If there's one thing that The Apprentice has taught me, it's that no amount of pulling "serious businessman" faces while riding up and down the escalators at St Pancras station will help you when you're on your way to an early-morning rollicking from Sir Alan Sugar – a bad-tempered toby jug who has somehow managed to build a business empire big enough to rival the one owned and operated by Donald Trump's ex-wife Ivana.

Yep, we're four weeks into everybody's favourite recruitment rally, and the show begins with the world's most pitiless jobseekers being summoned to the Temperate House in Kew Gardens - a wonderful place indeed. So what a shame, then, that upon seeing this array of boggle-eyed, frizzy-haired muppets standing amid a glorious display of blooms and branches, one cannot help but be reminded of all those segments in Fraggle Rock where they start off mucking about in next door's garden and end up getting a pasting from a furious Pa Gorg.

"The beauty and bodycare industry", Pa Gorg begins, "relies more and more on natural ingredients to market to its customers. And it's not just women spending the money." Well! I for one never would have guessed that, in the year 2009, men have started buying grooming products such as shampoo, shaving foam and shower gel. Truly, we have finally reached the end of the Neanderthal age. Although, to look at Mr Sugar, you might not know it.

This week's mission is for each team to develop two different "natural bodycare products" and flog them to people who've forgotten that they needed to nip to Superdrug at lunchtime. Paula, who is being played by Red Fraggle, is selected to run an Empire that includes Yasmina (Mokey), Kate (Wembley), James (Gobo), Ben (Boober with a serious head injury) and Debra (the Trash Heap). Will they come up smelling of roses, or will the age-old adage of "sh*t stinks" come to mind? It's time to find out...

Later that day, Team Empire are busying themselves on the laboratory premises of the only shop I know that makes me cross the road for all the wrong reasons. But despite my assumption that the place must reek like a bath bomb which has been recently and messily detached from a nuclear warhead, Paula and co are clueless as to what they should make. What's it going to be? Sumptuous skin creams? Fantastic fragrances?

"I'm thinking shower gels and soaps", she meeps. Woo, steady on the creative juices, and all that. Anyway, Paula then puts Ben and Yasmina in charge of keeping an eye on the costs, admitting that figures aren't her strong point. But this little detail is pretty much forgotten when Ben pipes up with another week's worth of his irksome claptrap, in a voice that sounds like Gerry Adams channelling a cross Patricia Routledge. "Ideally we should be aiming for women", he points out. "I don't ever buy soap to be honest", he continues, from which we can infer that he never washes his hands when he's been to the toilet, or before he prepares food.

That sound you just heard, by the way, was the fifty people who attended the London 2012 canapes party getting back on first-name terms with their sick buckets. Yum.

Anyway, speaking of food, the natural ingredients they can use include honey; seaweed; berries; earthworms; poisonous toadstools and rats' faces. Whatever. Surely they can shove anything they like in it – it won't stop their customers from effectively scrubbing themselves down with a large block of congealed vegetable fat in the mornings.

"I like seaweed!", proclaims Paula, in a voice that many of us would use to indicate our fondness for cats, or going on holiday. And lo, Debra, James and Kate are promptly dispatched to scrape some of the salty stuff off the rocks in Poole Harbour. Ooh, I've got to get some of that. I can't wait to smell like somewhere rich people keep their yachts!

Later, when Paula and Yasmina start peering into bubbling cauldrons of substances that, in turn, smell like "tequila and dogs", the first scene from Hamlet seems to be missing a cast member. This is because Ben has decided that he is far too manly to get involved in such fanciful, feminine pursuits as scientific labwork. "There's other jobs that need to be done," he says, without revealing what they are, "and at the end of the day I'm a berlohke, they're girls, and they know about soaps and smellies and things." But do they?

In a word, no. Their big mistake comes when they confuse two of their essences. And this might not seem like such a drama until it's pointed out that Sandalwood oil, which is imported all the way from tiny island nations in the South Pacific, costs £1200 a kilo – whereas cedarwood oil, which is much more common or garden, costs a mere fraction of that price. Perhaps because the stench of each of them seems to have had the same effect on Paula and Yas's brains as repeated goes on the U-HU, they get the two confused and end up pouring Sandalwood oil into their mixture as if it has a similar market value to cooking lager.

Helpfully, Nick Hewer points out their mistake when it's far too late for them to change it. "I'll leave it with you", he whispers in menacing tones, before going outside and laughing at the moon until the neighbours bolt their doors and windows and terrified hounds howl into the night...

- Read part two of Joe's blog >>