The Apprentice: Episode One reviewed

Anita Shah is fired from the Apprentice (Pic: freshbusinessthinking)

The first programme of this year's The Apprentice saw Anita Shah become the first candidate fired by businessman Sir Alan Sugar.

Anita was fired after being assigned in a washing task after she was assigned the job of counting up how much the girls' team, 'Ignite', had spent.

Both the boys' team, 'Empire', and 'Ignite' chose to wash cars, though the boys also decided to scrub shoes as well.

There was a couple of fundamental differences between the teams.

The boys chose their team leader straight away, allowing Howard Ebison take charge, leading the team to a net profit of £239.61 after spending £107.39 and taking £347.

But the girls were less decisive in their choice of team leader. Mona Lewis eventually took on the task as every other girl shirked the responsibility.

Mona said, 'you need balls to put yourself forward to be team leader in the first week', but that was hardly the case. She was team leader because she was the girl who was the least unwilling to be the leader.

Mona led the girls to a profit of £160.55, after spending £196.45 and taking £347. The girls had spent too much and whoever was seen to be in charge of that would come under eventual heavy criticism. But who was seen to be in charge and who actually was in charge were two entirely different things.

I was quite happy to see Anita fired because, as I said in my preview blog, she is one of the oldest candidates and is a lawyer and my prediction that she would not be what Sir Alan was looking for was proven true.

But I thought it was harsh in this task alone that she was fired due to that she was only asked to count the budget and not to decide the expenditure. In the long run, though, I think Sir Alan will benefit from seeing more of what Mona and Debra Barr, who has already shown her mouthy side.

The jury is still out on whether the two of them are, as Sir Alan says, 'a bunch of designer suits and dresses' who are just 'good with words'.

Certainly Mona has a lot to prove as her team never stood much hope of winning when she could not even tell that the item she picked up at the start of the task was a duster.

That's my say on this week's The Apprentice.

Now for the regular feature I am starting which are my random thoughts of the week.

Random thought 1: Did anyone else find Majid Nagra quite sexist? Or at least portrayed as such by the BBC team with selective quotes. I took his joke that he had a wife to do his cleaning as such, but he followed that later by saying, 'We can't lose the first task, not to girls - not that I'm sexist'. No Majid. Of course you're not sexist.

Random thought 2: Now, Mona's profile said she would love to be the brains behind Tesco. So where does she instruct the other half of the team to go to clean cars? That's right - a supermarket car park.

Read next week for my review of Episode Two of this year's The Apprentice.