The Apprentice: Sausage Connoisseurs...

Yes ladies and gentlemen, last night saw the majestic return of The Apprentice and, as we hoped and predicted in last week's candidates preview, this series is blessed with an abundance of marauding bellends. Stuart Baggs, who we earmarked last week as a real card, opened the bidding at only 49 seconds in with 'everything I touch turns to sold', only to be quickly followed by surgeon and business owner (surely you can't do both without detriment to one or the other) Shibby Robati who claimed, much to his own glee, that his 'first word wasn't "mummy", it was "money"'. Surrey investment banker (if ever 3 words were harder to come back from) Chris Bates threw his hat into the ring by claiming he was an 'all-round exceptional human being' (or something equally twattish)... as if we wouldn't hate him already. In fact, many of the candidates' statements were so obtuse, hackneyed or genuinely stomach-turning, that it was as though they'd simply hired actors to play a parody of typical Apprentice candidate archetypes.

Astonishing opening gambits and we were yet to have the credits. When the strains of Prokofiev were finally over, we saw the candidates shoved into the board room at midnight and ordered to go to Smithfield and craft some sausages. It had all the ingredients for a classic first task - forcing the contestants to wear silly hats, a good chance of potentially fatal cock-ups and a wee bit of sales tagged on the end. First the teams had to pick a name, a simple task, one would imagine. The women decided on Apollo (named after the space missions rather than the Greek god, apparently) and the men argued over whether 'Fusion' was more cliched than 'Synergy', eventually deciding that it was and completely missing the fact that they are both equally cliched and mean exactly the same thing. Joanna accepted the title of project manager after Melissa shirked duty despite showing initial interest. For the boys 34 year old Dan Harris stepped up to the plate, banging the table and roaring. "It was like being back in the dressing room" said Karen Brady, providing you with all you need to know about what it's like to be a woman working at a football club run by Davids Gold and Sullivan.

The first step of the sausage task was buying the meat. Synergy, having decided to pursue a sausage with the minimum legal requirement of meat in it (surely that won't come back to bite them in the arse, will it...?), charged off seeking the cheapest price available. Apollo, meanwhile, attempted to create a gourmet sausage with a staggering 70% meat. Meat acquired, both teams moved into the kitchen, taking a crash course in sausage manufacturing (the entire episode was essentially one, long, strung-out innuendo) before forming a production line with varying degrees of success. Dan quickly turned into a sausage Mussolini, all yelling and arm-folding, Joanna managed to get a degree of consensus and harmony from Apollo.

In Synergy the 'characters' certainly came to the fore. "Who is doing the mincing?!" demanded Mussolini. Baggs carped on about something or other, Epstein (you'll remember from last week, that he was convinced he invented the bendy bus and had been sacked from Hagen Daazs) spent his time looking like a hedgehog and Jamie Lester (who looks like a composite of all the previously successful male candidates) branded Dan Mussolini "a nob". Among the quieter ones were Raleigh Addington (the only candidate approaching Bates in the appallingly posh stakes) and indeed last week's blog's pick Christopher 'Full Metal Jacket' Farrell of the hidden convictions.

Both teams struggled with the sausage skinning machine, something that never looks graceful or impressive at the best of times. Apollo's simply fired out quantities of minced meat seemingly at random, while Synergy's rusk-heavy mix came out resembling something between pet food pellets and a turd, blocking up the nozzle in the process. Eventually both teams managed to create enough processed cylinders of meat to flog to an unwitting London public.

This was where it counts. Graft and sales. Stuart Baggs (who has his own erinaceous quality, now that I think about it) came out of the blocks quickly, terrifying potential 'sausage connoisseurs' with a bizarre combination of sexual aggression and unyielding hounding. "It's 100% meat" he claimed. Right, so that's 100% 42% meat then...? Epstein manned the griddle, presumably resembling a hedgehog too much to be of any use in a high-pressure sales situation. Mussolini led a splinter group on door to door sausage-selling, less a trailblazing march into a gap into the market and more harranging innocent West London residents by buzzing and yelling "do you want some sausages?!" into a receiver.

The women focussed on flogging their 'gourmet' sausages to banker-y types and a restaurant with a good degree of success. Meanwhile the boys subteam brought their limp, rusk-filled excuse for a sausage to a female chef who displayed more business acumen than the entire team had for the rest of the episode and drove a hard bargain and we were whisked back to the boardroom for the fallout. Sometime the editing can be misleading, but it certainly seemed that the women had adopted the correct business strategy, whereas the blokes were a bunch of in-fighting neanderthals.

Mussolini screwed up his already slim chances immediately in a bizarre display of non-adherence to board room etiquette and was quickly informed to "sit in a conventional manner" by Lord Sugar. One of my favourite ever Sugar quotes, I think, up there even with "you've gone from anchor to wanker". Nick and Karen gave their verdicts and numbers and the boys had lost by £15. Much, much closer than anyone would have guessed. At the inquest, previously subdued Raleigh laid into Mussolini branding his behaviour 'shameful' with all the air of abused spouse. Mussolini correctly brought both hedgehogs back into the board room and, frankly, Siralun mi'Lud Sugar should have fired all three.

Epstein was reminded of his own failure by Sugar and quickly gave a hurt speech about 'tough times', still hard to accept from a man with such a degree of hedgeholio about him. Baggs dug himself into an enormous hole with a smattering of appalling trash-talk and sickening sycophancy but inevitably it was the slouchy Mussolini that faced the finger of doom.

The One You Won't Remember: Sandeesh (Nope? Me neither...)

Next Week: Beach Holiday Paraphernalia