Only six remain rattling around the Apprentice townhouse. They?should probably show some of that entreprenurial spirit they all?claim to have in spades and sub-let some of the empty rooms.?Although the cost of the exorcism to remove the still lingering?spirits of Melissa’s tortured vowels, not to mention the peroxide?stains, could make that plan financially unviable.
What do we know? This is why here at hecklerspray Towers, we are all paupers, just 50p away from starvation at all times. Please buy our t-shirts!
An early wake-up call again, as the Apprentices were informed they?would be heading off to Wandsworth bus garage. Jamie took this?news as if the sexyladyoice had whispered that she was creeping up?behind him with her sexiest knife, almost dropping the phone in?dread and shock.
They all seemed pretty scared to be going to this transporting?jewel of South West London. Stuart Baggs shuddered up the stairs?in his best The Brand pants and claimed it was like “walking into?a room of knives blindfolded,” causing Alanis Morrisette to reach?for her “Non-Ironic Lyric Ideas” notepad and pen filled with Ryan?Reynold’s blood. But they survived long enough to be told by the?Good Lord that this week, they would be setting up and running?their own competing London tourist bus tours. Joanne was cracking?the whip on posh boys Jamie and Chris, and joy of all joys, Baggs?would be in charge of reprogramming business bots Liz and Stella.
And almost immediately Stella, still reeling from being told she?was a boring corporate clone, leapt at the chance to prove that'she was a totally wacky, zany, up for a laugh, life and soul,?skirt-tucked-in-her-knickers puke-crying-at-3am kinda gal. A?cockney theme, she chirruped! The real London , pearly kings and?jellied eels! I’ll be the tour guide – I can get really, really passionate about jellied eels! Baggs immediately spotted this as an opportunity to absolve himself of all responsibility and?happily handed Stella acres and acres of hangin’ rope.
Joanne, keen to impress her entreprenurial and independant thought skills upon The Good Lord, immediately capitualted to Jamie’s idea of a ghosts and ghouls walk. Chris, meanwhile, sat silent and?monolithic as a golem, awaiting his moment to CHRIS HULK SMASH.
And that moment would come.
But before that, Joanne and Jamie have to go in search of topic?material for their ghost walk, which they do by wandering around?the streets of London seemingly at random, hoping for spectral?visitations. Throughout their travails, Joanne conducted a?plainsong symphony of passive-aggressive whining on an infinite?loop, sniping and niggling at Jamie at every turn like an unfulfilled?housewife, until the normally gentle giant finally snapped and?clenched his jaw for a millisecond. Joanne took this as a?pre-emptive strike upon her person, notched up the octaves on her?whinge-a-thon and continued unabated. It was like being aurally?assaulted by a pre-menstrual whale, and Jamie was fraying at the?edges.
Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke, meanwhile, took the form of Liz and Baggs and strolled into the grimier areas of East London as if it were a theme park for their amusement. “I’m Elizabeth ,” cooed suddenly-landed-gentry Liz at a melancholic man selling fishy snacks from a van, as if he was a small child. “One shall anoint you with one’s presence tomorrow, so do make sure you up the cockney levels, peasant,” she continued. A nearby eel-guzzler (probably a cabbie or builder or something) almost exploded with indignation at her patronising manner, but that’s cockneys for
you. Sensitive buggers.
Having?thoroughly?vexed the locals, on Mary and Dick went, sweeping through the best the editors of The
Apprentice thought the East End could offer (piles of rubbish, building sites, apples and pears where there should be stairs) with fear in their eyes and the stench of pavement weewee in their nostrils.
Next stop for both teams was the London Visitor Centre, who would be selling tour tickets for the team who pitched the pitch best. First to pitch the pitch were Liz and Baggs, who wanted to charge extortionate rates for their rather sketchy-souding tour and were only willing to give below-par commission. But before the London Visitor Centre could shake their heads and despair at the business skills of the youth of today, in loomed terracotta warrior Chris, whose instructions had clearly got mangled along the way. He offered the visitor centre 20% of every single scrap of money the team would make from the tour – from tickets sold by the visitor centre, but also any sold by the Apprentices themselves, and any souvenirs or trinkets sold – and flung in the souls of their first-born children as well, just for a laugh. The London Visitor Centre gazed upon Chris, saw him meld into huge dollar sign before their eyes and signed him up immediately.
The day of the bus tour dawned, and it was time for the candidates to channel their inner Blakeys. Baggs, Liz and Stella emerged in radiant red jackets and hats, looking like a two-thirds passable and one-third utterly unacceptable Virgin Airline ad. As Baggs smacked his lips at the chance of milking the “juicy money bags” of the tourists dry, Joanne – in a more sober grey affair – begged and pleaded with the London Visitor Centre to amend their agreement to one that didn’t result in the Apprentices working their little buttocks off to hand over stacks of money to someone sitting all day on a throne made of Union Jacks and British bulldogs. But, understandably, the visitor centre chose to smirk and decline her offer of a more reasonable deal . No man-of-clay treats for Chris tonight. That new?glaze will have to wait till another day.
The buses were loaded with gullible foreigners, and Stella and Jamie were off, to fill their minds with misinformation and top up their?tummies with eels. Did you know, for example, that the Thames is the second largest river in London? And that the face of Big Ben is 20 diameters in width? This is the strange pan-dimensional London that Jamie inhabits. Stella’s London , on the other hand, was full of precise facts delivered in the manner of someone instructing all till-trained staff to go to the checkouts immediately.
But more punters were needed. And Baggs began his evil plan for domination; trailing Joanne and Chris around like an unwanted puppy in an oversized hat and trying to steal customers from them.
Everyone who Joanne talked to immediately ran into a wall of Baggs-chat, extolling the virtues of Cockney London and pouring vitriol on the ghouls and ghosts. When that didn’t work, Baggs set up camp outside the London Visitor Centre, nabbing tourists with tickets to the ghost tour, refusing to move when the Visitor Centre hoisted themselves from their bathtub full of banknotes and told him to eff off, and eventually suggesting that they call the police because it was a free country and he could stand where he wanted.
We were thankfully prevented from the sight of him handcuffing himself to their railings and singing “We Shall
Overcome” as he admitted deafeat and slunk off, Liz trailing behind, trying to pretend she wasn’t wearing a matching uniform.
As the day wore on, it seemed like the ghosts and ghouls tour was coming out on top, despite the gusto Jamie put in to his R18-rated descriptions of maiming and torture, blood and neck-snapping, which didn’t exactly go down a storm with his more sensitive punters. His on-bus film choice of A Serbian Film was probably a bad one too. Stella and her?minuscule?bunch of Cockney fans got lost amid the markets of the Isle of Dogs and never made it to the eel
van, but did see what might have been a Banksy but was probably a load of worthless nothing, and meet a pearly king, who shouted at them angrily about rhyming slang. A half-hearted chorus of Knees Up Mother Brown did nothing to rouse spirits, and the tour trudged wearily on.
But tensions were about to boil over in Trafalgar Square , as Chris cornered a couple of honeys with his Easter Island statue in a nightclub routine. As he was charming them to acquiescence (or boring them comatose, it was unclear which), Baggs came chuntering in and scared the ladies off. The light suddenly burned bright in Chris’s eyes, and the two chaps squared up, rather unevenly. After exchanging pleasant “fuck off”s, Baggs brought out the big guns,
goading Chris to hit him and giving it the old “you’re all chat” lobster claw actions. Chris, ever the pacifist, simply called
Baggs a “fat twat” and growled away, Jo providing the narratively essential “Leave it, he’s not worth it.” Baggs basked in the moral victory he had achieved like an odious little grotbag.
But would that victory turn sour when the Good Lord found out they’d been scrapping in the street? It was time to find out in the Boardroom.
First to cop the wrath of the Holy One was Chris, for his “adventurous” deal to give the fat cats at the London Visitor
Centre everything they earned and more for doing nothing but scrawling “Ghosts and Ghouls tour” on a blackboard. But then Joanne got a big ticking off for being a big reneger, trying to renege all over the place. Stuart got a light roasting for prompting the handbags in Trafalgar Square , and Liz was told that because she was an attractive woman, she obviously wanted to be shopping in Bond Street 100% of her waking hours.
And she was inching closer to her dream, as the ghouls and ghosts managed a resounding victory, even with the great pile of unused, non-sequential notes they had to deliver to the evil Visitor Centre. Joanne, Jamie and Chris whooped their way to Jersey for a Michelin-starred meal, where they disappointingly failed to try and out-Pacino each other.
Stella and Liz sharpened their knives in preparation to form a Baggs shish kebab in the final showdown. But they were not prepared for the full and awesome power of the Baggs under threat. After bantering back and forth about the failure of the task, it looked like the blame was shrouding around Baggs Alike a stinking cloak. But the Baggs was not taking this without his last stand speech. “I will work 24/7 for you. I will make you so, so proud of me. I cannot stop thinking about new business ideas for you. Let’s start a new company, you and I. Let’s run away together, Lord Sugar! Let’s run away into the night!”
The Good Lord was dubious, but Baggs was not spent. “I am not a one-trick pony, not a ten-trick pony, I have a field of ponies waiting to literally run towards this,” he cried, as Stella fell about laughing. We really didn’t make that up. He?actually?said that.
Lord Sugar recognised that this was childishness carried through the nth degree. That it was the rantings of a toddler. But something had ignited in the mind in the Good Lord, and even when Liz and Stella pointed out that they had better records in the Apprentice realm, and they were actual real people with real business experience, as opposed to the fantasy world that Stuart inhabited with his talk of building a telecoms empire from a yo-yo, they were on a hiding to nothing. Stella saved herself by virtue of singing a bit of cockney, and Liz, record-breaking task winner, uber-sales vixen, winner of best eyes in The Apprentice evah, found herself at the end of the fickle Harlow finger. She was good, but she wasn’t Baggs, and off she popped.
The final five have been anointed. There must be some kind of way out of here…
Next week: It’s interview week! How will the candidates cope with being asked, by old favourite Margaret Mountford no less, to explain exactly why they’re such lying bumvoids? Badly, we hope.
Tim says
Stuart – comedy gold. Bless.
I