The Apprentice episode 8 review: Can Bognor baker Phil Turner break his seven-task losing streak?

At this point, it has to be an Apprentice record, however dubious. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the history of the show – that’s too many hours of reality TV, even for me – but I simply won’t be convinced that any candidate other than Phil Turner has lost seven tasks in a row.

In a way, it makes for great TV. Every week at 9pm, I switch over to BBC One with two questions on my mind; is this the week Phil Turner wins, or is this the week he finally gets the sack?

Which was it? You’ll have to keep reading to find out.

This week’s task saw the remaining candidates designing an advertising campaign for electronic vans. Team Nexus, headed up dentist Paul Midah, took on a campervan designed to appeal to the leisure market, while Team Supreme, headed up by small business owner Noor Bouziane, had to market to the private business sector. Where most previous challenges saw the apprentices battling to make as much money as possible, this week’s task was a little bit different; this time, Lord Sugar himself, bulldog of the boardroom, got to pick his favourite campaign.

Team Supreme leader Noor set her heart on selling the e-van as a kind of pop-up shop for small businesses, despite Phil’s eminently sensible suggestion they use it to deliver groceries in urban areas, and absolutely failed to sell the rest of her team on the idea. She failed so miserably that the sub-team leader position became a bit of a cursed chalice, and landed in Phil’s lap by virtue of the fact that no one else wanted to touch the idea with a ten-foot barge pole.

Meanwhile, Team Supreme settled on marketing a campervan for couples looking to explore, and Raj steps up as team leader, tasked with creating an ‘elegant’ logo for a brand apparently based around camping, all alongside Flo, who remains almost spookily intelligent.

They come up with the name ‘EBnB’ – which would be great if the product had anything at all to do with bed and breakfasts – and a logo that wouldn’t look out of place on the corner of a spreadsheet. Perhaps because he’s about as much fun as a tube of toothpaste, Paul seems to like it.

Nobly agreeing to execute on Noor’s death wish of a business idea, Phil and Foluso set about making a logo of their own. It was hard to ignore a mounting sense of doom watching the two of them settle on a brand name – ‘Voltz’ – and wrestle with a logo that could have been drawn by Horrid Henry, but they did their best, and it’s hard to accuse Phil of doing anything more than play the hand he was given.

Not that Noor was doing much better. Obviously keen to prove herself as project manager, she wilfully dismissed common-sense suggestions from team-mates Tre and Rachel in pursuit of a ‘vision’ that only she could accurately picture. Instead, she insisted on deviating from her storyboard, and focusing on the perfect shot of two girls on their phones, instead of advertising the van.

Needless to say, things broke down very quickly indeed, and it wasn’t long before Noor, Tre and Rachel were barking orders to each other and an increasingly apathetic cameraman in a bid to eventually produce an advert that made sense. If it weren’t for Tre’s multimedia expertise and winning personality, I’m not entirely convinced they’d have produced a video at all.

Team Nexus did much better. Paul and co settled on a strong idea – contrasting a hapless corporate camper (played wonderfully by management consultant Steve Darken) and a young couple enjoying themselves in their van – and executed about as well as could be expected.

Maura seemed to do a lot of the heavy lifting here, though. Left to Paul – who, this week, seemed about as exciting as a blank spreadsheet – the advert would have probably fallen flat, but Maura injected it with humour through sheer force of will and, in so doing, salvaged almost the entire project.

Asked to pitch their campaigns to a panel of experts, neither team did especially well – which is fair enough given they were asked to put this thing together in the time it takes to make a sandwich – but, for once, that didn’t matter. This time, it would all come down to Lord Sugar himself.

Despite Team Nexus’ middling offering, they were the clear winners, and Sugar said as much. Noor’s barely-there vision and dictatorial approach to the advert scuppered any chance they might have had at a win.

So Phil comes away with his eighth loss, but he’s not out of the fight just yet. Predictably, it was Noor on the wrong end of Alan Sugar’s stumpy little finger, having totally failed to take responsibility for her car-crash of an advert and sloppy leadership skills.

Ultimately, it was hard to question the decision. Phil didn’t exactly shine this week, but he did make some sensible suggestions, and the fact he’s still there, after so many set backs and so many failures, speaks to a depth of character and resilience which, maybe, is a quality all its own.

Even so, Sugar’s patience is running visibly thin, and it’s this journalist’s humble opinion that Phil will have to pull it out of the bag sooner than later if he wants to stay on.

Watch The Apprentice every Thursday at 9pm on BBC One.