Ruth? No thanks.

Michelle was indeed the best candidate of the series, along with Ruth. Establishing yourself as an independent consultant with little qualifications and getting a six-figure salary with it means you must be fairly good. But she was really only the best out of a bad bunch.

Most of the series 2 candidates were pretty poor - Sugar admitted this afterwards. Most of them (i.e. Mani, Samuel, Jo, etc.) found their way into the "worst" list. Michelle leaving soon afterwards seems to have been the final straw that convinced Sir Alan that the whole series was a disaster.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6471463.stm

"I was somewhat disappointed with the calibre of the contestants we had in the second series, to be frank with you."

"There's a lot of regrets about last year - maybe turning up was the biggest regret about it."

So from the boss' point of view, all of the S2 group, including the winner, were the worst candidates he's had - except the Badger of course.

Michael Sophocles from series 3, has to be the most brainless & useless, contestant, the one who claimed to be a good Jewish Boy on his CV &, went to a Halal Butcher for a Kosher Chicken in the Marrakesh episode.

Toff, Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, was a, completely useless candidate

She certainly wasn't. Nowhere near, in fact...

He gave her a stupid idea to run with and being smart she concluded it was a silly idea.

What else could he say after it didn't work out and he made so many mistakes. The recycling computers idea was stupid so his winner had nothing to do and she left. He wasn't gong to admit a dud idea or any other reason. He got a lot of flack for not hiring Ruth and looked on the outcome to have made a mistake even if he hadn't. He also had the first of the kept in for being ruthless candidates - in Syed and had to explain why he had kept him so long only to discover he was lightweight at the end. Its true series two had a lot of weak candidates and some TV characters like Jo, but it was SAS who kept Syed and got rid of Alexa for his mistakes and who persisted with Jo. There's also an equivalent for most of the less capable people in series 2 in series 3-5, so its not that clearly worse on average ability . As winners go, objectively Michelle had been more successful than Yasmina running her own business beforehand and was pretty arguably more capable than the winners of the next two series.

I agree with most of what you say, except I thought Alexa was pretty weak. She ought to have been fired the previous episode and only stayed because she played (invented) the "make me PM instead" gambit, only to preside over the "100 chickens for 100 pizzas" debacle. I also sympathise with him for keeping Jo, who did seem to have a spark that many other candidates lack.

Arguably the big mistake at that stage was firing Karen, who had been in the car with Jo and Alexa, and seemed to have done a good job under difficult circumstances. So good she didn't realise she needed to defend herself in the boardroom. She got blamed for failing to acquire a tyre, which was a big part of why they lost, but in her head it was not her fault but a collective responsibility. Jo said no, the responsibility was personal, and (the then) Sir Alan believed Jo because personal responsibility is what he likes to see. That Karen was a lawyer probably didn't help, either, and it was early enough in the series that she hadn't made much of an impression prior to this. I can sympathise with Sir Alan's mistake, but I think Karen was much stronger than Alexa or Jo, and should not have been first fired of the three.

Alexa was weak, but the "100 chickens for 100 pizzas" mistake was entirely Syed's, and such was the magnitude of his error that nothing she could have done could have saved the task after that. I think Syed should have gone that week.


I agree Karen shouldn't have gone. Both she and Shazia in series 4 show that you can never assume that you're safe just because the others are so clearly more culpable than you; you need to be seen to defend yourself.

As I recall, it happened because of time pressure; he left a message on an answering machine with no opportunity to talk to someone and get sanity checks etc. And the time pressure was largely due to the team leader's mismanagement. Plenty of other things went wrong; they'd have lost even without the chickens. They'd been given a largish budget (a now-familiar trap) and Alexa was determined to spend it all.

Maybe there are others, but anyone who offers a 24 hour hotline for laundry, claimed Jenny C was a good PM on that same task, makes stupid offers like exclusivity at random while selling (and all the while thinks she is brilliant) clearly has not got a brain.

I love how the armchair critics can completely rubbish candidates for the most tenuous of reasons.

24 Hour hotline: Cost them precisely nothing to offer but made it sound as they were offering a high class, personal, service. If you check general advertising a hell of a lot of companies offer useless gewgaws to make their services sound more appealing. Just because Sugar didn't get it doesn't mean it was daft as it cost nothing to provide. Even if it was her idea the rest of the team went along with it.

Jenny C a good PM: In many tasks there's a general murmur of ascent when Sugar asks if the PM was any good because no one wants to appear disloyal. If he then picks on one person to ask and the confirm the PM was good it was just the luck of the draw who got to vocalise what the whole team were saying and, effectively, carry the can.

Exclusivity: That was entirely the fault of the programme makes for failing to correctly brief the candidates on what they could and could not offer the customers. Sitting comfortably watching TV with no pressure (and having been clued up by Sugar's response) it's very easy to ridicule the candidate but in the extremely high pressure situation she was in it's a different story. (Also, I wonder how many people spotted the mistake when she made it and how many only realised after Sugar blew his stack).

I'm not saying she was a potential winning candidate but there were others who proved themselves far worse - if only because they had a greater opportunity to demonstrate their ineptitude.

Maybe I am sounding like an armchair critic, but it's kind of hard not to be when you're watching people like Lindi. The fact that she would offer the same stuff that companies do over the phone for me shows what standard she was at. It also didn't help her win that pitch for the hotel, and as I recall she offered a ridiculously high price for the work, and then tried to offer the hotline.

Given that she was offering things like that early on, she was bound to do something like the exclusivity thing. I don't care if the producers didn't give her a proper look in. If she was that uninformed, she should not have taken a blind risk with that offer, especially since they were selling a regular farmer's products, although in fairness Jennifer M was just as responsible.

Also, people don't always agree unanimously that the team leader was good. Kristina didn't with paul, for example. Lindi also said Jenny was a good leader in the cafe, as well as the boardroom. I prefer the people who are willing to stand up for another point of view, especially when they know the team leader was awful. They're usually the ones that count.

There may well be candidates who were worse, but for me, Lindi was one of the worst.

Totally! The whole exclusivity issue in particular was debated at length on this forum after that episode with no real consensus, but to hold that against her as evidence she was one of the worst candidates demonstrates lack of business enterprise/knowledge on one's own part tbh. A number of us agreed it was one of Lord Alan's classsic 'made-up' reasons for firing her...with a number of posters/viewers jumping on the well-worn retrospective bandwagon that this was indeed 'proof she was useless'.

None of that proves 'she hasn't got a brain' and other candidates have got much further in the contest by doing and saying far worse! All you've done is construct a straw man argument (and not a very good one!) to justify your dislike of her. Your criticisms sound too personal - as well as ill-informed - for me to take them seriously,

Sorry if they sounded to personal. Maybe I was exaggerating a little bit about the brain thing.

But I still think she could earn a place on my list.

Sugar gave two good reasons why the 'exclusivity' deals were bad.
1) They didn't have permission to offer that themselves.
2) The deals themselves were far too small. Exclusive to a large multiple store yes, not a chain of 12 in the whole of London. Jennifer M's offer to a small chain of cinemas made some sense in that there aren't that many cinema chains (that they could sell to that day). However it screws the ice cream maker if he/she gets a chance at one of the main chains later. Lindi's was worse as there were many similar outlets they were now barring themselves and the maker later from. And in fact they did.

The 24hr hotline was nonsense as no one would care. If it's for a one off item like a car in for repair, or a travel flight it makes sense. For items that customers have a stock of anyway eg bed linen, they aren't going to be seriously affected if it arrives a bit later than expected.

I still won't put Lindi on the list of worst candidates though. She can only really be found guilty of forgetting to pack her brain in that pullalong suitcase, and being a bit too pleased with herself. Considering who else is already on the list and what for, Lindi shouldn't be included with THEM in my opinion.

1) It didn't look like exclusivity was something they were specifically told they couldn't offer. The information about them not having authorization to offer this came afterwards. I think it was a bit unfair to criticize them for this, because I don't think it's that clear that you're not authorized to offer exclusivity when you're out selling a product. At least they should have gotten better guidelines before they started selling.

2) I agree with most of this, but I actually thought that Jennifer's exclusivity deal was worse because she offered it without even being asked. And let's face it, no cinema chain cares about exclusivity deals regarding the ice cream they sell, because that is certainly not one of the things that draws people to the cinema. Hence, she was giving away business opportunities for no reason and not getting anything in return. At least the guy in the restaurant specifically asked for exclusivity, and the deal may have depended on it.

Lindi was a bad candidate IMO (not one of the worst, though), but the whole exclusivity thing wasn't the main reason. The hotline and especially the 4999 pounds (!) for the hotel laundry made absolutely no sense at all. A 10 year old could have done that better. And then you could add the diminutive sum of money they charged the fishmonger for all his laundry. The guy almost couldn't believe what an excellent deal they were giving him.

Lindi's lack of common sense was indeed one of the main reasons that I raised the possibility of putting her on the list, as well as the fact that she thought she was absolutely brilliant all the while. Also, I don't know if she's been cleared of it, but she has been accused of pyramid selling, and if that's true it just confirms my opinion of her. I don't pretend to understand every detail but it sounds like yet another Lindi idea.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/...d_gifting.html

I still think she should be on a list of worst candidates - but on reflection probably not the top ten. Maybe top twenty or thirty, because I'm in a more merciful mood .

I guess at least she didn't come across as bad personally as some of the others, particulary in her series.

I agree with most of post #43

The exclusivity though doesn't need to be spelt out in the rules.
Both those exclusive deals were bad deals as they were so small. Good business sense should have told them that. The task was to break two real life small ice cream makers into the London market. If they had stopped to think about that, then any exclusive deal is very premature at that stage. Leave that for M & S etc as they will take all your production anyway (and some). Both Jen M and Lindi were just trying to win the task as sales people and missing the wider point. Lindi's deal may have hinged on what he asked, but they would have to decline or at least check with their employer/client, the maker. If they did, it wasn't shown. I suspect they didn't. Sales people promising stuff they shouldn't is a real pain in the real world btw.

Incidently, Amstrad hi-fi (lol) and computers were originally sold exclusively by Dixons. That is until Sugar and Stanley Kahms had a public falling out over Sugar's complaint that the margins now requested were far too small. Moral: you only sign exclusive deals if the money is enough for your business to thrive. Otherwise get more customers. Which is a lesson a lot of small suppliers to car companies have learnt the hard way (I used to work for Vauxhall in Luton, nuff said)

Agree with post #44 too. In an awful year, she only made you shake your head, not want to throttle or cross the street to avoid. Mind you, if the pyramid selling stuff is true, and I had heard of it before, only now read the link (thanks), then I reverse my opinion and vote her on the list for that! Incidently, while I liked Jen M a lot and thought she got a raw deal later, I did read an Irish forum with quite a few critical posters over her Bella makeover studio. Jist was over a photo package offer that failed to spell out that it wasn't the total package that might be expected. Some posters were happy though. Most happy people don't post of course. Definately not in the pyramid league though!

Thats the point. The issue with exclusivity is that you don't do anything with it - let alone offer it - without knowing if you can give it and under what circumstances. Anyone who made up policy on the run on such an issue would deserve sacking on the spot before they created a real world legal/financial disaster. The laundry hotline was just a massively stupid idea - as SAS noted, who on earth would phone up to ask how their laundry was doing. Same goes for people who invent figures off the top of their head for prices - SAS might as well, hire a random number generator.

It was Syed's mistake though. Alexa made the entirely rational calculation that she knew nothing about catering and Syed claimed to be an expert with direct experience - so she put him in charge of food production. There's no acceptable excuse for what he did - either he was grossly incompetent or he set her Alexa up - time isn't an issue in deciding that a chicken a pizza is too much - that just requires pre-teen numeracy and common sense. Karen suffered from SAS's attitude to lawyers but Alexa got hit by the related attitude to academic qualifications. She volunteered to lead, but SAS then made her situation impossible by giving her the fractious male team and Syed (who no one could lead) to lead. She didn't stand a chance at that point wheras she might have if SAS had left her leading the female team.

I agree that the failiure of that task wasn't entirely Alexa's fault - especially since Syed was making all those ridiculous claims about his catering experience. I think he actually did work as a waiter once, but I'm not sure if he ever ran a restauraunt! .

Still, as I recall, she was in the same car as Syed when he made that order, so you would have thought something would have clicked in and told Syed to cancel it. You don't have to be an expert to know that 100 whole chickens is ridiculous for 100 pizzas.

Also, Alexa had been relatively weak or average in previous tasks. Syed, on the other hand, had sold well previously and lead his team to victory the week before, so I think Sugar may have judged their performance overall as well as that particular task. That, and the fact that Syed made good TV!

Then again, he could have just as easily fired Tuan instead, since he was the one who overestimated how many pizzas they could make in the first place. Ultimately though, Sugar must have decided Alexa was the weakest performer overall. Still, I don't think she quite deserves a place on the list.

That whole exclusivity question became 'abundantly clear' in retrospect, i.e. after Lord Alan used it as a reason for sacking her and whether they did or didn't have permission was at best ambiguous. The hotline idea was silly but she wasn't the only person in the team thus you'd think another person could have piped up about its inappropriateness. At least she had lots of ideas!

Like you, whilst I wouldn't say she was one of the best, she certainly doesn't make the worst list either.

I seem to remember the voiceover referring to the offer of exclusivity being made before the boardroom. Also, as some of the later posters pointed out, the whole thing should have been clear from the start, since they were acting on behalf of a small independent farmer. I don't see how that should be ambiguous.

As for the hotline, Lindi did that on her own initiative during the pitch to the hotel, and the only other teamate present was Jennifer M. It wasn't as if she suggested it in the initial discussion or anything, when there would have been a chance to shoot it down. She had ideas, but I'm sure there were others who had better ideas, like Shazia with the labels. Her other ideas, like plucking prices out of thin air (i.e. £4999 for the hotel) lost them the task.

I still think she should be on a list of 20 or 30 worst candidates. That's my view, so don't accuse me of making personal arguments .