The Apprentice - BBC series 4 - final - preview

The Apprentice final is on BBC One this evening at 9pm. Four candidates compete designing a men's fragrance in the final task of the series.

One team includes Helene and Alex - they are joined by firees Raef, Kevin and Jennifer. Claire and Lee are joined by Jenny, Michael and Simon.

Will we find out anything about Helene Speight, the most enigmatic figure amongst the four? We have been told several times that she is a "global pricing leader" but no one has ever explained what that means. We have also been told that she worked for "one of the world's largest companies" but it presumably never gave the BBC permission to release its name.

She is uniformly agreed to have no chance. James Max, a series one contestant says: “Helene couldn’t sell a £10 note for £5."

In week four, Helene was the team leader in charge of Lucinda, who couldn't operate a program on her PC at the Bluewater shopping centre. Neither Helene nor anyone else tried to help her get it going. But Helene did show she knew how to harangue and shout at people she didn't like.

Helene had the chance to demonstrate she was a better candidate than Lucinda, who she put down as lazy, when they went head to head in week eight in the wedding dress task. Lucinda's team thrashed Helene's.

Quite how Helene has reached the final must be beyond the comprehension of any of the viewers of The Apprentice. Perhaps Sir Alan Sugar will explain why after this evening's final.

Viewers will also be wondering how Alex Wotherspoon managed to slither into the final. Alex is another candidate who made a point of turning on his fellow team members whenever he had the chance. He started during task one when they were selling fish, blaming others for the poor labelling and pricing, even though some of this was his fault. He was still at it last week when he turned on Lucinda in the boardroom, hastening her departure.

Sir Alan Sugar will make his decision on his new apprentice this year after having seen the previous eleven episodes on TV. He will have wondered how Helene and Alex got this far and maybe ask why Nick and Margaret didn't give him some more relevant information on their performance during the series. Some better candidates were fired while these two slipped through.

The star performer of the series was Lee McQueen until Bordan Tkachuk checked his CV and then got him to repeat his lie about his education in the interview last week.

This year's candidate could end up with a sales job at Viglen, the company which sells PCs to schools and the public sector. Bordan Tkachuk is the CEO and he is unlikely to want a candidate he caught out in an interview shown to millions on TV.

And Sir Alan is the man who proclaimed in previous series that he doesn't like liars. So he can hardly hire one without showing himself to be both a hypocrite and a liar himself. But Lee has shown himself to be an inspiring leader and team member and the one person who balanced out the excess of dysfunctional candidates in this year's series.

That leaves Claire Young as the probable winner. Claire is lucky not to have been fired when she just couldn't keep her mouth zipped early in the series. Sir Alan even sent her back to the house once just to give his ears a rest. But she has quietened down a lot since then and is probably an excellent saleswoman.

Expect Claire to be hired this evening but don't discount the possibility Sir Alan may hire Lee as well.

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