was to cost them dear. The sad looking, pink, limp lollies were completely blasted by the client. She did offer an apologetic £100 for the lot, yet by some mysterious thought process, sub team leader Dean turned it down. The boys were left with a whole batch of unsold limp lollies.

The lollies for the public were a different story. The boys’ lavender flavours flew out of the hands of the selling team – especially Thomas and the money came rolling in. Thomas was a joy to behold, his banter led to people buying lollies they would probably have ignored if it wasn’t for his sunny, market trader style.

The girls struggled at London Zoo to sell their cherry cola and liquorice allsorts flavour and many of the lollies had broken. Once again this task ended up with the teams running around trying to sell off what was left of their stock for any old price. 

In the boardroom, the blame game began which resulted in the numbers coming out. The girls were victors once again, making over £500 profit with the boys lagging behind with profits of over £300. 

Project manager Kenna brought back Ryan-Mark and Dean into the boardroom. Dean for being Mr U Turn and leaving money on the table and Ryan Mark for being miserable, grumpy and disruptive when he didn’t get his way early on. All of these reasons were fair and I really thought Dean was on his way home. After all he’d left money on the table. 

However it was Kenna who got the boot. Sir Alan said he ‘was as resolute as an empty crisp bag in the wind’ – which frankly was fair. He was a project manager who could project yet not manage and he didn’t put his foot down when the laughable pink ice lolly was created. 

His inability to make a obvious decision around that or to press for a more detailed brief – led to the other mistakes by other team members. I still would have been glad to see the back of Lottie, who, in spite of telling everyone she was a librarian, still thinks she has the answer to everything.