Five minutes to go and there just happened to be a fella on the other side of the road willing to buy Philip's team's rug?

The dramatic will-they-or-won't-they finish to the task seemed set up to me.

Not really - if they had not sold the rug then they would have lost less money and won by a bigger margin!

They wouldnt have known that in advance though..

The OP has a point- theres always a last min "mad dash" these kinda episodes, and knowing how these reality shows work.... Hmmmmmm.......

Yes, who remembers the final seconds of the car hire task?

The went on for minutes.

This seemed more staged than usual.

It just made no sense for a random bloke to agree to buy a rug that he hadn't even seen properly whilst waiting at a traffic light on a busy road!

Is it any more suspicious than that a random bloke in a bar might want to buy a skeleton.

lol exactly

It's probably just the way they edit the programme as we have no idea exactly how long anything really takes!

Not remotely. Get a grip.

I thought this was a very obvious bit of fakery

if the guy had even unrolled it just a bit to take a look it would have at least looked a bit more genuine.

the guy buying the skeleton in the pub was suspicious too...but you'd hope that the score was at least 1-1 and they'd kept things even between the two teams.

its something they've done before, in the car task last year the contestants running after a customer in canary wharf with 2mins to go was very dubious

so you just buy rugs for £50 without even looking at them

it could have been moth eaten or contained a dead body for all the 'customer' knew

Maybe he had looked at it but they didn't show that bit! If it was brand new and quite large, it has to be worth at least £50.... those horrid Readicut rugs are about £150 to make yourself... and they're much smaller!!!!

A lot of the show is staged. You have to remember that this is reality tv, and there is a whole camera crew there the whole time. If they had just walked into that pub and approached people with the skeleton and there was no camera crew, the people in the pub would have just ignored them. Because of the crew though, people were interested and taking notice.

It's the same when Sir Alan gives the candidates their task each week. They don't all just walk into that room and decide to align up all neatly next to each other. They are told to stand like that. Also, during the events of the board room, it doesn't all just flow along like we are lead to believe. There's a producer shouting 'cut' all the time etc.

But he'd pretty much agreed to purchase it before the team had even finished crossing the road!

He was already shouting 'How much?' before they reached him.

It just seemed too convenient to me.

I appreciate that but there's a huge difference between making sure the participants know which chair they sit in in the boardroom and deliberately interfering in a task so that there is a buyer waiting for a team 5 minutes before a task is up.

of course, we have to accept some staging, such as when they do selling tasks to big pharmaceutical companies, we can expect the producers to get the contestants their sales meeting..whilst on screen they will probably show the candidates arranging it themsleves via the phone

i just felt it was a particularly poor attempt tonight, they'd have been better a stall holder/shop keeper having a look at it and making them a low offer...if they were going to resort to fakery.

Yep, I was instantly suspicious - particularly after their stroke of luck in selling the skeleton. Seemed like a set up to me.

Although a cheap small rubbish rug is about £20 from shops, so maybe the bloke really didn't care and saw a bargain. Not that I am saying it wasn't staged, but rugs are quite dear normally and £50 isn't a lot to pay in context (not that I would have).

I'm sure there are various setups and cheats. The production team could keep them away from phones and other communication, but there must be the occasional leak to their friends and family. For a £100,000 job, it would probably be worth "investing" a few hundred here, and a few hundred there.

No, not really, tbh. They'd been walking around for ages was the point. Would he have bought it without the TV cameras there, maybe not, he probably liked the idea he could tell everyone the story of buying it and get a cheapish rug, but that isn't the same as saying they set him up. I think the programme would rather have had a Philip and Lorraine boardroom showdown than fix it for them to stay in.

How they got the costumes for the ads made overnight last week baffled me. That chap buying a rug, no.

Without wishing to be Mr Cynical, it wouldn't surprise me if they paid someone to take the rug! The whole scene looked a little too contrived and somewhat fake. They can't sell the rug for love nor money then all of a sudden some bloke appears walking down the street and wants it! Hmm..

The Apprentice is an entertainment 'reality' show, it's not meant to be an accurate documentary about getting a job in the business world so they can fake bits here and there. Sugar's office is fake, so too his secretary, in an earlier series of the show Sugar *hired the two finalists* - Michelle and Ruth (!) so it wouldn't surprise me if some of the actual scenes during the task are faked or manipulated to create a certain result. And people shouldn't forget the BBC have been found out to be a little dishonest. Blue Peter faked a telephone competition:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6449919.stm

.... so a bit of faking on a show like The Apprentice - contrived scenes, paying people to buy certain items, paying companies to buy the teams' products etc - wouldn't surprise me. Any show that is about finding one apprentice but hires two finalists (and didn't tell the audience this fact) is anything but genuine!

yeh who buys a rug in the street that you havent seen before? I suppose like the man in the pub who paid £150 for a skeleton!! lol (all set up i think)

When Phil went into the pub trying to sell the skeleton, I'm surprised no-one said to him:

"Your girlfriend seems to have lost a lot of weight."

























(the skeleton is his girlfriend - that's the er.. joke. Ahem)

Have to agree I also thought it was set up by the programme makers, but the point was they shouldn't have sold it for that price, and wouldnt have if they had done their homework.

I'm actually surprised they had any trouble selling it at the price they were prepared to accept.

To anyone who has a basic knowledge of those sort of rugs it would have appeared to be a huge bargain.