The Apprentice: Zoe is fired for crumbling under pressure.

Zoe was ordered to leave the competition last night having failed as PM of Logic to get any orders for the team’s biscuit BixMix, whereas Venture, whose PM was Helen, sold £800,000 units to Asda for their little stars biscuits for kids.

Zoe’s error? Not going to the factory to make the product and leaving Tom and Melody to it.

Lord Sugar told Zoe, ‘I’m looking for someone to go into business with. You can’t perform in a task, then you can’t perform with me.You’re fired.’

As Zoe, a food retailer, walked out of the boardroom, Lord Sugar told the remaining candidates, Melody and Tom, Susan was let off the hook, ‘I’m flexing my muscles, as someone who is meant to be an expert in this field has failed.You get it?’

Logic’s failure of the task was put down to their poor quality product. Feedback from the supermarkets they pitched to, Asda, Waitrose and Sainsburys, was that the team had no clear target audience, their packaging didn’t stand out and their snap and share biscuit, half chocolate, half digestive, was good in principal, but left one person with a plain biscuit and the other with chocolate.

‘You should have broken it horizontally so both get some of the chocolate’, advised Sugar.

Before making his decision, Lord Sugar told Tom he was like a broken record with his ‘should have, could have, would have done’ speech.

Tom replied that it was a learning process. ‘It’s not school’, said Sugar.

‘I’ve got over you being a charming, nice man, but you’re not authoritative. What should, could, would have done is no good to me.’

Previously Sugar’s advisor Karen said to him that all they hear from Tom is he’s learning. ‘At some point he’s got to get it right’.She also warned that Melody needs to be carefully watched as her interaction with the other candidates is not good.

This was proved when she and Zoe argued on Asda’s shop floor before the pitch, and their bitching to one another in the boardroom.

Sugar told Melody he was concerned about her arguments with colleagues and that it never seems to be her fault?

Next week the teams go back to basics and set up their own market stall a’ la Alan Sugar.

The Apprentice- Glenn is fired

Lord Sugar last night told Glenn he had a problem grasping his unique selling point and a social club was not a business.

‘I’ve never come across an engineer that can turn their hand to business. You’re fired’, he said.

Glenn’s team- Venture, failed the task as they did not secure enough advertising space in their freemium magazine for the over sixties called ‘HIP Replacement’, which subsequently saw PM Jim, Glen and Susan go head to head in the boardroom after Zoe was sent back to the contestants’ house.

Sugar saved Jim as he said he had seen a ‘glimmer’ in him he like, despite calling the contestant deflective and manipulative, and placing the blame on him for the failure of the task, which Sugar put down to not negotiating with their first client Carat on rate card prices. A huge mistake for a launch of a new mag, claimed Sugar. He said to Jim the penny obviously dropped afterwards as he offered reduced prices to the two other agencies-Mediacom and Maxus, with Medicom spending £16.850 and Maxus £12,000 on advertising. Carat placed no orders for ad space.

Susan also narrowly escaped being fired with her past successes being her saving grace. ‘You need to show me you can do what you say on paper’, Sugar told the 21-year-old. He warned Susan that she needs to voice her opinions more rather than be a mouse, as describer by Jim, after she said she had told the PM to drop his prices and advised against the title HIP Replacement.

‘That name was bad’, confessed Sugar. It back fired. You read it as exactly what it means. ‘Out with the old, in with the new’, is even worse, like out with the old hip in with the new one.’

The features are also condescending he told them. The technology article about phones tells readers how to make a phone call, are you taking the piss? I’m in that age group and I know how to dial a number. And the cover, he said, was like Viz with old people wearing cardigans, so much for the sixties being the new thirties, as the mag’s strapline reads.

However, Sugar claimed that he was surprised the team had lost as they choose a good niche market, the over sixties, whereas the winners Logic, who secured £9,00 of ads with Maxus, £7,500 with Mediacom and a whopping £60,000, the whole magazine, from Carat, created a tacky lads mag-Covered, that had no USP and was described by advertisers as stuck in the nineties. It doesn’t reflect today’s male they argued.

‘Who would want to advertise next to a feature called Blow Your Load’, said Sugar, who couldn’t understand how the team secured a win.

Next week the contestants must use the French language skills to buy objects in Paris, phrase books at the ready.

The Apprentice- Felicity is fired

Logic’s PM Felicity was axed on last night’s show for, according to Lord Sugar, ‘A disastrous task and not being decisive.’

‘There’s no way I could have gone into business with her’, Sugar told his advisers Karen and Nick. ‘If you did you would have to make all the decisions’, replied Karen.

Last night’s task challenged the two teams, lead by Felicity and Zoe, to choose two beauty products/treatments to sell in Birmingham. Zoe’s team-Venture, choose a spray tan and cold pedicure, while Felicity’s team, Logic, also chose the spray tan, which they lost to the other team, so went with a blow dry bar and a hot shell massage.

Venture spent £734 on products and made £937, a profit of £203.01. Logic spent a massive £924, made £677, which is a loss of £246.28.

PM Felicity blamed the failure of the task on team mates Ellie and Natasha, who she took in to the boardroom with her. Ellie she said had sat back and not shown any enthusiasm, while Natasha she claimed failed to sell any treatments, just products.

Lord Sugar questioned Ellie, whose job in the task was to give treatments, about what she had done for the three hours she was upstairs in the team’s treatment rooms without any customers, and asked her why she hadn’t called her colleagues downstairs to see what was going on. ‘It’s a very serious issue’, he said. However Sugar decided to give Ellie the benefit of the doubt and told her in future to come forward.

To Natasha, who Karen warned him was all talk, Lord Sugar asked why she had only been selling the products rather than the treatments. In which she replied that there was no strategy to sell treatments, Felicity claimed this was not true. ‘You didn’t catch on to the fact that the idea of the task was to sell treatments (the money maker)’, said Sugar. ‘I’m not looking for a receiver. I’m looking for someone that does something.

But it wasn’t only the loosing team who got a telling off. Lord Sugar told Venture that their profit was exactly great, particularly as they had Susan on their team, who sells beauty products for a living. Susan agreed with him, however the rest of the team blamed her for their poor result, with Zoe claiming that she had trusted Susan’s word in the amount of products they should buy. But Susan denied that it was her fault.

Next week the teams have to design and make a new brand of dog food. Don’t they say never work with children or animals?