Another week on The Apprentice, another lengthy introduction that absolutely no-one needs (even if you’ve never watched it before, if you own a TV I’m sure you have some idea of the premise of the show). I especially like how they very slightly tweak it every week, as if that’ll make us more interested in it. We’re not, just get on with it already! This week, the candidates were told that they would be meeting Sir Alan at the Wallace Collection. This left most of them stumped (“the only Wallis I know is clothes” one said – wrong spelling dude), though you’d have thought that the word collection might have steered them in the direction of it being an art gallery or museum. Apparently not. When they reached the surprise destination, in front of The Laughing Cavalier a most certainly not laughing Sir Alan outlined this week’s task.

They would be taking photographic portraits of shoppers at the Bluewater Centre – where customers are referred to as guests, we’re told, as if that’s meant to persuade us it’s a classy establishment. As soon as the task was revealed, ex-army man Simon let out an audible “yes!”, as if he’d been waiting all his life to show off his photographic skills to the world. As the task progressed, I actually got more convinced of it. Sir Alan has been getting rather annoyed with all of the fighting within the teams, so he mixed them up a bit, presumably resorting to blind faith that it would make any difference whatsoever.

Simon put himself up as Renaissance’s team leader, and while he wasn’t exactly cheered into the role, no-one else was offering their services. As he explained his reasons for wanting to be project manager, that “I’ll put my nuts on the chopper” phrase turned up again. For Alpha, it was Helene who put herself forward. “I’m a business woman with a lot of balls” she said. There we go again! These people are obsessed.

In Renaissance, it was clear from the very beginning that Alex wasn’t going to be entirely supportive of his team leader; when Simon asked him if he’d be his point of contact for a separate team he “backed off from it so far he was practically out of the room”, as Margaret would later put it. “Right, Claire, it can be you then”, Simon said. Talk about out of the frying pan, into the fire. In the car with Alex she said “Simon’s like a toddler; he’s very enthusiastic but we’re holding the reins to keep him up.”

On the same team, Michael generally kept his head down until he was speaking directly to the camera: “The theme we’ve chosen, Glamour and Beauty, well it’s not really a theme, is it? That’s not a theme, that’s just words.” Very well put, sir. Alpha had a rather better idea of hiring a lookalike for people to have their photograph taken with. They auditioned a few potentials, including a Del Boy, a Cherie Blair, and a red-PVC-clad Britney that had Nick not knowing where to look. In the end, they settled on a David Beckham who, you have to say, really did look the part.

It soon transpired that Simon was becoming a laughing-stock in his own team. Sure he had some odd cost-cutting ideas, and he can get a little over-enthusiastic – “I have a real talent for photography” he exclaimed – but Alex and Simon undermined him at every opportunity in a really rather nasty way. Back in Helene’s team, she made the terrible and down-right bizarre decision to put Lucinda in charge of manipulating and printing the photos on the computer. Poor, hapless Lucinda said time and again that she had never even used a digital camera before, but for some unfathomable reason, Helene stuck to her guns. Along with Lucinda in the back room, Raef would do the mugs and jigsaw puzzels, and Helene would “oversee” them. Not that that included learning how to use the camera software or anything; nope she was just overseeing. An important job. Honest.

Obviously, then, things went somewhat disastrously for Alpha at the printing end, and it was exactly the same case for Renaissance. Plenty of photos were being taken, but when it came to printing them, they had no idea who was who. Quite a fundamental issue, really. Both teams then, were poorly led, undermined, and fatally fractious, and neither deserved to claim the title of ‘winners’. But the bottom line for Sir Alan is profit – or, in Simon’s case, loss. Yup, Renaissance actually lost money, and so were brought back into the boardroom. I actually felt a little short-changed by this outcome, as I would have loved to see Helene try and explain what she did as project leader, other than crush Lucinda who was put in a wholly unsuitable role. What did “overseeing the back-room” actually entail, may I ask? Handing paper to Raef?

As it was, I was hoping, probably along with the rest of the viewing public, for Claire to be fired. I know that Simon wasn’t a great project manager, but neither was he manipulative, aggressive or plain vicious. Claire was, and Margaret knew it – so Sir Alan knew it too. He said to her and Alex that they “showed absolutely no respect to [Simon].” And he continued: “I don’t like people being victimised, I don’t like people being ostracised.” Even Margaret said that Claire had “treated him like dirt”. Wow. After all the bluff and bluster we get from the candidates, this was all quite wonderful.

Unsurprisingly, Simon brought Alex and Claire into the boardroom with him to face the one-man firing squad. Alex, being the Machiavellian little fox he is, soon saw that Claire – hitherto a member of his little clique – was not Sir Alan’s favourite person, and said that it was in fact she who should be fired. I didn’t know whether to applaud or slap him. Not that it made a difference in the end, as, for all his shouting at Claire, Sir Alan did not fire her. What really annoyed me about this decision was that he had clearly been convinced of her objectionable behaviour, and yet he still chose to kick out Simon instead. Wrong decision, Sir Alan.