I cannot stress how much I do not trust this man.

I’m the Pingu of business.

It’s that time of year again when the personifications of hubris and hamartia power-dress to impress the cursed ventriloquist doll we call Lord Sugar

the resemblance is uncanny and only gets even more so as the show slowly replaces him with a piece of AI algorithmically stitched together using his entirely unintelligible twitter feed. But the show still ensures us that amid the economic uncertainty and inflation (that they never blame on anyone because guess how the old man who yells at clouds votes) that Sugar is the candidates’ best option for success despite the actual prize fund never having increased.

This year’s gimmick seems to be declaring yourself the fictional character of business

nobody tell Sam that Del Boy is already the Del Boy of business, that’s basically HIS ENTIRE THING. And we’re yet to find out if Foluso’s business plan involves berating children through the medium of song and calling it charming. And Asif (of unspecified doctoral origins) is very quiet about declaring himself the Andrew Tate of Business (I still believe Andrew Tate is a cryptid like Bigfoot, Mothman and Raymond from Animal Crossing)

he’s already in an arms race with Katie Hopkins as to who can be the most toxic candidate! I truly dread the moment the teams mix genders – provided he doesn’t clap himself out the door before then.

Last year we started off by shipping everyone over to Antigua to perish to death while wearing 3 piece suits in 30 degree heat because Claud wanted a bit of a holiday. This time the BBC got a 2 for 1 deal on Scottish Castles and drove them all to Cawdor Castle to play Corporate Traitors for a task about putting on an awayday

and in order to avoid too much dilly dallying over choosing Project Managers, the teams had to pick one the in front of Lord Sugar – so no awkward silences this time! Onyeka stepped forward to lead the women and DJ “NotChip” Virdi was managing the men.

Loch’d Out

Onyeka’s first task as PM was deciding what activities to lay out for the guests with the main option being between a Loch Tour and a Land Tour – she did desperately try to get herself out of doing the Loch Tour on the grounds she may very quickly become The Lady of the Lake that haunts the grounds

however, her team did point out that Lochs are kind of a big reason to visit Scotland (congratulations to everyone for getting through this conversation without saying USP) and so a Loch Tour in the morning and Highland Games in the afternoon it was! And yet despite being well aware of her own aquatic shortcomings, Onyeka still chose to put herself on the Loch Exploring Team and unsurprisingly had to Douglas Mawson herself halfway through, although with significantly more skin in tact and less huskies eaten

did… did the instructors not explicitly ask if everyone could swim? Because at least part of this is on them.

So while Onyeka’s Team became one of WatchMojo’s Top 10 Most Doomed Expeditions, the other half of the team, lead by Sam were negotiating on food – going for the always popular mid-range option which was a fishcake and a rhubarb crumble (served separately, you’d think.) They did go a little bit over Onyeka’s specifications, because she wanted to feed her captive audience prison food

with their meals ending up costing £36.50 per head and no alcohol required because the client had requested as much

and it’s probably not a great idea to ply people with prosecco and then have them lob big sticks and heavy rocks around completely unsupervised by someone who knew what they were doing because the entertainment team had decided to not hire the professional highland games athlete, which he failed to fully mask how hurt he was over

he did still get £280 out of them for equipment rentals, although Noor was under the false impression that she could forage for her own cabers and shotputs

brave words from a woman who can’t make a fishcake.

Roll on the day of the awayday and a slight team shakeup had to take place with Onyeka jumping ship from the Loch Tour and deciding to manage the Ready Steady Cook Kitchen on Steroids, with Sam taking her place and all of her teammates being absolutely brutal by literally pushing her off a cliff

and with her only knowledge of the loch being Flo’s fascination with its brownness as she took the tour of the loch like a geography teacher that was rapidly losing the attention of a year 8 field trip

the sacrificial lamb just had to jump into the brown unknown with complete faith in a group of people that would not only throw you under the bus but would gladly drive said bus

no bones were broken in the making of this loch tour.

Over in the kitchen and the first signs of chaos were beginning to bubble up as someone, RIGHTFULLY, declared that the fishcakes “didn’t taste nice”

did they do anything about this? No, they just kept on making their horrible tasting fishcakes in the hopes that it was just a them-problem. It was not just a them-problem as all the diners had the same far off look of existentialism as Lisa Faulkner accidentally eating a whole raw scallop

despite one half of the team looking for a tub of mysteriously missing crumble topping

and the other half complaining about funny tasting fishcakes, nobody did a Poirot and put two and two together to get Crumble Coated Fishcakes with the guests being the unwitting victims of a combination of smoked trout and demerara sugar

the main perpetrator of the situation seemed to be Noor, a judgement I make purely because she looked like she’d eaten a Rhubarb Crumble Fishcake when the error came back to the kitchen

and with no fishcakes left unsugared, all they could do to apologise was serve them a rhubarb crumble that they couldn’t 100% guarantee would not contain any flaked trout

this didn’t go down too well either because in a rush to get things out, they just sort of grilled the crumble tops leaving them both burnt and completely raw

but despite having only drunk water and taken 1 and a half curious bites of a fishcake that tasted like salmon birthday cake, the clients still had more than enough energy for the highland games at the end of the day

which was quite the recovery, not that this particularly consoled Flo who got into the homebound mini-van looking like she was on death row

I’m willing to wager £30 that if anyone drops out for sudden and unspecified reasons on the way to Dubai, it’s her.

Veni, Virdi, Vici

Virdi’s approach to Project Managing was rather fascinating – he didn’t really want to specify anything and spoke in corporate riddles at a rate of knots in what came across as a deliberate attempt to confuse everyone on the catering team into making mistakes so that he had someone else to blame when he quite literally drove this challenge off the edge of a cliff

so off his half of the team went in the clear knowledge that they were going to be doing *checks notes* urban and Bhangra dancing in the Scottish highlands

and his side of the team knew that the only way to get a group of people who looked thoroughly ground down by the hospitality sector that they worked in

to go through with this, was plenty of alcohol

Steve’s highland piss up with urban flavour was sadly not going to come to fruition because Pie Man Phil, not to be confused with Pie Man Paul who is in turn not to be confused with Dentist Paul, doesn’t know how to read a drinks menu and thought they were charging £9 per glass of prosecco DESPITE IT SAYING “PER BOTTLE” AT THE TOP OF THE BLASTED THING!

that’s the Tesco Clubcard price for 1 bottle of Freixenet. Although, he never claimed his speciality was sparkling wine, he is however The Pie Supreme (Pie Man Paul found dead)

Naturally Pie-ana Ross was put in charge of the catering team which he ran like the navy although most of his supervision went on Asif and Oliver – mostly because Asif’s only way of relating to the task of chopping onions was to talk about the dead body he owned for a few years

this man is a walking red flag and I am ENTIRELY certain his business plan is going to be selling horse dewormers like the average free speech podcast owner

When not trying to get Asif to stop talking about his dead body collection, Phil’s main priority was to painstakingly guide Oliver through the making a brownie which was a fool’s errand from the outset because Oliver is The Little Cook of Business

you’ll be unsurprised to learn that the man who could barely make Baby’s First Bake had never stepped into a kitchen before

he usually just sits at the 16 person dining table and the butler brings him his food while he he sits in stoic silence while his parents both silently contemplate the pros and cons of a divorce at the opposite end.

Despite the heraclean trial that Oliver turned making the brownie into, they did get made

not that they would ever get used because Virdi and Tre’s Highland Dance Night Morning got a little bit carried away and arrived almost an hour late for lunch and somehow less of the cold Toad in the Hole got eaten than the Accidental Smoked Trout Crumble

and on completely empty, entirely sober stomachs and with only 4 minutes left to spare before the clients’ bus left, Virdi still tried to speedrun a highland dancing masterclass

which unsurprisingly nobody was really in the mood for after an entire morning full of woodland bhangra and Tre’s miscellaneous and unfilmed urban dance session – I will pay for that footage, purely because I need to see how much more of THIS Steve did

still not the most cringe thing to have happened amongst this whole ordeal as upon sensing the impending doom of Team DJ Virdi and MC Tre, Jack’s one contribution to the whole episode was to very bravely ask for a tip

you almost have to admire the audacity of it.

The Boardroom Blitz

It’s safe to say that nobody shone in this particular challenge – both teams initially made profits but had them DRASTICALLY cut due to horrible lunch induced refunds – the women’s initial profit of £1266.43 was kneecapped right down to a mere £122.43. Then it was time for the guys to find out how they’d done and initially they had made a mere £643.60 profit but they had been hit with a Brexity 52% refund and in a truly GLORIOUS display of jumping the gun, Asif started applauding the £300 profit he thought they’d made

literally everyone’s reaction to it could be hung in The Louvre, but most of all Onyeka

the guys didn’t actually end up with a profit, they had instead made a gargantuan loss of £506.40 which, in my time recapping the show, is the first time a team has actually lost money, I cannot stress how hard it is to actually pull that off, and how much harder it is to lose as much as £500 – even the infamous Sandalwood Debacle only ended up with a loss of £68!

So while Onyeka and team got the grand prize of moving in to a house and receiving a “welcome drink” (which was not water)

Virdi had to make the decision about who to bring back into the boardroom, eventually deciding on Oliver on the grounds he did nothing and Steve on the grounds that… he probably wouldn’t turn on Virdi like anyone from the other team would have

the main tactic was to get Oliver fired because he was a little quieter and had proven himself to be a bit of a pushover throughout the challenge. It’s kind of astonishing to me that Virdi still managed to get off the hook considering the scale of the refund was undeniably down to the fact his team’s timing in the afternoon went to complete shit – had they arrived on time, they’d have been served hot, fresh food and still been able to do the dancing activity. Sure there still would have been no alcohol but that might have incurred a significantly lower refund, if any at all. Who knows! They may have even got a tip!

Alas, with no real reason to fire Steve other than the negotiation (which, and I cannot stress this hard enough, Virdi was also a part of) Oliver was the first firee of 2004

he’ll never make brownies again.

And so… still far too many people remain…