That’s what most people constitute entertainment. If people were selected purely on their ability, most of the audience would find the programme boring and switch off. Presumably, candidates are selected because they are either interesting, charming, attractive, arrogant, emotionally volatile, or incompetent. (Or, they are easily coaxed into being, or sounding, one of the above by the production team).

Alan Sugar is pretty good at making money, so he’s going to want to make The Apprentice as successful as it can possibly be. Given that there are only likely to be a handful of the candidates Alan would consider hiring in the first place, it makes no difference what order he fires the rest of them, so he may as well make sure the programme is as entertaining as possible by keeping the strong characters on board. (Also, keeping the more disruptive and awkward people on board means he can see how the good ones deal with working with them.)

Also, I wonder how many of the “mistakes” people make are actually their fault. I think it would be quite easy for the producers to sit around planning what the episode’s “cock up” is going to be, then engineer that. Considering the two teams are always in isolation throughout the task, it’s extremely easy for them to fix who wins, or even what details are overlooked. Considering there seems to be a “cock up” almost every week now, I’m quite sure they are being contrived. They can basically do anything they like because we only get to see a tiny fraction of the footage that they choose show us.

None of this bothers me, though. The emotion is real, and the programme is edited in an entertaining way, so I enjoy it. And of course I love to get my weekly fix of all my favourite songs: Dance of the Knights, Clubbed To Death, and the others.


Maybe most people find this sort of thing clear and helpful, but I just find that really confusing.

The Apprentice isn’t presented as a live show. We are not supposed to be watching events in real time. We see them going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. Alan often says “I’ll see you in the morning”. Everything that happens seems to relate to the events as they happened at the time of filming.

So Alan switching between “real time” and “air time” seems needlessly confusing to me. And it makes it feel less like a fly-on-the-wall documentary and more like performance.


The difference between Countdown and The Apprentice is that Countdown is supposed to be recorded on the day it’s aired. The fact that they film it all in one go is something of a secret, that they try to cover up by lying outright. They lie about the date. They lie about what they did over the “weekend”. They lie about it being their own birthdays. The Apprentice is not at al like this: it’s supposed to be live, and the programme has never even suggested that tasks take place once a week, or that the episodes were filmed recently.

So if Jeff Stelling says: “I’ll see you tomorrow for more Countdown”, that may mean 10 minutes to him. But if Alan Sugar says “I’ll see you back in here tomorrow”, that is actually supposed to mean the next day. To my knowledge, we’ve never been lied to about the passage of time on the Apprentice.

So when Alan then says: “next week’s task”, I find that very confusing!

Intersting insight I think:

Diary of Adam Hosker, been posted here before but it's a good read if you havent read it before:
http://www.thecoolmarkwebsite.co.uk/adamhosker/

My word, he's a bit up himself, isn't he?

In the sandwich task, it was filmed around late August/earlySeptember, as on a bus that passed it was advertising a film which was released on September 12th.

Good piece on info, when the candidates are eliminated, their walk to the cab is actually filmed at the start of filming.

How do they make the clothing match? If they have the candidates wearing the right clothing in the boardroom, that would mean that the entire thing is a fix.

Are u new to The Apprentice? Don't they wear a long black coat on the exit cab shot, so what they are wearing underneath isn't that noticeable?!. However a hairstyle might be different which is somewhat noticeable!

Brill diary, I enjoyed series 3 but awful Katie did seriously spoil it for me.

Not new. But I'm sure that some clothing will be visible through the coat at least some o the time. Then there's shoes. Jewelry, and the like. I'm going to have a quick looksee on iplayer.

Edit: Clothing isn't matched. When Kimberly is fired, she's wearing big hoop earrings. When she walks to the cab, they can't be seen. But there are no real shots of her ears, and when she flicks her hair hair back, her ears are out of shot.

When Paula is fired, she's wearing a very simple black dress. When she walks to the taxi, she's wearing a grey dress underneath the black cot.

Just never looked carefully at those scenes before.

Interesting stuff!

For anyone who can’t be bothered reading it, here are some interesting facts about the production I got from it:

• As mentioned, the shots of each person getting in the taxi after being fired are all filmed before the first task.
• The boardroom and waiting area are both in a TV studio off the M45, not actually in Alan’s office building.
• The people who interview them on camera are not impartial and allegedly try to stir up trouble.
• Scenes where Alan is talking (like giving them their brief) are likely to be re-shot several times to get it perfect.
• Candidates who get onto the TV show have to tell their friends that they didn’t get through.
• On tasks, the public aren’t allowed to be told they’re filming for The Apprentice (even though it’s pretty obvious), nor are they allowed to use the camera crew as a negotiating tool.
• Candidates aren’t allowed mobile phones or cigarettes during their time on the show.
• The board room segment actually lasts a full day of filming (at the TV studio) and is extremely tough for the candidates. First the candidates are all taken off and interviewed one by one. Then they go to the green room where they have to wait around for hours and are not allowed to talk about the task to anyone (and are followed around by chaperones to make sure they don’t). Then they get taken to the waiting area where they are filmed sitting there for 30 minutes and not allowed to talk at all.

There may have been other interesting production nuggets but that’s all I can rememeber.

Yes but the question is WHY? Why bother filming them getting into the cab when it brings up the continuity problems?
I don't know why they can't just film them leaving the boardroom and then film them IN the cab.

Another interesting point I got from it is this:

Even though there have been many comments here saying that nobody would sabotage a task, he claims that Katie and Paula would sabotage tasks. He also says that he himself deliberately allowed Paul to make mistakes, which led to failing the task. So, if we have Yasmina failing to correct Paula's mistake with the cost of sandlewood, or even leading her down the garden path, it is plausible that she was sabotaging the task.

Adam also admits to being a bit tipsy during the meeting where they decide the first team leader: "Later on that night we had to choose a team name and a team leader. I was the wrong side of a few bottles of champagne..." I wonder if that's the kind of thing Katie had in mind when she brought his drinking up in the boardroom. Admittedly it's not quite the same as being drunk on a task, but it's pretty bad in my opinion. (I've never been a fan of Adam.)

I don't attach much weight to what he says about Katie and Paul. I am appalled that Adam admits deliberately letting his team lose; what he says about them is probably projection.

And it doesn't have much bearing on Yasmina. As discussed in this other thread, it's very unlikely she'd made the costing mistake deliberately.

Turning the Appentice into just a personality contest is daft and I would say most people dont want that so you are in a minority.

If the task becomes more importent which is what it should be it does not make the programe dull. It makes it more interesting an entertaining and turns it back into a real contest.

We have seen hells Kitchen go the same way. It has turned into a personality contest with the cooking just a background to it.

I think you might have misunderstood what I was trying to say.

I don’t think the programme is a “personality contest”. It’s a business contest. But bear in mind that the collective goal of both the programme makers and Alan Sugar is to make the programme as popular as it can possibly be, for obvious reasons. They can better achieve that by “casting” interesting people to be on the show (people who are more likely to create drama), and keeping those interesting people on longer while getting rid of the boring ones (without getting rid of anyone who Alan Sugar might seriously be interested in employing).

Just my speculation. In my opinion, pretty much everything on TV these days is about personalities. If you’re looking for a person to be on your show who has some talent or professional ability, you don’t choose the most qualified person — you choose the most interesting and entertaining person. And, in the case of reality TV, you choose the person with the most potential for drama.

That’s why factual TV in the old days (documentaries, news, etc.) was full of very dull people delivering very factually sound information, while these days everything is wrapped up in “drama” and “suspense” and larger than life characters. As factual TV deviated more towards entertainment and drama, so the “reality TV” genre was born, and has grown to the point where almost all TV shows have “reality TV” elements.

(This is, of course, just a generalisation.)

I have no way of knowing how “ethical” The Apprentice is when it comes to making an honest TV show. I’d be surprised if they didn’t at least take the occasional dip into the modern TV-maker’s toolbox of underhanded tricks. And anyway, “honesty” is a matter of perspective. They obviously have to try make the show entertaining to some degree, as well as showing the outcome of the competition — so who decides where the balance should be set? There are absolutely no rules about how it should be done. The programme doesn’t even describe itself as reality TV; that is just something we infer from watching it. They could hire actors to play all the candidates next year. I’m not saying they should, but there’s nothing stopping them.