So it comes down to this: after 12 weeks of dodgy DVDs and dayglo babies, tour buses and tramp-tie dresses, octopus-based perversions, Blue Book confusion and Stuart Baggs’ little white sausage, two candidates remain for the chance to sit at the right hand of the Good Lord and suckle at the meaty teat of the Sugar empire.
And despite his weekly protestations at the start of each episode, the Good Lord has ended up with Chris – the steadiest Eddie there could ever be, seeing as he is hewn from solid rock – and Stella, a Carol so cautious it took her 10 weeks to work up to murmuring a cockney ditty at four disinterested tourists.
Now Chris and Stella must go head-to-head in the final challenge that will be several light years more interesting than anything in their possible Amstrad careers of selling ad space in doctors’ surgeries. Because that’s what the previous two winners of The Apprentice now do!?Doesn’t that make you feel better about almost everything?
Just don’t think about the 100 grand salary.
NEVER think about the 100 grand salary. You’ll cry yourself into a coma.
The townhouse HQ had a faint whiff of the Overlook Hotel about it, with scores of empty rooms haunted by the trampled dreams of fired contestants; Chris tried not to listen to the manic echoes of Jamie’s stuttering and Melissa’s syntax puree as he crept towards the sexyphone in an appropriately sexy dressing gown. The Langham was to be their destination and after a bed-headed Stella had chirped “Morning, finalist!”, making it seem like the world’s worst cutesy pet name [or another nickname for morning erections, Ed.] and they had decided that The Langham was probably a hotel and that their latest task wouldn’t involve the impossible rehabilitation of a disgraced comedy actor, off they went to both suit and boot themselves.
A hotel it was, one containing a high-class bar, a very grumpy-looking Nick Hewer and a healthy sprinkling of former Apprentice contestants. Look, there’s Shibby, the doctor who makes buns disappear! Paloma the Destroyer and Alex, who wants to know if you like this dress! And, to the utter dismay of all, a Stuart Baggs-shaped gap. Yes, the Brand was banned, leaving viewers to just gaze at their What Would Baggs Do? wristbands at regular intervals during the show and sadly imagine the high-jinks that could have resulted if he’d been let loose on designing a Baggs-booze. (Something absinthe-based, possibly, to drink with a spoon! Spoonfed with a spoon!)
Because alcohol was the name of the game this week. A new spirit, to be marketed at stupid, rich over 25s who would spend ?20 on perfumed ethanol if the packaging was pretty enough. They would design the spirit, the bottle and film an advert for the unspeakable swill they’d knock up. Chris was beyond gleeful at this opportunity to make a sequel to his Germinator magnum opus, which he showed by notching up his mouth-corners by at least three millimetres.
The traditional Dance Of Who Is Most Hated was then performed, as Stella and Chris picked their teams of former candidates. Chris plumped for Jamie, Liz, Alex and Shibby; Stella favourited Joanna, Christopher and Melissa, and was forced to have Paloma, left hanging around on her own at the end in the “fat kid who smells of ammonia” role. Both Chris and Stella gave their chosen ones a vigorous shower of effusive praise and pep, the chosen ones beamed back their acquiescence and all was rather tedious peace and harmony.
And so it remained through the brainstorms. On Team Stella, Melissa spoke movingly of raucous nights out on 14-litre bourbon cocktails and Joanna repeated the word “heritage” until it had lost all kind of meaning; and so it was decided that some sort of heritage bourbon with a modern twist was in order. Nick Hewer flapped about in his raincoat and fretted over the fact that girls never drink bourbon, due to the high risk of it rotting through their outer casing of sugar/spice/all things nice.
Team Chris had a secret weapon in the shape of unlikely king of the disco Alex, who declared with conviction that in all the hot bars he frequented, “Latino” cocktails were what really brought the ladies flocking. But wait, that was not all! When he wasn’t sipping on a mojito and burning up the dancefloor, he also kept a beady eye on the fruit hit parade, and pomegranate was riding high. Chris gazed upon this and saw that it was good, and the pomegranate rum was born.
But these Frankenstein spirits needed names. Musing on the theme of Britishness for no apparent reason, Alex tittered over crumpets, and Liz pondered whether they could christen their pom-rum “Crown Jewels”. Chris expressed disdain for the idea of rolling up to his local Wetherspoons and sharing his Crown Jewels with everyone. And anyway, he’d grabbed onto the concept of three, and wouldn’t let go. Cube, he droned. Rum. Cube rum. The perfect name was staring him in the face. Of course! Cube…rum! Cuberum! Cu…er, RUBE!
That is what should have happened, but didn’t. The spirit remained unnamed and Alex proved his sub-Baggsian foreign counting skills by getting stuck at the Italian for two. Stella and cohorts were struggling too; jammed into an alliterative thought-groove, they wrestled with the concept of blue bourbon. Joanna scrunched up her face with the effort of remembering whether blue meant happy or gay. But suddenly, at the last minute, a light bulb pinged on above Stella’s head – when in doubt, rhyme! Urbon, the urban bourbon, was the way of the future, shortly to be followed by frisky whisky, handy brandy and fear beer (previously known as Tennants Extra).
Meanwhile, Melissa’n’Christopher and Liz’n’Shibby were playing at being mad drunken scientists at a “leading liquid developer”, or bar-in-a-lab, supposedly designing the spirits themselves but spending most of their time chugging and swilling shots like an bitter maid of honour on a hen night. “So you spit rather than swallow?” asked Shibby of Liz, rather ungraciously, as she slurped down another sample of moonshine. Eventually, Liz’n’Shib settled on a fetching coral-pink liquid, with Shibby declaring that he was fine with the innate femininity of the drink because pink was the new blue. Unfortunately, Chris was less enamoured with the cheerful hue, as he’d finally decided on the name – Prism – and bottle shape – in a leftfield choice, a prism – and his whole theme was being ruined by the ros?.
Nevertheless, he was stuck with his pointy pink triangular bottle, even though it looked like a dual-function perfume/viciously sadistic marital aid. Stella was thrilled to bits with her Urbon packaging, failing to notice she’d created the exact spit of a bottle of flavoured oil received in a particularly unsatisfactory office Secret Santa that you leave in the back of the cupboard when you move house.
Props in hand, it was time to make their ads, but not before a little going over from the Fun Police in charge of advertising standards. Paloma’s pitch of “guy staggers round bar clutching two full-sized bottles of Urbon” was met with polite incredulity and suggestions that it might just be condoning excessive drinking. Chris’ slightly-too-vividly-described fantasy of “guy buys girl Prism and coke and she shags him immediately” was primly hosed down. In fact, said the Fun Police, the merest suggestion that Prism could directly or indirectly influence anything within 80 miles of sexytime would be right out. Denied even a salacious eyebrow raise, drooping in all ways, Chris slinks off to scribble advert ideas into the wee small hours.
Ad day goes swimmingly for Stella, her team working in glorious harmony to create a boring-as-hell tale of four attractive urban friends having attractive urban fun whilst ordering attractive glasses of Urbon in a needlessly sarcastic manner. Chris, on the other hand, got bogged down with the most inept and clumsy barman ever to wield a cocktail mixer and spent three-quarters of his day trying to perfect a three-second close-up of ice being placed in a glass without being sprayed liberally over the whole of west London. So when the time came to film the meat of his advert, and the typically dreadful Apprentice ad actress attempted to do a casual walk and ended up flailing about like a deranged monkey falling out of a tree, Chris had no choice but to shrug and go with it.
So, their drinks were concocted, bottles designed and ads shot. The final test was upon them – to pitch to the Good Lord and a ballroom full of “industry professionals” who had nothing better to do with themselves on a Thursday afternoon. Chris, off the back of his second all-nighter, emerged even more dreary and monotonal than usual – emitting nothing but a low groan when practising his pitch, his team reacted like they were being taught advanced algebra in a dentist’s waiting room. Stella went for an opposing “It’ll be all right on the night” approach, involving a good night’s sleep and writing the whole pitch in ten minutes while Paloma, Joanna and Melissa heckled from the sidelines and Christopher closed his eyes and wished he was back on the frontline to get some peace. But both approaches seemed to work well for the by now solidly professional candidates, who got through their presentations, complete with excruciating street dancers and Question Time-style barracking from the pros, with nary a boo-boo. They even got some jokes in, earning a wry smile from the Good Lord, who had otherwise regarded the whole event with lugubrious eyes. He hates this bit, does the Good Lord. You can tell. He just wants to be back in his blue boardroom, where he can be happy or maybe gay.
And that’s where he went!
With no winning or losing team, the boardroom was a very balanced affair. The pros and cons of each drink were discussed, both Stella and Chris were gently reprimanded for leaving the actual creation of the drink itself to their lackeys while they swanned about the design studios of Soho and Dr Shibby was laughed at for being an idiot who thinks you taste with your eyes. Both teams of candidates fought hard for their respective PMs. All except Alex, who was just so thrilled to be there that he said he loved them both equally, just like he loves all his teddies equally, even when they whisper bad things to him in the night.
The Good Lord thanked them for their mostly useless input and expressed hope that he’d see them again one day, adding under his breath that if he did, they’d better not attempt to speak to him or look in his general direction without fatal consequences.
And then it was down to brass tacks. The experience of Stella versus the youth of Chris. Asked for one final plea for their future career, Chris invoked a mega-Baggs by comparing himself to a young Good Lord and claiming he was a diamond in the rough. Stella growled like a lioness and unleashed a ruthless tirade against Chris, saying she had passion for the job, such passion, massive underground reserves of passion, whereas you could fit Chris’ passion into a matchbox without taking out the matches first. Chris bristled at this sudden truthful accusation, but Stella was on a roll; she’d risked her whole life for this, and her family’s life, and no monolith of bore was going to get between her and the Good Lord’s cash.
It seemed Chris could sense the outcome. He started nodding frantically as the Good Lord told him he was a super-duper chap and had a very bright future ahead of him, but… Chris’ face fell like a cliff eroding into the ocean as the fateful words rolled majestically from the Good Lord: Stella, you’re hired.
And with that, she gets into the Sugmobile to be whisked to a life of middle management drudgery in Harlow, while Chris and his mesmeric blue eyes will be on Celebrity Take Me Out before 2011 is up. And it’s all over for another year.
Thank the Good Lord.
Moment of the series: Extreme masculinity? Herr Baggs? Invisible calculator? Nah. (Ahem!)
Next week: Merry Christmas!
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bacraze says
Do you think we will actually be able to buy the Prism Rum From the Final. Just the look of the bottle is so amazing.
Dragons Den Online says
I too was wondering about the Prism product. It would be really ironic if the brand and product took off and that became Chris’ claim to fortune
Tim says
Sugar definitely made the right decision. Stella had been consistently strong throughout. In the final she also showed she could be creative and stand up and pitch to an intimidating room of experts as well.
Chris always represented potential rather than proven ability. Unlike Chris, Stella is capable of delivering immediately, something Sugar had stressed right at the outset.
Let