Nooooo!!!

Margaret can't quit! She just can't!

Oh, she has.

Off to study ancient papyrus. Obviously. Maybe I'll hang about in the British Museum in the hope I bump into her in the Egyptian room.

'I even went to Margate and spoke to a gay person'

This week it's make or break time for me and The Apprentice. Although fun this series hasn't been a patch on the last couple. It does always warm up as it goes on, but there's no splendid Raefs or Badgers left to keep the momentum up.

This week is all about rebranding Margate. Ben's idea of a family holiday is the Seychelles, Mona can barely say the words gay and lesbian without choking, James is worried about suggestive licking, Nick's concerned about the gays looking stiff, Margaret's in fits of laughter watching the munting models strip off. And Lorraine has never seen text over a photo – one presumes she's never bought a book or has seen an advert.

Deborah bullies her team into submission, especially Howard, who tries (and fails) to instill some basic common sense into their poster campaign. Consequently their leaflet remains half-finished. Her team actually work very well together, but she manages to scupper that with a dismissive, aggressive arrogance only she can carry off. I wouldn't have done Howard's job of having to pitch that amateurish shit of a campaign for all the 99 flakes in Margate. In the boardroom Deborah sits there blinking like a big fat shiny clockwork owl, Mona twitters like a tiny sparrow, James puffs up like a nesting booby. Nothing much happens.

Not up to standard. Where's the fun? Sir Alan needs to work harder or this will be The Apprentice going into a deep depression.

Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around...

They're all beginning to unravel, which is when the series gets really fun. Unflappable Ben, the champion of explosions and gunfire at Sandhurst ('he didn't actually go there, remember,' said Margaret) got whipped into a panicked froth by the end. 'You were totally spineless and you shat your pants' said James, who I've warmed to over the series. Philip projected his own faults relentlessly onto Lorraine (or, as Margaret rightly called her, Cassandra). She's 'erratic and volatile'; 'everything that comes out of her mouth is bollocks.'

It was all about selling a load of random objects round London against the clocks. The objects themselves caused some consternation. 'Is it in foreign?' asked Nooral, of the David Bailey book. 'You know what book people are like. They want to waste your time,' said Deborah. I can certainly confirm that.

Margaret was unimpressed by her charges. 'They were very lucky,' she said, of the random flogging of a skeleton in a pub. 'This must be one of the most stupid activities they have yet engaged in,' she said as Philip's team tried to flog the rug in an East End street market. 'I'm speechless!' she said at one point, eyes closed and boiling in frustration as only The Mountford can. And the whole audience was left speechless by the random nutter who suddenly bought their rug at the last moment.

And as with all but the most spectacularly disastrous tasks, it was the team who were edited to look the best who ended up in the boardroom. 'I don't know who's going to be fired, but it won't be me,' snapped Deborah, before she started savaging everyone, including Nick. Sadly the mardy cow was right and ghostly Nooral faded away, bones and all.

Spongebob Squarepants, John Major and Phil

Well, I didn't think anything on TV would make me squirm this week as much as Nuts in May had, but then there was The Apprentice, almost too shameful to watch.

Margaret, Van Helsing that she is, could see the dark heart of moany, preening Phil. 'I still think he believes this was a good campaign', she said. And that was the really embarrassing thing about it.

Man Love the British way

The Apprentice: You're Fired gave its usual cry of 'Man Love!' complete with romantic music as they showed Phil and Maj actually – gasp – enjoying each-others company last night. Reminded me of the constant chorus of 'Girl Crush' that accompanied every reference by a woman to Cheryl Cole on the X Factor. Apparently, straight British viewers need to be constantly reminded through stupid media buzz-words like 'bromance' that it's okay to have friends and admire people of the same gender without being accused of the depraved excesses of unchecked poovery.

'I've heard of blinis'

Oh, joy. Wednesdays!

Rocky (!) vs Yasmina, and it was sandwiches at noon. There was blue-eyed boy Rocky's team, whose crack sales force failed to get any sandwich clients ('I think we may have missed a trick there' said Philip, insightfully). And there was the revenge of the infamous French farmer's market Macro cheese this evening, where the high quality catering required by Yasmina's clients was met by Asda's budget range. And their clients commented accordingly: 'It looks like you've dropped it'. Yasmina reminds me so much of Collaterly Sisters from The Day Today: a chillingly glamorous robot of death.

Every year there's a humiliating fancy dress angle to the catering task, and the boys outdid themselves with their Olympian theme. 'It looks like I've just come out of a mental hospital' observed Majid as he shambled about in his ludicrous toga. And in the girls' team there was a fantastic Alice in Wonderland theme. 'They're kind of gigantic for canapes' observed Margaret, after they appeared to have swapped the sizes of their food, with tiny sandwiches and huge 'canopies'.

Both teams rebelled against their leaders in time-honoured Apprentice fashion. Chirpy Rocky was a dead man walking with his insane costs, and scary Yasmina's underspend was threatening to be be her undoing, with the most hideous low-quality food imaginable. 'There's a hair in mine!' squealed one city type at her paltry wrap. Which, compared to most of her food, was an act of generosity. 'Compensation,' as Margaret said.

And the duel ended with 200% profit vs a loss. James felt like his cat had died. He could taste success on his spit, he said, but he spent most of the episode looking like he'd been forced to eat his dead cat.

I should declare at this point that I think Margaret is probably my favourite individual on television, so when she said rather sympathetically about Rocky, 'He's very young', I was quite prepared to forgive him his terrible decision making and wanted him to stay, especially as the other two were such dicks. 'Give him a few years and he'll be the star of the North East,' said Nick. Certainly the other apprentices agreed, and they all expected useless James to get his. He's quite hard to watch, not even in a 'so bad he's good' kind of a way. But he's doomed, like Michael Sophocles in the last series. Let's hope he falls to bits in equally spectacular fashion.