Shopping. If there’s one thing teenage girls are meant to be good at, it’s that. Right? Well, apparently not. For last night on Young Apprentice, Lord Sugar’s minions proved that particular stereotype spectacularly wrong.

The task they were set was simple enough; they just had to buy stuff. That’s it. Not buy stuff and sell it on, not buy stuff and brand it, not buy stuff and make an ad for it. No. Just buy stuff. Specifically, they had to buy 10 items for the waxwork figures at Madame Tussauds.

We’re not sure if the Sith Lord was intending to use the task to smash gender stereotypes, or if he’s just recruited a particularly useless bunch this year. Either way, they were utterly hopeless.

Before the children could fail at buying stuff though, there was the usual team rejig. Which now seemingly exists to try and get Posh Harry out of the competition, for he was moved over to be on a team with Lizzie, Hayley and Zara. Other Harry, Irish James and Heya meanwhile, formed their own little miniature team. Lord Sugar tried to use their original names, but frankly there’s been more swapping of members than even an average day in the Sugababes, so we’ve lost track of who’s meant to be who.

What we do know is this; Other Harry made the most pathetic attempt of all time to put himself forward for project manager. He said he’d be alright with giving it a shot but he didn’t know London, so maybe Heya should do it. AT LEAST A HUNDRED TIMES. Eventually, Heya said she’d do it if she really had to. And so began the most disorganised shopping trip of all time.

It turns out that Heya had no actual plan at all, just a vague list of places in London that she might’ve been once. She muttered some stuff about sort of knowing Camden, and then her team all got into taxis and just went off to try and look for things.

Heya stayed with Irish James – presumably to stop him from using his “negotiating skills” to tell people that they were utter cockmonkeys – and embarked on some ridiculous lying to try and get a cheap guitar. Apparently, at the tender age of 6, these children have already worked out that lying is the way to get to the top in corporate life. And so they went around guitar shops saying they needed one cheap for Heya’s brother’s birthday, the lying bastards. What would the Occupy London protesters say?

Unfortunately for Heya, once she’d tricked people into giving her a cheap guitar, it became apparent that she’d forgotten to actually work out who was looking for what. Or even what they were looking for. They’d been told to try and find a Dashiki, which they couldn’t even pronounce, let alone find. Other Harry took to roaming the streets of Shepherd’s Bush asking passing strangers if they knew what it was. Which they didn’t. Although maybe they did, and just didn’t fancy telling a besuited infant with a film crew in tow. Find it out the hard way, Other Harry!

Unbelievably enough, the other team actually did manage to find out what a Dashiki was, but were utterly shite at everything else. Project manager Lizzie decided that maybe some organization might be a good thing, and got her team to ring around before the set out. Which seemed like a good idea. Except it wasn’t.

Because it turns out that ringing around isn’t enough to stop two teenage girls ignoring all logic and reason and heading off to Croydon to try and buy a pocket watch. Croydon. That place which is best known for Kate Moss, Ikea, and being on fire. Sod all the jewelers of London, Hayley and Zara really fancied a nice little day trip and a £130 pocket watch. Who doesn’t?

Posh Harry, meanwhile, was busily ignoring everything everyone ever said, and was trying to buy a child’s suit in an adult’s tailor on Savile Row. It didn’t matter how many times Lizzie yelled at him to try a kid’s shop, he wasn’t having any of it. It’s almost like he can’t hear anyone whose household income is less than £250,000 per year. Which means even if he sees this, he won’t be able to understand it, so we can be as horrible about him as we like. The cockwhore.

Which is a good thing, because clearly everyone thinks he’s a total dickwad. Everyone, that is, except for Lizzie. After her team lost the task by spending a whacking great £500 more than the others and not even getting all the stuff, she decided to let Posh Harry go back to the house, and brought Zara and her pocketwatch and Hayley and her manners back into the boardroom with her.

After some debate about whether or not Zara is an evil, domineering bitch from hell, Hayley found herself sent home for being just too quiet. Which really, was missing the two most important lessons of this week’s show. Firstly, Zara really needs to find a new boardroom outfit. And secondly, it turns out shambolic disorganization IS the way to win at life. Which is great news all round.

Last night was the Apprentice final. The week where we get to finally find out who wins, and what they’re going to do with Lord Sugar’s money! But really, who cared who won? MARGARET WAS BACK. Everybody loves Margaret. Except maybe the Apprentice candidates, who had to face her wrath in their interviews.

It wasn’t just Margaret doing the interviewing though. No, Lord Sugar had brought in a team of four scary-looking people who were out to make the candidates cry, and scream, and maybe piss themselves. And so, we got to find out their rubbish business plans. And more importantly, their massive flaws. Because let’s be honest, they’re bound to be more crap than good.

Susan wanted to expand her existing business and make everyone pretty. Unfortunately though, she’s both a tax-dodger and a bit of an idiot. She had no idea what it takes to actually set up a company, or to get her products tested, or even that you’re meant to pay tax and national insurance, but she’d read about it on the internet. Apparently this means she’ll make £1m profit in her first year. Nobody seemed convinced, but her confidence remained unaffected.

HELEN WANTED TO ORGANISE EVERYONE. Her plan was to take all the rubbish little tasks off people’s hands and do them for them. But she doesn’t know anyone, and so wouldn’t be able to get anything done. And then Margaret pointed out that Helen had such a non-existent work-life balance that she might not even be a human. Which would make sense of her awesome winning streak. The woman’s a robot! HOW DID WE NOT CLOCK THIS EARLIER?

Tom, meanwhile, wanted to solve back pain with a chair. Which he forgot to mention in his business plan. He’d also made his numbers up, and forgotten to cost his chair. Well done, Tom. Strong showing all round.

After all this, we still didn’t know what Magic Jim is planning on doing. We just knew he’s a massive cliché, who’d had a meteoric rise from zero to hero. And when asked to talk about himself without clichés, he said that he’s ‘what it says on the tin’.  When they eventually got the idea out of him, it turned out he wanted to go into schools and brainwash children to be just like him. He wanted to call his business AmSmart, because he’s trying to seduce Lord Sugar through the power of money. Which is just a mental image hecklerspray could really, really do without.

After the interviews, it was back to the boardroom, where Susan was mocked extensively for her £4m turnover estimate. Tom and Helen meanwhile, both got a bollocking – Helen, for just being a great big disappointment, and Tom for adding to Lord Sugar’s health and safety nightmare. Jim stayed out of it and just carried on trying to seduce his way to the money. He even called Lord Sugar just plain “Sugar”.

It didn’t go down well with Lord Sugar though (thank God, because we don’t think we could have coped with that mental image on top of everything else), and so Jim was first to be fired. Susan was next to go, because Lord Sugar’s scared she’ll spend all his money attempting to professionalise her company without actually achieving anything. Which seemed a fair and valid point.

And so it came down to Tom and Helen. Really, what we all knew was that the two of them should go into business together, possibly get married, and take over the world with their incredibly inventive and organized children. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option, and so Lord Sugar had to pick just one.

Before he could, Helen decided to make one final, desperate grasp for the money and announced she was actually going to start a chain of bakeries. Unfortunately for her, Tom’s oddly stalkerish tactics for getting his products into shops impressed Lord Sugar more, and so he was made Lord Sugar’s business partner. Finally. Despite losing everything.

And so, another year of the Apprentice has come to an end, and hecklerspray finds itself at a loss as to what to do on Wednesday nights from now on. We might take to wandering the streets throwing insults at people in a desperate attempt to fill the void in our lives. Or we might just start communicating exclusively via Amstrad E-M@iler. If we can find one, that is.

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Last night The Apprentice dabbled in poor Franglais and mildly racist yet entirely subconscious accents. Yes, Lord Sugar sent his minions to Paris to sell their crap to the French. He wants international business people, you see, as you can’t take over the world if your company’s only in the UK.

Unfortunately for everyone else, Melody was the only one who could actually speak French, setting in motion her plan for world domination. She’s like The Brain, but with better eyeliner. And Leon was her (slightly more attractive) Pinky.

Before Melody could get cracking with taking over everything though, Lord Sugar needed to rejig the teams. Helen got booted over to Venture, where Susan put herself forward for project manager, despite seemingly having no idea what France even is. That was OK though, because she got to play with fun little products, like the kiddy’s chair and the kiddy backpack. She clearly missed it when Lord Sugar told her to act like a “Big Person” at the end of last week.

Over at Logic, Melody was being big enough for everyone. Tom wanted to sell the much coveted children’s backpack (apparently it turned into a booster seat or something. hecklerspray wasn’t really listening, because if there’s one thing we hate more than people in general it’s children) but Melody was having none of it.   She and Leon had been sent ahead to Paris to do some market research whilst Tom and Natasha stayed back in London to pick the product.

Unfortunately for Tom though, Melody’s version of market research seemed to be to just make things up. According to her, nobody drives in Paris and so those massive traffic jams are the result of evil cars getting too smart for their own good and just planting themselves in the middle of the road. It’s not really what anyone said to her, but it was her story and she was sticking to it. She could get away with this devilish plan because Leon’s complete lack of linguistic skill meant he had no clue what was going on at any point in time and so just stood there drawing some pretty pictures and smiling awkwardly.

Not content with forcing Tom to sell a stupid teapot light and some weird postcard with added cress, Melody then refused to hand over any appointments to anyone else and just went to them all herself. Tom and Natasha were reduced to phoning strangers and asking to speak to the postcard manager, whilst Leon just stood around looking pretty. For a change.

Back at Venture, meanwhile, Susan’s idea of a great pitch to a massive company was to sit on a booster seat and go “look how small I am!”. Thankfully for her, Helen was there to completely ignore her and bash ahead, netting the team over £200,000 of orders for the weird kiddy chair. The woman might actually be a genius.

Having been comprehensively shat on from a great height by Venture, Tom inevitably elected to bring both Pinky and the Brain back into the boardroom with him, where everyone ignored the fact that Brain-y Melody attempted to ruin the task single-handedly. Leon insisted he was at a disadvantage because he couldn’t speak the language, thereby completely ignoring the fact that everyone else was speaking English the entire time. Tom, meanwhile, tried to cover the fact he sold absolutely nothing by telling Lord Sugar he’s going to be bigger than Dyson.

And Melody?   Well, Melody’s an award-winning genius, don’t you know? She’s even Woman of the Future, which means we’re in for a terrifying time of odd beverage-themed lighting and huge eyeliner.  At the end of it all, Leon got fired for having done nothing but drawing pretty pictures, and some standing about.  Because it turned out that, Lord Sugar liked Melody’s hunger, so she got to stay. Despite being a megalomaniacal monster who is hell-bent on the destruction of the human race.   So a bit like hecklerspray then.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is apparently a really nice guy. Him and some of his nerdy mates have pledged to give all their stupidly vast fortunes away to noble causes either during their lifetimes or after their death.

Presumably this is so we all forget all the data and privacy problems Facebook has been plagued with recently, plus the way Zuckerberg was portrayed as the world’s biggest bell-end in David Fincher’s film, The Social Network.

Bill Gates, the lord of the geeks and former one man bank came up with the scheme to get the obscenely wealthy to say they’ll give their billions away at some point down the line to benefit the less fortunate, with his wife Melinda and some fella named Warren Buffett (who we’re reliably informed is some sort of investment banker, you know, like Chris Bates from the Apprentice).

But we here at Hecklerspray still won’t forgive him for that bloody paperclip, no-matter how many copies of the Big Issue he buys.

Naturally, the news that Mark Zuckerberg is pledging to give all his cash away to the needy isn’t something you’d traditionally expect people to take the mickey out of, but we aren’t a traditional blog.

Zuckerberg recently rolled out a new Facebook page design, which for once didn’t result in all 500 million members joining groups called, “GET FACEBOOK TO CHANGE BACK, THE NEW LAYOUT IS CRAP!!!11ONE112!” He’s also been on a bit of a PR trail following the release of The Social Network, doing more interviews and public appearances, portraying himself as just a nice guy, albeit a nice guy whose bank statements has more zeros than a list of X-Factor contestants.

Now, we’re not suggesting that Saint Zuckerberg is resorting to the cheap tactic of making a sizeable charity donation in order to raise his public profile. But let’s face it, he probably is.

Maybe we should all go back to Myspace, at least Tom was our friend.

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If there’s one thing this nation needs more of, its smug gits in business attire spunking away money that isn’t theirs whilst being rewarded with lavish amounts of champagne and opportunities to stab those who have irked them squarely between the shoulders.

Yes, that’s right, it’s week 9 of The Apprentice!

This week everyone’s favourite job applicants have the task of buying 10 rare items with a budget of £1500. Whoever spent the least won the task. Simples. There were obviously fines for failing to procure all the items or for not turning up to the boardroom on time, just in case anyone fancied playing fast and loose with the rules.

Sir Alan/Lord Sugar/The A-Train also decided to return to a boys versus girls format, so be prepared for lots of bitching and over the top macho posturing! HOORAY!

Synergy hit the ground running, project manager and world smirking champion Jamie took off on his own, leaving Chris, “all the personality of an investment banker,” Bates and Stuart, “Iceland own-brand,” Baggs to duke it out for the title of Britain’s dullest man.

Apollo, meanwhile, took the time to call ahead, finding out what their products were and where they could find them. When they finally did hit the road, they were able to get straight to their suppliers and bagged all 10 of their items with relative ease.

The only exception was Liz and Joanna’s late return to the boardroom, which was caused by them trying to haggle with a man who moved so slowly that, upon reflection, he may have actually been dead.

Apollo’s organisation and efficiency looked like a solid plan, which naturally meant they would go on to lose the task to Synergy, with their plan of randomly walking up and down streets in central London the vain hope that they just happen upon one of the items on their list, despite the fact they often had no idea what they were looking for.

Another key component of Synergy’s plan seemed to be the acting ability of Chris. Jamie asked his team to have a story ready to sell to suppliers that would allow them to get the best price and boy did Chris take this advice on board. Our lovable investment banker started making up bizarre stories about how he’d left items in Nottingham, or was going to a wedding in Scotland with his Nan whilst also bleating about how he had no money left.

There were only 2 problems with these stories. Firstly, none of them made any sense. Secondly, Chris was a sharply dressed man, accompanied by another sharply dressed man AND A CAMERA CREW. There was no way anyone was actually buying these stories, they just wanted to get him and his lively, investment-banker personality out of their shops before he made their heads explode with his ridiculous monotone lies.

When we got to the boardroom it was announced that the boys, despite failing to get all 10 items, had won the task. Which shocked Jamie so much he actually continued to apologise for his performance despite winning. Cue VT that sees the boys spend the weekend in Paris, frolicking in parks whilst wearing berets, oversized sunglasses and turtle neck sweaters.  It made you want to reach through the TV and throttle them until the twitching stopped.

That’s right, the boys got rewarded for their failure. The Apprentice has now officially become a bizarre hybrid parody of the banking sector.

The girls, looking like a bizarre corporate girl-band, tried to ditch Stella faster than Girls Aloud tried to ditch the Ginger one by subtly editing her out of their videos. But eventually it was 22 year old rah and professional glass ceiling dropper, Laura, that bit the bullet.

Let this be a lesson to you, if all you’re really good for is looking a bit like a horse and crying a lot, then an angry old man probably won’t hire you to be his assistant. Unless he’s a pervert.

BEST MOMENT: Tie between the surprise on everyone’s face when Synergy won and the audible groan when both Stella and Liz walked back in to the house.

WORST MOMENT: Liz trying to grab a pen out of an old man’s hand because he was taking too long to write a receipt. Classy.

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In the first 2 weeks of the Apprentice we saw the candidates tackle Bangers and Beaches. This week our intrepid job-seekers took on another couple of words starting with the letter b, namely baking and boredom.

Lord Sugar told his gaggle of personality deficient buzzword soundboards that they had to go about, “turning flour into serious dough.”

What followed was an hour of television that was less interesting and engaging than waiting in line at Greggs.

Jedward/Bulldog hybrid Melissa and constantly ignored Joanna were sent over to Synergy, with the incredibly dynamic Chris and some doctor named Shibby going the other way. Lord Sugar claimed this was to stop all the bickering, but the truth is it was probably an attempt to stop Laura from crying every 2 minutes.

Then some baking happened, or something, someone got upset and project manager Melissa managed to spend the entire task not actually answering a single question or being able to use a calculator properly.

The only glimmer of excitement came when Apollo project manager, Dr Shibman, had to go tell an hotelier that he’d only managed to make 16 of the 1000 bread rolls he’d ordered. But there was no bust up, no fireworks and nothing even resembling entertainment.

Laura didn’t even cry, that’s how dull this task was!

After what seemed like an eternity of bad bread based puns and whinging by serial job-dodger Sandeesh about having to bake bread, ON A BAKING TASK, we got to the boardroom. Where one team was predictably deemed the winner on the basis they made more of a profit than the other team. Hooray for them.

By now all of the candidates had gelled into one useless, grey entity that excretes white noise and words you’d usually see on a power-point presentation from your bank manager. This made it impossible to tell who actually won, all that anyone could really be certain of is that the Shib-daddy proved to be the most incapable of the lot and was summarily fired for achieving such an incredible feat.

At least in Greggs there’s a chance you might see a punch up.

Best Moment: Stuart stroking a snake whilst surrounded by dancing girls. No! Not like that! Get your mind out of the gutter you perverts!

Worst Moment: Shibby telling the hotelier that he should advise his customers to go on the Atkins diet, after he failed to deliver 984 of the 1000 bread rolls that were ordered.

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Remember when you were 16? It was just like Skins, right? An orgy of drugs, violence and sex. Or, like 95% of people on the Internet, it was furtive, frantic masturbation the moment you were alone and trying to get served in pubs.

You probably didn’t spend those precious years running an international importing and distribution business. If you thought the dicks on The Apprentice were hateful turds, The Junior Apprentice is sure to boil your piss in new ways. It’s one thing when the back-stabbing business-botherers are ten years older than you, but when they look like they’ve rolled on set straight from an episode of Grange Hill, it’s somewhat dispiriting.

Yes, it’s The Junior Apprentice, in which six teenagers prove they have the mettle to argue with Lord Alan, who sits peering and at them and scrutinising like a fussy paedophile, while Karren Brady, with her daft spelling, glares at them like Margaret Mountford, only older and weirder.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Yes, they’re all horrible, cocksure little shits, with more arrogance in their bell-ends than you have in your whole world. Helpfully, Rhys Rosser and Tim Ankers bring the rhyming slang nicknames to town, while Jordan De Courcy is every bit the hateful little ponce that his name implies.

They show their maturity from the off, refusing to chuckle when Alan says he started out ‘humping potatoes’, but ruining it by turning up in the boardroom dressed like it’s a come-to-school-as-your-dad day. All except Zoe, a posturing, bellowing Robyn lookalike who’s more in your face than a pornstar’s spunk.

Jordan De Courcy (I’m going to use his full name every time, just to irritate you the way he irritates me) is the CEO of his own company, which he’s remarkably proud of. What he doesn’t know is that I’m the CEO of my own company, which sells £10 notes to shops, in exchange for cigarettes. He also talks about ‘business to business sales’ and ‘consumers’. When I was 16, it was ‘shops’ and ‘people’.

This week, they’re out selling cheese. Bloody great lumps of cheese. The girls head off to Covent Garden to bother tourists, who are, of course, notorious for buying Union Flags, postcards and cheese.

The boys bung some cheese in a plastic box with crackers and grapes, calling it the ‘Credit Crunch Lunch’, a name straight from 2008. Probably before most of them were born.

Arjun, played by a proud midget in his dad’s suit, bursts into tears at the slightest provocation. Even if it’s just a customer looking at him. Him and Rhys Rosser bumble around attempting to attract the attention of cheese consumers, but don’t even register on their radar as anything more than Scouts collecting for a bring-and-buy sale. They’d have been better off doing the old trick involving one on the other’s shoulders, and a long coat.

The cheese-selling descends into the usual farce of running around London desperately trying to swap their unsold produce for pound coins by harassing commuters on their way home. Finally a ridiculous coffin of cheese is offloaded to a cheese seller, after trying a hairdressers, wine shop and brothel.

Back to the boardroom, and they predictably whinge and blame each other for everything. Perfect for the corporate shitheels that they’ll inevitably become. The boys lost, because they sold £450 of cheese for £250 out of desperation, and only made another forty quid for the whole of the rest of the day.

Jordan De Courcy brings Rhys Rosser and Tim Anker back. Rhys’s voice hasn’t broken, while Tim is like a bloody Werewolf. It’s an eerie combination, like father and son brought up against the evil Lord Alan to explain themselves for crimes against humanity. Jordan and Rhys both cry – one of the joys of having basically kids on here is that they’re being judged and criticised for the first time, they’re no longer the elite, and it’s tough for them to adjust to being just another face in the crowd.

Tim doesn’t cry, which bumps him up a million places. This would probably save his life in some sort of improbable shotgun-based scenario. Jordan gets fired, because he’s a shit. And a shit leader. Brilliantly, he bursts into tears yet again, but sadly doesn’t storm out of the room and scream at Alan that he’s not his real dad anyway. In the taxi on the way out, he predicts that in five years, he’ll be more successful than Alan. I wouldn’t bet on it, De Courcy.

Nine sods remain. Next week’s task is to watch an entire episode of Loose Women without popping an erection. And even with those haggard old bints, the average 16-year-old won’t last much beyond the continuity announcer’s introduction.

This was a guest post by Nik Johnson from the marvellous Shouting At Cows

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10 - Ladies and gentlemen, our new favourite website. Hit ‘random’ and discover why – 5secondfilms

9 – A bunch more reasons to be terrified of caterpillars – Environmentalgraffiti

8 – Bear Grylls and Will Ferrell – a marriage made in… what? They’re not married? Fine – YouTube

7 - 20 flat-out amazing TV adverts for different sorts of Star Wars crap - Gunaxin

6 - Here’s that Cassetteboy/ Apprentice mash-up you’ve already seen a million times – YouTube

5 – Beating a man up with a live swan: cruel or awesome? Cruel, obviously. But, you know… - Spiegel

4 – Look at this quite nice picture of an iceberg – Flickr

3 – Here’s a disturbing video of a man in a dress rapping about why he doesn’t like long films – YouTube

2 – This just in: you are DIRTY – Nationalgeographic

1 - This man will be in the next James Bond film. Guaranteed…

We’re the best there is, ever was, and ever will be. In fact, we’re the Jesus of business and we’d kill every child ever used on a Huggies or Andrex advert to win, the cuter the deader.

That’s right, The Apprentice is back! Just in time too, as we need something to fill in the time between series of Dancing on Ice.

If you’ve ever watched this humility free reality show before then basically you’ve seen them all. There’s a bunch of contestants who are dead behind the eyes, all vying for a job at Sir Alan Sugar’s workhouse.

Each one of them is as devoid of character than the last, but they do provide an impressive amount of hyperbole and idioms to enjoy. It’s that which most likely keeps us returning to watch the series year after year.

The programme begins as normal with the candidates making ludicrous claims regarding their competency. Every one of them would have you believe that they are some sort of wheeler dealer Robocop who would burn their competitors’ eyes out with a spent match rather than face defeat. At this stage it becomes patently obvious that if beauty does indeed come from inside, these people would all be butt ugly.

This week’s challenge was to clean things in return for payment. The boys’ team, despite being a man down quickly managed to assign a faceless man called Howard to lead them, and picked the name ‘Empire’. Considering the historical ramifications of this word, it felt as if the choice of name could have been more sensitive considering the multi-cultural make up of the team.

The girls’ team was given the moniker Ignite. That’s a good name because it signifies burning things, no, because it represents light? Passion? Anyway, they were headed up by Mona (pronounced Monna), an incredibly outspoken and direct woman who repeatedly informed her customer that they were wrong during negotiations.

The tasks proceeded with the normal back-biting, bitching, and short term allegiances. That and the look of utter contempt on the team leader’s face when they are updated on the progress of their sub team via cellular telephone. Any sort of mistake apparently comes across as news that they’ve just defecated botulism-laced faeces into their lunchbox.

We won’t spoil the massive excitement and anticipation by telling you who won, but the trio of business superheroes who ended up in the boardroom were particularly sour-faced and provoked the feeling of intense satisfaction when Sir Alan gave them a big telling off.

Here’s a pick of some of our favourite phrases from episode 1:

“[I have a] rainbow of skills”
”at the end of the day”
“turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”
“[I’m a] rough tough cream puff”
“[you get the] complete package”
“I’m a one man business killing machine”
“I’ve got acumen coming out of my arse”
OK, we made up the last two. Feel free to add some better ones below (shouldn’t be hard).

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Remember that reality TV show which was a bit like The Apprentice but focused on the contestants’ restaurant-owning acumen rather than the art of arse-kissing Alan Sugar called The Restaurant? Well it is back for a third series.

That’s right, Raymond Blanc is returning to judge nine couples who think that they can run an eatery because they once threw a successful dinner party so they can join him in restaurant running Disneyland. However this time Raymond says, “This year will be survival of the fittest. I am not looking for dreamers, I want to see couples with fresh ideas and a partnership that will flourish under pressure.” He says that every time, though, doesn’t he?

Helping Raymond put some emphasis onto the current economic bonanza we’re enjoying will be expert advisers Sarah Willingham and David Moore. It will be interesting to see if they inexplicably keep in the worst couple till the final again.

As far as we know, last year’s winners Michele and Russell who ran ‘The Cheerful Soul’ haven’t actually got their own restaurant yet despite winning the competition in October last year. But hey, who’s counting?

Applications are being accepted up until 31^st March, so get applying.

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Listen, we don't know how to tell you this – it's as much of a shock to us as it will be to you – but Alan Sugar, he's… he's gone.

Dead? No, of course he's not dead. But Sir Alan Sugar has stepped down as chairman of his company Amstrad after 40 years. That means that all those wonderful jokes about the crappy-looking, pointlessly impractical email telephones he hawked so mercilessly during the first few seasons of The Apprentice are all worthless now. Really, he may as well be dead.

Anyway, even though he's left Amstrad, Sir Alan Sugar's still going to be the terrifying boss figure on The Apprentice. However, there's bound to be some changes – those taking part in next year's Apprentice will now be battling for a prestigious £100k a year job keeping watch for the rozzers while Sir Alan flogs boxes of unsold email phones from the back of a van in an MFI car park.

Listen to the intro to The Apprentice long enough and you'll believe that Sir Alan Sugar is a genius. A stone cold genius so unashamedly geniusy that everyone he works with happily puts up with his bellowed insults and belligerent manner because they understand that he knows more about business than anyone else alive.

Sir Alan Sugar even has the ear of the Prime Minister, we're told. He literally has it. He tore it off during a heated conference about proportionate enterprise regulation procedure. The Prime Minister doesn't even mind, because Sir Alan Sugar is that much of a business genius.

And as a business genius, Sir Alan Sugar knows that the recession is affecting two things more than anything else – rising fuel prices and tumbling property prices. Which is why he's chosen now to step down as chairman of his electronics company Amstrad to build up his, um, property and private jet businesses. Whoops.

That's right – Alan Sugar is no longer in charge of Amstrad, the company that's been his life for 40 years. The Times reports:

Sir Alan Sugar, the multi-millionaire star of The Apprentice TV series, has stepped down as chairman of Amstrad, the company he founded aged just 21. Sir Alan insists he is not retiring but that it was the “right time” for him to step down from his role at the company, which he sold to broadcaster BSkyB for £125 million last year.

You know what that means, don't you? it means all those ghoulish Amstrad animatronic Alan Sugar toys will be going cheap! They're the perfect Christmas present for anyone you want to curse into a lifetime of petrified insomnia thanks to the latex cockney robot sat in the corner of their room constantly bellowing insults at them. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter that Alan Sugar has quit Amstrad, because he'll still be presenting The Apprentice and making appearances in all kinds of television commercials. However, let's just hope that his property and private jet interests hold up, because otherwise he'll have to change his catchphrase from "My fee from this ad is going to Great Ormond Street hospital" to "Up yours, sick kids – Daddy needs a hot tub."

The great and the suck for this week.

Folded:

• Composer Michael Hunter (Soviet Connection – awesome tune. What next for this Scottish prodigy?)

• Pising in the Driving Seat (“Having lived life in the fast lane for well over a decade, it’s no surprise to me that my back hair’s begun to fall out”)

• Cadbury’s ‘Twisted’ (a Creme Egg in a bar. Better than a Twix anyway)

• Indiana Jones icons (so the new movie was a bit of a letdown, at least you can reminisce about the old ones with these pointless little desktop doobries)

• Lucinda (an annoying moaner really, but she knew how to dress)

Creased:

• House prices drop, rental prices go up (been to an estate agent recently? Congratulations, you can afford to live in a box)

• Summer of Big Brother idiots again (surely not one sane person over 15 years old actually looks forward to this ‘event’ anymore?)

• GTA IV Obsession (you can’t go around saying “If you don’t mind” all the time in real life, people don’t like it)

• Cheesy feet (then don’t wear shoes and no socks in or slippers in summer; don’t wear slippers at all in fact)

• Alex (he probably sleeps in a onesie at home. Big baby)

For all the talk of enterprise and skill-sets, it's no secret that people only watch The Apprentice because all the contestants are awful, awful tosspots.

And this year the level of Apprentice awfulness seems to be higher than ever. So awful, in fact, that the first Apprentice reject Nicholas De Lacy-Brown claims to have received death threats from angry viewers.

Now, while we only have Nicholas De Lacy-Brown's word on this – and the man honestly seems like such a bimbling twat that he'd molest his own granny if it got him some headlines – we can't help but wish it was true. After all, if you're going to send death threats to someone, what better reason is there than because they briefly underestimated the wholesale price of lobster? We hear that that's how Salman Rushdie got his fatwa, too.

The Apprentice is the epitome of watercooler television, in that anyone with even the merest scrap of common sense would like nothing more than to burst into the boardroom with a full five-gallon bubbletop watercooler bottle strapped to each wrist so they can run around windwilling their arms about and indiscriminately bludgeoning every last gormless, self-satisfied face there into unconsciousness – except for Nick and Margaret, obviously. You'd need them to take notes on your performance.

This year's Apprentice is certainly no exception. In fact, this year's Apprentice candidates seem even more drastically unpleasant than their initial introductions suggested. Strutting, over-confident, given to making self-promotional statements so alarming that they make Tom Cruise look like the shivering dog from the Volkswagen Polo advert – the sort of people who'd look like dreadful failures if they only committed themselves 100% to a project rather than 110% or 150%.

And, since he was the first of this year's contestants to be fired from The Apprentice, that makes Nicholas De Lacy-Brown the biggest clown of the lot of them. On last week's The Apprentice Nicholas was ostensibly fired because he sold some lobsters cheaper than they should have been sold for. But that's probably not the real reason for his sacking, though.

No, in actual fact there were four real reasons why Nicholas De Lacy-Brown was fired from The Apprentice: 1) He's an unbearably overprivileged posho, and Alan Sugar hates them, 2) he doesn't like football and Alan Sugar does like football, 3) he has a shit little clump of facial hair perched under his bottom lip when Alan Sugar knows that a beard's only a beard when it covers two thirds of your face like an outbreak of grimy mildew and 4) people would generally rather an afternoon rolling around in herpes than talk to him. 

But although the first candidate to be fired from The Apprentice is usually forgotten about within minutes, Nicholas De Lacy-Brown seems to really caught the public's imagination. The public's imagination for sending terrifying death threats, that is. Digital Spy reports:

Apprentice star Nicholas De Lacy Brown has received death threats from fans of the show. "People have sent me messages saying they want to kill or injure me," Nicholas told the Daily Star Sunday. "One read something like: 'If I see you, I'll hurt you'." However, Nicholas has remained defiant and insisted that he will not be affected by the threatening messages. "The abuse I have had does not bother me," he said. "I have had some supportive emails too. I take it all as a compliment. They think they can push me down with this abuse but all it does is pump me up. I realised soon after the show started that it was not for me – it was just such hard work."

As scary as these alleged death threats are, Nicholas De Lacy-Brown probably shouldn't worry too much about them. After all, by Wednesday night everyone will be concentrating on whoever the next person to get fired from The Apprentice is and he can go back to being a thunderingly anonymous halfwit again.

But perhaps the death threat is the new way for Apprentice candidates to grade their worth. For instance, a few mealy-mouthed comments on the internet is OK, but not as good as actual face-to-face-death threats in the street. This way the winner of The Apprentice would be the person who had the most terrifying death threat made against them. The obvious problem with this is that Yoko Ono would win The Apprentice every year if that was the case, but we're sure there's a workaround.

Read more:

'Apprentice' reject receives death threats – Digital Spy

Piers Morgan has won the final of NBC's The Celebrity Apprentice.

Or, to put it another way, Piers Morgan went to America looking for success, and America (and by America we mean Donald Trump) looked back at Piers Morgan and replied: "Sure, why not? You're a man with all the qualities required to succeed here. Your wish is our command".

What is wrong with America? It all started off so positively some 40,000 years ago when a bunch of wandering nomads from Asia decided to set up camp. They had a quaint little society going on, and for thousands of years everything was wonderful, but then in 1492 some Italian named Chris landed on the shore and it all turned to shit.

Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, then Will and Grace, and now this, the ultimate coup de grace – Piers Morgan – whose list of crimes include making people feel sympathy for Jeremy Clarkson, being editor of the News Of The World once, and having the name Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan. Commenting on Morgan's performance in the show, touped-twat Donald Trump told him:

"You're a vicious guy; I've seen it … You're tough, you're smart,
you're probably brilliant, I'm not sure. You're certainly not
diplomatic, but you did an amazing job and you beat the hell out of
everybody."

The final task on Thursday's finale was to hold a charity event and raise as much money as possible. Morgan's rival, country singer Trace Adkins, had the duty of babysitting The Backstreet Boys, while Piers was responsible for the auction and food.

Trace sold more tickets, but Stefan Pughe raised the most money, earning an additional $250,000 (£125,000) for his charity.

And what was Morgan's chosen charity? Why it was the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which provides support for families of U.S. military personnel who have died in the line of duty.

Which is all very well, but it just goes to prove that, no matter how much of an utter cunt you are, if you cheer loud enough in support of the troops, all will be forgiven, even if you had previously been sacked for publishing faked photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by British Army personnel.

Whatever, America, you can have him, but don't doubt for one moment that this is anything other than your Judgement Day. So long, it's been good to know ya.