Sorry if this has been asked before, but what happens to the profits the teams make from selling? e.g. the DVD task the other week ? Obviously they have to pay for the materials etc etc, but when all that is paid, what happens to the rest of the money??

I think because Lordie Sugar puts up the seed money he then also gets the profits. That's why if they ever make a loss it really annoys him.

We're talking tiny amounts of money. It's just +/- on the production costs.

Most of the sales aren't real anyway. They aren't actually supplying 6 months of crisps.

I'm not so sure about that. The crisp firms were real and the buyers were real. The sales the teams made were on behalf of the crisp makers so they would have got the profits (and from any ongoing sales).

When they sell stuff to people in shops and galleries, etc, they appear to be genuine sales. If the buyers are all actors then the programme is a complete fake.

The buyers are not actors, but I think some of them may be fibbers. Just like deals on Dragons' Den some of these sales may not go through in the end, but the point is that the contestants were made genuine offers at the time. There's always the possibility that buyers might not follow through, and Sugar is probably too busy to chase after them, but this doesn't affect the boardroom.

True, and that goes for real life too. In tasks like this where they are representing real businesses and real products the sales are probably genuine too (at least the intention to buy). The negotiations appear genuine, often embarrassingly so.

Some things are clearly contrived. The Marriott guy only having two appointments free hours apart for example. The fact that the apparently cold calls involved mostly the same businesses. Hamburg's a big city so it's a hell of a coincidence they found the same outlets. They must have been given a list of contacts by researchers.