The Apprentice
Episode seven
Alan Sugar stands at the start of the M1 and asks the teams to go North.
The task he has set is to meet “12 companies”. “Each will pitch their products and it’s up to you to chose two of these to sell to dealers in Manchester and Liverpool”. The apprentices are rearranged into two new teams with the existing names of “Ignite” and “Empire”.
The teams arrive in Manchester and the team leaders are picked as Mona for Empire and Lorraine for ignite.
10am at The Hilton Hotel, Manchester and a “dozen
up and coming British designers” 
are
in the waiting room. Our man Peter Noble is waiting his turn and there’s
not long 
to
wait before he’s being ushered in first to see Mona’s team. Following the
formalities of shaking hands with the team Peter is quickly down to business
and 
introduces
his product name of Drill-Mate. There is a cut away to the other team who
are viewing a designer leather cushion. The team comments “don’t think
it will set the world on fire” (oh how tv can be so cruel to inventors).
Cut back to Peter to see the 
demonstration
of how Drill-Mate catches dust when drilling into a wall. Mona cradles
the
product in her hands and pronounces “I think it’s a maybe”. Ever so quickly
we see a step ladder stabiliser and a coat rack made from plumbing parts.
Peter says the screen shots of him and his product totalled 11 seconds. On the day he pitched a time limited 10 minutes to each team. There were 12 designers so that’san amazing four hours of filming on the pitches alone. The program showed eight designer’s pitches, yes, four got no airtime at all. Total pitch time on screen for all was about 3 minutes. Oh how so much ends up on the cutting room floor!
The voice over tells us “Sir Alan has set up appointments
with two major retailers, a hardware superstore in Liverpool and a high
end designer store in Manchester”. One team pick a cycle pannier and a
cat playbox. Mona’s team debate the items to go with and select the double
dog lead together with the sleeping bag with arms and legs. 
There
is a debate within the team about the saleability to the Sir Alan preset
hardware and designer appointments for day one. Her instinct for Drill-Mate
has been forgotton.
Margaret (Sir Alan’s long serving aide) then reinforces the fact that a mistake may have been made as the first day appointments are already primed for major purchases. The sales day one, as you would expect, do not go well as each of these retailers do not generally sell pet or camping products. Day two goes better for Mona’s team.
Day three and we are back in London in the boardroom.
Mona’s Empire team is in the firing line first. Sir Alan makes it plain
he is unhappy with the day one lack of sales at his appointments. “They
bought nothing”. He goes on to lambast the choice of products when his
directions were very clear. “how did you go about choosing the products”
There was an excuse that the team thought better to sell well on day two
for 
their
personally chosen items. Sir Alan retorts “I lay on two places for you,
yeah, the first thing is you do is look at the products that you got on
offer and look at the places because, you know, it’s like a bet, like placing
a bet whether you liked ‘em or not you should have chosen something which
you thought to yourself this is a good bet that I can sell to these people,
you weren’t gonna sell a sleeping bag in a hardware store was you, so you
deliberately ignored my leads, well, bit of a waste as far as I’m concerned,
there,because you are now left
with having to go and sell stuffthe
next 
day”.
Ignite also got the same punishing dressing down. “Did you pay much attention
that the items you chose for starters should be saleable for the day one?”
Surprisingly some orders were received for day one. Day two rescues Mona
and her team. They win.
The losing team is brought back for the firing and
again Alan Sugar drives home the choice of products. In analysis we have
seen on screen 8 products. Four were chosen by the Apprentices and four
chosen by Sir Alan for his hardware and designer appointments. Many bloggers
think that Drill-Mate should have been the natural choice. They also say
it was predictable that the contestants would miss the blindingly obvious
benefits of a device to catch dust when drilling into a wall.