The Apprentice week 8 recap: Thomas Skinner is a ‘legend’ for saving Pamela in the boardroom, says Sian Gabbidon

THE Apprentice is getting better and better and every task is getting more and more interesting.

This week the teams were tasked with catering for a corporate away day on a train.

Ryan-Mark’s team offered up a royalty themed journey, narrowly losing out to Lottie’s silver service train.

To be honest, I really liked both experiences, they were really cool.

Ryan-Mark was very unlucky to lose but in a task where every detail matters, that’s just how it goes.

But the best moment of the episode has to be Thomas saving Pamela in the boardroom.

Negative Marianne strikes again 

To be honest I thought Ryan-Mark’s was better. He had a strong team and it was really unlucky for them to be given the client who wanted more of a corporate party.

It’s hard when they were told the task was for a luxury experience, with Ryan-Mark being the king of luxury, then getting someone who basically wanted a party.

I’m surprised though that he went because I thought Marianne was the weakest. The whole food intolerance problem was a major, major factor in the loss.

I think she overall didn’t work as a team. I feel like she’s got this slightly negative air. It’s always like, well if that’s what you want than that’s what we go with. Rather than being like we’re a team, let’s do it together and let’s win.

I didn’t like when Marianne said Ryan-Mark isn’t the right person to be on the serving team. 

Basically he was saying, they are not the right demographic. I remember thinking if that was any other situation, there would be uproar caused by saying something like that.

It was a bit rude. It’s like someone saying to me that I’m too common to do something. Service is service, I don’t care what accent the person has.

Disaster train 

It came across like they made so many more mistakes. The service wasn’t the best, Lottie was looking at tiny details when they should have been serving.

If they’d have lost, poor Corina would have been fired. But she made some bold decisions and it worked out for them.

Dean saying he was going to be on Corina’s side when she made the decision to buy more booze and then telling Lottie it was all hers, I just thought, who’s your ally in this or are you completely in this for yourself?

He was sitting there smiling. Even when Lottie was telling Corina she was not going to be the sub-team leader anymore.

On the task him and Lottie were just talking amongst themselves when you just need to keep people happy.

When a hero comes along

Tom is such a legend. I rate him and I say it every week. He made some errors (like he does every week) but that moment in the boardroom, I thought was TV gold. 

I almost wanted to cry. What a guy! He didn’t need to do that.

It was a contrast to Ryan-Mark saying Tom was completely at fault for hiring the band, when he was the one who agreed to it on the phone. Tom is the complete opposite, where he takes all criticism on board.

I do think he needs to breathe and think about his decisions before he goes ahead with it.

I think if Ryan-Mark was smart in the boardroom, Marianne would have gone. Watching it back I was think about how I would have done it.

There were so many faults between Marianne and Tom, Ryan-Mark was in the strongest position.

He could have blamed them for everything that went wrong. Technically he didn’t make any major faults, but he approached it in the boardroom wrong.

There’s times where Lord Sugar watched him act and thought, I can’t work with him. 

One to watch? 

No one really shined this week. Corina made some bold decisions and it paid off for her. So I would say she did a really good job.
Pamela did a good job too.