Smash hit

Lee is the hairy man of the contest, the Hulk to Raef's Bruce Bannerman, Tarzan to Lucinda's Jane. His catchphrase, “Vat's what I'm torkin abart!” rallies his colleagues, who dare not patronise him. His party trick is impersonating what he calls (but cannot, I suspect, spell) a reverse pterodactyl. Its simulated screech is his cry. It is probably how Neanderthal man won himself a mate.

By a combination of cleverly never volunteering to be team leader and dogged graft, he has never faced Sir Alan's ire in the boardroom. The only moment anything like nastiness surfaced was when he bullied another contestant whom he considered had not pulled her weight. Had she been in his team, she would have been in the boardroom, “simpoo as vat”.

His motives are transparently Darwinian. He wants to have more than his postman father had. If he wins, some of the nonsense talked about business and some of the consultants who talk it will seem a little less important. It is a tragedy that tells us much about what is wrong with business today that he felt the need to lie on his CV about his perfectly adequate and largely irrelevant education. I hope tommarraw belongs to Lee.

Helene
by Penny Wark

Fair enough, Helene isn't the obvious one to win. She hasn't bragged about being fluent in English, or given us a weekly demonstration of her barking-mad credentials. She hasn't wept, ratted on her colleagues, mouthed off at Siralan or bigged up her talents only to crash and burn. She has singularly failed to entertain us and instead shown that she is steady, determined, straightforward and grown-up. This is why she should get the job.

Confronted by glorious cock-ups week after week, it's easy to forget that The Apprentice is a search for a talented business performer. Which is different from a yen for greasepaint. Or, as Siralan has pointed out, a big gob. If Helene lacks the obvious charisma of Lee or Alex - not for nothing has she been called a speak-your-weight machine - she does have a sense of perspective, as she acknowledged to Karren Brady. “To be honest, I've struggled throughout the process,” she confided. “Why is that?” asked Brady in her softest trust-me-I'm-a-doctor voice. “I'm just not used to being surrounded by 15 gobshites,” Helene replied.

It's a fair point. Apart from being Amazonian and having unfeasibly large eyes, Helene isn't a natural on reality TV, probably because she has had more reason than most to engage in histrionics and knows that they don't achieve anything. If your parents were alcoholics, if you have at some point “gone off the rails” too, as she has admitted, and if by the age of 32 you are leading a sales team of 500 at General Electric, and earn six figures in a male-dominated industry where your colleagues have tried to scupper your progress by hiding contracts and giving you misinformation, you have clearly worked out that mouthing off is rarely an effective policy. You have learnt control, and you have developed tactics for surviving when you feel threatened. Helene's raised eyebrow may not make telly producers salivate, but it's neat and effective.

These are Helene's stengths and her instincts have served her well, proving that she is prepared to get stuck in, and that she doesn't regard bullshit as a get-out for failure. If Siralan, rippling with inverse snobbery, is dismissive of what he calls her comfortable corporate background, this is a cliché that says more about him than it does her. She counters, rightly, that she hasn't had it easy, and sensibly stops short of asking why Siralan's Del Boy environment is so superior?

What her low profile in the series - and her background - prove is that she's robust and mature. The more of a prat you are, the more airtime you get and the less suitable you are for business. The more you get on with it, the more you don't play games, the more you quietly take on the untelevised role of big sister in the house, the more you deserve to be hired.

Alex
by Luke Leitch

In most competitions we shout for whoever or whatever it is we want to win. When our chosen man, woman, team or horse comes out on top, that's when we punch the air and make odd guttural noises a bit like Lee's signature pterodactyl impression.

In The Apprentice, though, the greatest satisfaction comes when whichever deluded, two-faced, back-stabbing, vain, slimeball it is who happens to have most offended your sense of natural justice is found out by Siralan. The rush comes when your most-loathed is busted, given the pointy finger and packed into a black cab with nothing but a wheelie-bag full of regrets. We watch it to see them lose.

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