Viewers can’t get over the ‘racist gin’ in last night’s The Apprentice

After last week’s virtual reality bonanza, the latest episode of The Apprentice returned to a more traditional task: branding a new alcoholic drink.

Lord Sugar simply instructed candidates to create and market their own gin before pitching to industry professionals. Easy. No sweat. A task where nothing could go that wrong, right? Wrong.

Enter the orange-coloured ‘colony gin’. That’s the name team Frances, Trishna and Team Titan project manager Grainne came up with.

Why? Well, as Frances explained in her pitch, "at the height of the British Empire" the planet was "embracing exotic delicacies… and spices were being discovered across all of the colonies".

But Twitter wasn’t convinced – they thought the connotations of invasion and slavery made it sound a bit, well, racist…

Unsurprisingly, the mistakes didn’t go unnoticed. But instead of ‘I’ve got an A* in geography’ Frances facing the finger, Lord Sugar gave Trishna the sack.

The Apprentice returns 8pm next Thursday, BBC1