The Apprentice blog

Lee McQueen, a 30-year-old recruitment sales manager, won the final of the most popular series yet of The Apprentice tonight, but instead of exclaiming his catchphrase – “Now, that’s what I’m talking about” – he clenched his fists and looked down solemnly before hugging the competition favourite, Claire Young.

McQueen will be given the task of forming a venture within Amshold, the holding group of Sir Alan Sugar, involving the development and sale of digital display advertising screens. “It’s all a case of delivering, and he delivered,” Sir Alan said of McQueen.

How worthy the plaudits sounded after an electrifying final to an outstanding, absurdly dramatic and compulsive fourth series. The four finalists were split up into two teams: the viewers’ favourite Young and McQueen versus Alex Wotherspoon and Helene Speight. The two members of the losing team would be fired, the winning apprentice – scooping a £100,000-a-year job with one of Sir Alan’s companies – would be one of the two on the winning team.

Their task was to create a male fragrance and a promotional campaign around it. Both teams had the questionable benefit of a brace of returning Apprentice rejects aiding them, although Michael Sophocles’s fangs had been siphoned of poison and Jenny Celerier was unusually muted and pleasant.

McQueen, who talks about himself in the third person (“Lee McQueen is not happy”), thought his target customer would indulge in “manicures, pedicures . . . he would definitely shave his balls”. There is something transfixing in the way he speaks – he is so full of fruity enthusiasm you never know where a sentence might go (does he?), especially after it is plunged through a barrow-boy filter.

Lee and Claire did not want to produce a flowery metrosexual scent and went instead for a product straight out of the Seventies. “Roulette” was a musky affair, “with animal tones” that you were presumably meant to splash on rather than dab.

Filming the Bond-tinged advert for it, McQueen got terribly worked up directing the female and male model: “You’ve wanted ’im for months. Now you’ve finally got ’im.” When he told the audience of industry experts their target customer “wants to look like a man, to smell like a man” he said it in such a macho, nonironic way, that they burst into laughter. If it all goes wrong at Sugar HQ, he definitely has a future in telephone porn.

In the boardroom, the tension was drawn out before McQueen and Young emerged triumphant from their challenge. On the opposing side, Wotherspoon cried, saying he was “heartbroken” to have got so near to the prize. Speight was just glad she could put the blame on him.

Sir Alan wavered, in his typically baleful way, between McQueen and Young. McQueen said he’d been the most consistent competitor, Young that she had learnt the most; was the most driven. She has been an obvious star of the show: a self-defined Rottweiler who learnt when to keep her counsel. McQueen, said earlier contestant Celerier, was a true gentleman.

Sir Alan has a thing for old school decency and for those who plug away, triers rather than shiners – and for men rather than women. His reason for not hiring Young appeared nonexistent, beyond not being sure he could “put up” with her, although “she will always have my help if she needs it”.

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