CUE THE HAPPY CLAPPY CHARACTERS…with no hands!

WHO WAS IN THE FIRING LINE THIS WEEK?

Episode three of this year’s series of The Apprentice graced our screens last night as the boys’ and girls’ teams mixed it up to become Team Affinity and Team Apex. Would this be more good mannered as the gender mix changed? Or would the claws really come out?

The task this week was to create a 25 second cartoon as a promotion for a new character for pre-school children. Lord Sugar, in cartoon-mode himself, explained that children had always been at the heart of the BBC in its 100 year history (shame it’s all online then now isn’t it?). The teams had to come up with the next big ‘thing’ in children’s pre-school tv.

The team went their separate ways with Avi Sharma becoming project manager for Affinity and Reece Donnelly for Apex — Reece was confident, as he runs a theatre company for children that he could nail this task. He certainly nailed something.

And throughout this task where was Gregory? Apart from talking about the sun moving across the sky in a cartoon, he was noticeably absent. There in body, certainly not in spirit and certainly not in action.

Their team concept was around inclusion and featured two characters Femi & Fay — in a conversation about being inclusive around disability and ethnicity. Already early doors it all felt very PC and as dull as dishwater. If an adult is bored — how would a two-year-old react to it?

Then precious time was lost arguing about the names — should it be Fay? Should it be something else? Victoria and Denisha went head to head wasting time. Denisha was blamed yet Victoria does have a habit of voicing her complaints almost every week, I’m still waiting for her to offer a single useful solution.

This argument came into sharp focus when the script team, led by Reece, called the design team to tell them the storyline for their characters to play out. Cue, the very big problem…

The storyline involved one character in a wheelchair not being able to play with the other who was coming down a slide. The character on the slide then changed the game and started a clapping game with the character in a wheelchair, to ensure the wheelchair character was not left out.