Yep the famous 'Winner's edit' well finalists in the case of adult (haha) Apprentice. And they are getting more obvious at it.
It's not the amount of camera time, it's the number of good plus points. So like in a murder mystery you can look back and see all the clues afterall. Viewers don't feel cheated. Mind you they have to provide the good points themselves, the edit can just remove the against points.

Much like Survivour's rule that if they aren't in the narrative or have a side-interview in the first 2 episodes, they're not in the final 3.

Not watched it. At least TA isn't that obvious. Though they do side interview the person going each week early on. Basically keep them occupied talking while a program assistant pins a big target on their back. Next series they may add a tail as well.

In terms of predicting the winner, I have to keep reminding myself its not regular apprentice - ie LS isn't looking for someone to give a job to, he's looking for someone to invest in. Or give money to - not sure whether he invests in them or the money is just a prize?

If he was looking for an apprentice a la main show, then Zoe would pretty much walk it, but as he's not I'd say the candidate interesting him the most at the moment would definitely be Arjun. We haven't seen much of Kirsty yet but another one could be Hannah 'the inventor' even though she has had a few shaky moments already.

Not sure I'd agree that Zoe would be his choice for an adult apprentice - the demon sellers have done well, but usually fallen at the last hurdle.
Lord Surallun has said before he can always hire good sales people, but he wants a more rounded person for the actual apprentice job. Hence Michelle won over the Badger, Simon over Kristina.
I'm not sure what that means here - one problem is that Jordan and Adam who both have their own companies and could immediatly use the cash have gone. Of those left none have a clear investment plan that I can recall?

Did anyone hear the fantastic one-liner from Lord Sugar that's in next weeks show....don't know who he is talking to when he says, in his own way of course.

"You make me feel like Van Gogh,



,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, you make me wanna cut my ear off !!! "


Excellent....... who's that to do you think?

http://2010theapprentice.blogspot.com

My fave is Kirsty, and I think she along with Emma and Arjun are the main contenders to win. Kirsty has a no bull-sh*t type of personality, Emma is a subtle but determined worker, though I don't know how Lord Sugar takes to geeky math nerds like Arjun.
Zoe is the most confident one, but I think Lord Sugar may think she's a bit of a wannabe and punching above her own station.
Tim and Hannah have been tarnished with the 'hanging under-the-radar to dodge responsibility' tag and Lord Sugar doesn't like those sorts.
I don't know if Adam is coming back, if he does I think he will do well, as Lord Sugar clearly likes him but might feel he is in over his head.

Looking at where Lord Sugar is pointing the 'You're fired!' at, looks like Zoe/Emma/Arjun are the ones sat on that left side, and maybe the person who sits on the far left will be the one fired.

Couldn't keep my eyes of Hannah earlier *ahem*

I think she's quite pretty! Full lips and lovely eyes.

I don't actually think Emma's looked good at all. She was invisible in week one, in week two all she contributed was one crap idea (an even crapper idea than all the other crap ideas, which took some doing) and in week three she wanted to buy a quantity of cakes that they could never possibly have decorated and sold. In her favour, she was effectively the sole producer of the cakes in week three, with Adam (through no fault of his own) all but useless.


These clips are so cleverly edited that in the past I've found them no guide.

It seems to me, the Apprentice often does the opposite, and give the winner such a poor edit that when they win, many people are surprised. A classic example is Michelle in s2, of whom most people either thought she came out of nowhere, or thought she won only because she was a photogenic girl with a sob-story. Tim in s1 also seemed to come out of nowhere. Simon in s3 was well-known but had come across quite badly. Lee in s4 was made to look like a bully. Yasmina was very controversial too, for example getting a win on the food task by delivering very poor quality product.


I agree the winner does generally have plus points shown as well as minus points. I was a fan of Michelle from about ep4, for example.

I think the main thing the editors do is focus on candidates who will be leaving soon. That's because the programme is more about failure than success, and they need to show why the fired candidate was fired. It's also because the winner will still be around in later episodes so can be given their footage then.

I think Emma is a strong candidate who has been made to look bad, partly by circumstance. She has made mistake, but they all have, largely because they are all so inexperienced. It doesn't help that Nick has decide to shoot her down at every opportunity (Nick isn't perfect either).

In task 1 Emma simply got on with it, which is good. She did speak up in the boardroom in support of her PM. In task 2 she wanted to do the board game rather than the cabinet, and although the board game wasn't a great idea, the cabinet was worse. It wasn't her idea to make the cabinet out of cardboard; she thought the board game should be cardboard, which was much more reasonable. Because she wasn't taken in the boardroom, she came in for a lot of stick that she wasn't present to defend herself from. That's a big part of why she looked bad.

In task 3, she wanted to be PM but Zoe wouldn't let her. Emma came up with the "I (heart) X" theme which was so much better than the other team's, and which was a big part of their win. It's true she would have got the numbers wrong, but so did Zoe. Arjun wanted 250. Zoe upped it to 400. Maybe if Emma had had Arjun's guidance, she'd have done better too.

Zoe gets the pricing wrong. She and Arjun were responsible for the market research, but we don't see them doing any until after Zoe has decided on £2.20 a cake. Not realising that people would pay up to £3.00 for a customised cake was a huge mistake. I can't say Emma wouldn't have made it too, but we do see her warning Zoe about how getting the research wrong would lead to wrong quantities and prices.

As you say, Emma does well in the kitchen. Then there's an interesting bit towards the end of the day when Emma comes out from the kitchen and is horrified by the messy stall Zoe was selling cakes from. It's easy to criticise, of course, but it came across to me as Zoe making a mistake that Emma would have avoided.

Emma seems good in the boardroom. Articulate without being too shouty. Since she's won twice and wasn't taken into the boardroom when she lost, she's not had a lot of Sugar face-time, so we can't tell how good she really is.

Overall, I think Emma is at least as competent as Zoe, and maybe a bit more creative and a bit nicer. And I say this as an early fan of Zoe.

I agree. Plus she's shown herself to be confrontational during the tasks and willing to undermine the project manager. SurLordAllunSugar doesn't like that. And the cardboard thing was a massive minus point against her. If Adam had taken her into the board room rather than Zoe (presumably because Zoe isn't as pretty as Emma) she'd have been fired after the camping task.

But Zoe only upped it to 400 because of Emma's insistence that 250 was far too few and they should be getting 800. Zoe was taking her input into consideration and compromising with her.

Yes, Zoe got it wrong too, but Zoe getting something wrong isn't a plus point in favour of Emma, it's a minus point against Zoe. The only person who came out of the cake buying number controversy with a plus point to their name was Arjun, and both Emma and Zoe acquired minus points.


Emma might have avoided that but, again, that's not a plus point in her favour it is, if anything, simply a neutral thing. As it goes, I didn't see her coming out in the last half hour of the task and saying "oh look how terribly you're running this all" as particularly different to the way that Rhys would spend tasks going on about how badly everyone else was doing so that at the end, if it all went wrong, he could say "well, I did say that it was bad". I don't think she's much different to Rhys in that respect, except she's much more canny in how she does it.

Zoe had already upped it to 350, which was a lot more than Arjun's 250. So she didn't need Emma's input to get it wrong. That she went further to 400 I think showed weakness; she gave in to peer pressure when by that stage she ought to have known better and had confidence in her numbers.


Agreed. But earlier in this thread some people seemed to be saying Zoe (and a couple of others) were potential winners and Emma wasn't. Showing how Zoe has made mistakes does put Emma in a better light by comparison. They've all made mistakes. In my opinion, Zoe isn't actually stronger than Emma.


The comparison with Rhys is a bit unfair in that he was PM and both in a position to see what was going wrong, and with the authority to fix it. Emma was stuck in the kitchen and couldn't know what was going on in sales until the end. She pointed out the problem as soon as she could, and I think her criticism was spot-on. So for me that's a positive

And another negative for Zoe. Zoe has a lot of confidence, is good at talking with people and negotiating with them, and that translates into being good at sales, but she doesn't yet have the depth of sales technique. Her messy stall was a bit like her lipstick: they are both off-putting. Where-as Emma is beautifully turned-out. I reckon in 5 years Emma will have achieve far more, regardless of who wins this.

It's also worth noting that Emma criticised Zoe for making fewer than 800 cupcakes, and then openly acknowledged in the boardroom she'd been wrong to do so. She knows that being critical isn't a zero-risk option. It's just that if she sees something she sees something she thinks is a fire, she shouts "fire". Which is good. On the cake quantities she did it early enough to make a difference, and happened to be wrong, and with the messy stall she happened to be right, but didn't have opportunity to point out the problem until too late. The upshot: she looks worse than she deserves.

Where-as Zoe makes a lot of mistakes and gets a win anyway, which makes her look better than she deserves.

In my opinion it's between Arjun and Kirsty to win. I find Zoe to be endlessly more entertaining to watch than Emma, and I'm reasonably certain she'll end up making it to the final (3rd place, I reckon) on that alone, but I don't think she'll win. I'm not really interested in doing a "Emma vs. Zoe" comparison, because I don't think either of them will win, so the point is completely moot.


I meant Rhys in the previous two weeks where he'd spend all his time moaning about how badly the task was being run. That's exactly what Emma did during this task.


For you, maybe. But the question is whether Surallun would see it that way. She left her post right at the end of the day and, when it was no longer a constructive criticism to make because it was too late to do anything about it, assigned blame for how badly she was perceiving the task to be going on to Zoe. I've never seen him look upon that kind of thing as a positive. She'd have done better for herself by sticking to her job and keeping her mouth shut.


What other choice did she have? She could hardly have said that she still thought it was a good idea when they didn't even sell all the cakes they had.

And it's worth noting that last week she did still say that making the gaming table/storage unit out of cardboard was a good idea, rather than copping to it being a bad one - when it obviously was a terrible one.

Well when you dissect Emma like that.
But I suppose I was thinking of the faults of the candidates that will stick in Lord Sugar's mind as opposed to what the viewers notice. Even though Nick seemed determined to not let Emma get away with coming up with the bad idea, I don't think it bothered Lord Sugar too much. I think he just felt the whole team was stupid for going along with it.
All Lord Sugar's winners have made big mistakes, but it's their general attitude to work that he goes for.

I don't think Nick shoots Emma down at every opportunity, though he was clearly critical of her "make it of cardboard" idea, and rightly so.

I agree he isn't perfect; he's sometimes been critical of decisions that turned out to be right, and once was factually inaccurate in describing events to Sir Alan (the occasion when Debra went off on one at him).

I agree that was weakness on Zoe's part. There was no need for a compromise as Arjun had sound calculations to back up his 250.

Thanks for clarifying. I'm not sure I agree about Rhys, though. In ep1 his leader was Jordan, who rightly got fired. I remember Rhys criticising his choice of the cheapest for "cheese of the day", and I agreed with him. His leader in task 2 was Hannah, who was nothing special. She ignored the product ideas he and Arjun came up with; I don't think he was being unconstructive there, either.

Back to Emma. She didn't spend all her time moaning. She spent most of it working hard as hard as she could. When she was critical, the editors included it, partly to highlight conflict and partly to make it look like Zoe's team was going to lose.


She left her post because there was no work for her there, because Zoe and Arjun weren't selling. She realised there was a problem, went to figure out what it was, and then tried to fix it. It wasn't too late; there was over an hour to go (of a four-hour day) if the voice-over is to be believed. She didn't put all the blame on Zoe; she included Arjun.

The key for me is that she was right. The last hour is an important selling time; at the end of the day you need to get rid of all your stock. Had Emma not got them to clear up the mess, I expect Zoe would still have won, but it's quite possible they'd have made a small loss instead of a small profit.


My point is that she gave advice when the giving wasn't a zero-risk strategy. It hurt her even when the advice wasn't followed. It's hugely different to what you accuse Rhys of doing, of moaning soto-voice with no risk.

I'll be happy if Emma or Arjun win, I really dislike the rest of them, especially Zoe.

I do like Zoe but she thinks she is too good.

The thread may be down in numbers tonight with BGT being on.

Tonight Tim has to step forward.

Evening all

Hair straighteners!?

I don't remember my childhodd being this image-conscious! (or my adult one for that matter )