People describing themselves as “the female version of Jim Carrey”, the future prime minister, and the “king of the truth bomb” means only one thing: the return of The Apprentice. After two episodes and two firings, 16 aspiring business partners remain and, if I were Lord Sugar, I wouldn’t trust my £250,000 investment with any of them!

Lord Sugar (complete with terrible puns) makes a welcome return, as do the fabulous, all-seeing Karren and Claude. Much less welcome though no less entertaining are the candidates’ embarrassing gender portrayals. Within the first few minutes, Titans (the men’s team) labelled the “chicks” as “emotional”, while Nebula (the women’s team) spoke of “alpha males” fighting it out – and their actions throughout the tasks have sadly reinforced these stereotypes!

The first episode showed the questionable skills of the candidates while valuing and selling antiques. Neither team covered themselves in glory, especially those selling to trade. Titans ‘sold’ a chair to someone who later transpired to have no purchasing authority, but Nebula had the dubious honour of claiming the episode’s best moment. When arranging a visit to a dealer, they forgot to tell the van driver with their stock where they were going, so when they arrived for the meeting, their stock was miles away in Camden Market. An unbelievable mistake for them to make!

Titans’ market team was the most impressive sub-team as they actually understood that the task’s aim was to make the most money! This was epitomised by Titans selling a vase worth £7 for £175, while Nebula sold vases worth £300 for £15. Sofiane was the stand-out performer of this episode as his strategy of high pricing helped win the day for Titans, while unsurprisingly the inept project manager of Nebula – Michelle – was fired.

The second episode was a demonstration on how not to do an Apprentice task. The teams did so appallingly that they were both brought back into the boardroom. The task itself was to brand, advertise, and pitch jeans made of Japanese denim, which was admittedly quite challenging. It was a disaster for both teams, though I think they did have flashes of good ideas. Titans’ packaging looked quite good, and Nebula’s brand name of Unclaimed wasn’t too bad, but their performances overall were terrible. Their TV adverts epitomised this appalling task for both teams: one was filmed in a restaurant’s toilets and the other tried and failed to be trendy at a skate park.

With so many incompetent candidates in front of him you would think Lord Sugar would fire several of them, but instead only Natalie was fired, for not doing anything – slightly unfair as she did do a model’s hair and clean… How project managers Mukai and Jessica escaped a firing I’ll never know!

This year’s show is undoubtedly full of characters, notably Jessica and Karthik who already seem to be dividing the other candidates and the audience. Jessica gets hysterical, talks far too much, and needs to calm down, while Karthik is arrogant and plain annoying.

After the disasters of these tasks, the candidates will be looking for redemption next week. Hopefully we’ll see more of the quieter candidates, such as Grainne or Samuel, as they haven’t had a chance to show themselves yet, and may actually be decent candidates. And to be honest, we need the candidates to up their performances otherwise they’ll all be fired by Week six!