Yes, Arjun seems like a good adjunct but not a leader. He can analyse situations but he doesn't seem creative.


It's hard to tell. Zoe created drama and controversy and made the edit. Emma just quietly got on with it so wasn't featured.


Zoe (and Hibad) screwed up the focus group. That was a big mistake. Emma's idea was for a collapsible storage unit that could be packed flat for transport. The material was wrong, but at least she had an idea. According to the edit, she came out with it near the end of the day when they were getting desperate for something they could make. Zoe wasn't present at the meeting, and when she's told the final idea she doesn't criticise the cardboard.


You pick up on one mistake Emma made: the quantities. Zoe made several, including getting the pricing wrong, getting the quantities wrong, and not keeping the stall tidy. I had been an early supporter; this was the episode where it started to go wrong for me.

Emma didn't just work well in the kitchen. She had the idea for the theme in the first place. I think, had she been leader, they'd have done much better on this task.


Zoe was virtually unmanageable, and did not follow direct instructions from her team leader, even when her leader was correct. Yes, she sold well, but it's becoming clear she's a one-trick pony. Sales (and related activities like presenting) are all she's good at. Other basic things, like pricing or negotiating discounts, she gets wrong even when there's someone beside her telling her what to do.

She doesn't seem able to learn. Lord Sugar criticised her manner in the first task, and has to do it again here. That's a big weakness. It ought to have been enough to disqualify her. Letting Zoe through to the final was one of Lord Sugars two mistakes.

Yes but choosing something positioned for the market and cheap but that didn't work hardly helps his image.

Not sure either who came up with the suggestion for teenagers, all five were round the table. Zoe certainly responded by saying it had not been tried before, but maybe that was a reason to do so.

It's a more difficult job than the boys tried. You have to create a market as opposed to get a slice of an existing one.
But IMHO touting it as healthy, improving complexion etc could work. 30 & 40-something marketing people are not always the best people to judge what will appeal to teenagers. Ok they have market research etc but the girls live in a full time focus group. There is at least one mineral water targeted at children. But younger pre-teens
http://www.breconwater.co.uk/content...p?id=94&type=0 no 14+ is going to want to be seen with that

It's just Drip-Drop doesn't sound like anything to do with drinking plenty of water. Maybe I'm wrong and Hidr8 got vetoed by Zoe & Hibah. I do think that the moment Hibah got a rhyme, they both fell for it as a jingle that they forgot that wasn't the only part of the marketing. Great example of being so pleased with a piece of brilliance you forget what it's supposed to be doing. The black lettering seems to have been Kirsty's choice (who is from nr Aberdeen) and that really didn't help either. Her advert that it's cool for girls to get water (by any means) wasn't anywhere near as obvious as Sugar seems to require.

Ah right. I'm not sure Yasmina really was that type, to be honest, not in the way Saira, Ruth etc were.

Agreed; Tim was certainly the better creative thinker. But presumably Lord Sugar had his own ideas about what he was looking for in his junior apprentice winner, and maybe he deliberately chose a master of small details over a creative thinker.


It's true we don't really know how the girls sales were divided in week one. There's no doubt that Zoe was shown selling very well (and seemed to be the one who thought of the deal with the wine seller, which was a pretty good idea, and negotiated it superbly), but maybe Emma was selling better. Perhaps Lord Sugar saw more details of this than we did.

I'd say Zoe was at the centre of drama and controversy rather than that she created it. To my mind it was Hibah who created the controversy with her resentment of Zoe's good performance.


Yes, Zoe and Hibah did get carried away with one idea and effectively pushed it at in their market research. I was sure Zoe did criticise the cardboard idea, though; perhaps I'm thinking of her being critical of the idea of combining the two ideas of board games and the storage unit. It's a few weeks now since I watched this. But Emma still had the poor idea of the cardboard.


When it came to the quantities, only Arjun got it right. Zoe was at any rate less wrong than Emma. The failure to charge extra for personalisation was a typical Zoe error; she often seems to have trouble with the small detail. I wonder if Arjun raised the subject, because that's the sort of thing I'd have expected him to pick up on. I don't think the tidiness of the stall was that significant an issue to be honest; I think Emma was making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill there.

Whether they would have done better had Emma been PM would have depended on a number of things, one of the main ones being whether as PM she would have forced through her notion that they should buy 800 cakes, or would have listened to Arjun and Zoe telling her otherwise, and if so, to what extent she might have compromised. Another factor would have been how she allocated the roles; I think Zoe was always going to be more use in the sales role than in the kitchen. Emma, like Zoe, would have been hampered by the fact that Adam was no use in any capacity.


I don't recall Zoe ever directly disobeying Emma in the art task. She did raise the question of discounts with the artists; she just did it in a rather apologetic way that didn't really encourage them to take her up on it. I think that was Zoe's fatal flaw; she thought she knew better. That was understandable in this task, where Zoe had good reason to think she knew more about art than Emma did, but I think Zoe's knowledge of art was from a more purely artistic point of view rather than the strictly commercial, and therefore she wasn't at the advantage she thought she was.

In many ways, Zoe made the directly opposite error to Kirsty, who could only view the art as a saleable commodity.

To some extent, you're right; Zoe is a one-trick pony. It's just that it's a pretty good and useful trick and she does it so very well. Many people have very successful careers in sales without ever acquiring skills in the other areas where Zoe is weaker.


I dispute that Zoe is unable to learn. She was very much less domineering in the final. And if people's manner is grounds for disqualifying them, bear in mind that Emma's manner was appalling in the week that she was fired. Lord Sugar had clearly had bad reports about it from the designers, and we saw a sample for ourselves. That's apart from the fact that Zoe made most of the running on selling the products.

I think you're right that Zoe and Hibah disliked Hydr8, because they found the whole replacing "ate" with 8 patronising; they didn't indulge in textspeak themselves and maybe lost sight of the fact that they aren't necessaily typical of their age group in many respects. I don't know if Zoe vetoed it exactly (Hibah wasn't PM and couldn't have); I think she just proved more forceful than Kirsty in discussion.

Didn't stop Zoe's embarrassing attempt at, like, "street talk", innit, with the boys in the playground...

I agree with your reason why they lost sight, they allowed their personal view to colour things. Watching the repeat a few hours ago, Hibah is the first with the Drip Drop idea, and Zoe likes it. However as we cut back to Kirsty's car, there's Hannah with Drip Drop on her pad as Zoe spells out she'd also like a bigger D. Hannah sketchs in an even bolder D than before. I think the edit timeline doth lie a little lol

Lol are you being serious? How pedantic must you be to have wasted your time carrying out such a search?

But as James explained in the boardroom, given a few more days, they could have tinkered around with the chocolate and made it edible. The final task wasn't to make chocolates, it was to create a brand, and Yasmina did better than Kate in creating a brand.

Yasmina's team had everything else right - the name, the packaging, the price. The only thing they needed to sort out was the chocolates themselves. Kate had targeted the wrong market, her packaging wasn't up to much and her pricing strategy was flawed. In fact, the only thing she did well was creating nice chocolates.

I think it's almost a given that Sugar will pick Arjun who he has something in common with - computers/technology.

AS can easily relate to Arjun whereas Tim, well he might as well be living in another planet as far as AS is concerned.

Shame really.

No. Zoe didn't choose Emma because she knew from previous experience of working with her that she contributes very little if anything.

Although not as much promise as Arjun showed from the get-go. Tim was very good towards the end but his sluggish and lazy start cost him.

Agree 100%. When all is said and done, Zoe was the strongest girl by far and fully deserved her place in the final.

V. balanced and fair analysis, Dave. Good times!

Only one bit I take issue with, and it's just a tiny detail...
Meself, I thought that Zoe was being horrendously dismissive and sneery at the even notion. I don't think she disobeyed, but I'd say that rather than simply "not really encouraging them" she was actively scorning them for the idea.

But yes! That's a minor detail but my interpretation coloured my perception of her quite a bit - I felt it was the first of a few examples of her being a bit too brazen to make a sensible decison.

Well spotted! Our assessments of what happens on the tasks is often flawed because it's based on an edited version of events which sometimes chops events about and puts them in a different order from the way they actually happened (Debra's comments after one of her interviews in the last series were of course an example of this, when she appeared to tell the others how easy an interview she'd just been in for was when we'd just seen her getting a real grilling; in fact the comments were made after another interview).

I think that's much exaggerated. She didn't change her way of talking much, if at all.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s108/...nd-series.html

Another series to air this time next year .

(I guess this means that we'll be seeing series 7 return to the spring meaning a shorter wait than usual after series 6 of just three to four months, which is nice after having to wait as long as we've had to for series 6.)