The backstabbing was awful but I liked my hug from Bill, says Apprentice reject Paddy
DEPARTURE: Salesman gets axed over airport shop task
JOB OFFER: Paddy O'Dea landed position before show
Tuesday November 11 2008
Paddy O'Dea, who was fired from the hit TV3 show last night, said he is sorry he did not land the grand prize but won’t miss the bitching.
The Cork man was one of three contestants, along with Nikki and Orla, to be hauled into the boardroom after their team lost their task.
After hearing each of the trio defend themselves, Bill decided that Paddy had to go.
But the fired contestant said today he thought he heard “a little bit of hesitancy in Bill's voice” when he was being kicked off.
“At the very end, he came out afterwards and put his arms around me and said 'you didn't fight for me, you didn't fight for me'.
“And I was going 'ah god, Bill, if you'd only shown that in the boardroom I'd have fought a little bit more for you’. But a big hug in the end definitely made it all right,” Paddy revealed.
He was taken aback by the contestants “tearing strips off each other” in the boardroom.
But he was glad that Nikki stood up for him.
“It took me for a hop (the criticisms). It was nice to see that Nikki had sided with me and said 'well, he did as much as he could do',” Paddy told Newstalk radio this morning.
He feels Orla probably should have been the one to go.
“Bill hasn't fired a project manager bar Joanna last week for the obvious,” he said, referring to her cheating at last week’s task.
He added: “Maybe she (Orla) should have gone last night.”
The team lost because the company name they chose for the task – selling duty-free type products at Dublin Airport – was already in existence.
“We had done a lot of Googling the previous day to see exactly what the other airports had done and never once had Buy-and-Fly come up,” Paddy said today.
He said he hopes that either Brenda or Shane go on to win the competition.
On the show last night, Orla defended the team by saying they had spoken about the name so much she “presumed” they had checked.
“You told the DAA (Dublin Airport Authority) you'd cleared the name,” Bill said.
“I was convinced we had,” Orla replied.
Sales executive Paddy became the eight contestant to wave goodbye to the prize – a €100,000 salary working for Mr Cullen. Paddy has returned to work for Magnet Business, a job he got only two days before he was told he would be an Apprentice contestant.
