Young Apprentice hopefuls’ dashiki dilemma – Week six verdict

Let’s not beat around the bush. Despite a healthy dose of bickering, a top drawer boardroom performance and plenty of dashiki dilemmas, last night’s ‘Young Apprentice’ didn’t exactly set the world alight.

After last week’s wonderful display of ineptitude and Harry M’s pantomime villainy, week six was actually pretty tame. It did serve a purpose however, reinforcing the public’s reasoning for wanting Harry M and Zara fired from cannons into the nearest sun.

This week the whippersnapper’s task was for each team to find a list of products and buy them for the lowest possible price. It’s an ‘Apprentice’ classic with plenty of traditional pitfalls that our young contestants reliably as ever stumbled straight into.

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Haya, eventually, took control of Kinetic after jockeying with Nice Harry for the role of project manager. Well, it was less jockeying and more like a couple demanding that the other hang-up first. James looked thoroughly bored, but he always looks like that.

Meanwhile Atomic were setting up camp in Madame Tussauds with Lizzie given the task of managing well-mannered Hayley and trying to keep the egos of Zara and Harry M at bay. Was she able to keep the pair in line, or did they run amuck and do their own thing?

I think you know the answer.

Kinetic won by a whopping £500 margin, thanks to each of the team’s individual haggling efforts. Nice Harry deserves praise most of all however for being sent off on his own for the task. He managed to impressively knock the price of a stall down by almost 50%, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.

James and Haya made a formidable duo, hacking prices down and then demanding an extra pound off just to rub salt into the seller’s wound. Haya was complimentary to everyone, even swallowing her pride to admire a Russian shop-keeper’s monstrosity of a necklace.

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On the other hand James was vaguely charming and basically the opposite of how he is when selling, and it worked well for the pair. A sort of good cop, indifferent cop routine.

Meanwhile, still at Madame Tussauds, Atomic were busy on the phone trying to find each of the products. A more structured plan of action than Kinetics run-and-gun tactic but it didn’t help them in the long run.

Harry M kept suggesting top of the line places to find their products like Harrods and Saville Row. Clearly choosing places he has fond memories of frivolously spending his petty cash as a child. He ignored suggestions and adamantly went about his business. Nothing surprising, but Lizzie should have cracked down on it.

Zara was more welcoming, a kind of watered down Harry, but deciding to go all the way to Croydon for a pocket watch that ended up being four times the price that their rivals paid for theirs was a terrible and costly move.

It’s ‘Young Apprentice’ law to throw in a mystery item, and this year it was that damn dashiki! Nobody, not even the people selling clothes who probably should have known, knew that it was an African garment. In the end it was Zara who unravelled the mystery, asking a shop keeper to look it up in a nearby dictionary.

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So Harry lost yet again and would have surely been fired if Lizzie had brought him back in with her, but she chose to bring back Hayley and Zara instead. As soon as Zara pointed out Harry M’s record in the series he shot back with Piers Morgan levels of nauseating smugness before slinking off back to the house.

Anyone could have been fired this week but Zara pulled out a great boardroom performance, completely dismantling Hayley to save herself and smack the final nail into Hayley’s ‘Apprentice’ coffin.  So, once again the nicer, quieter personality bites the bullet. Not a bad decision however.

It wasn’t until the drama finished that we saw the show’s highlight. Having returned to the house, Harry M was lording it over his rivals only for Nice Harry to smack him back down to Earth saying he’d have definitely taken him with him into the boardroom because he’s the “weakest” one there. Good lad.

So we're down to six...

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