I find it frustrating, that the editors of the programme do not balance out the tasks between teams. For example, the girls team were seen to be on the ball and getting all the items whilst the boys team were seen as underdogs always chasing. There are 300 hours of footage to edit for each programme to whittle down to an 1hour presentation. I knew who would win, the underdogs! It would be nice if the editors left us wondering who won until revelations are in the boardroom.

Also on the subject of bad editing. There was a moment when the teams had switched at the beginning before LordAlan had told them to swap. I found it odd that folks appeared to be warping from one spot to another. Teleportation skills should be banned in this programme.

It was obvious that the girls had lost the second the footage of Liz telling Stella and Laura to phone her before making a deal on the truffles was shown. Had that not been something that was going to be brought up in the boardroom at the end it wouldn't have been included in the programme.

It was clear quite early on that the boys were getting far better deals than the girls.
The question was would they get all the items in time - which they didn't but since they understood that it was the price that mattered they came through.
I wouldnt be suprised though if the truffle incident actually happened earlier in the day and was held back for dramatic effect...

BTW just to be pedantic - its not 300 hours of film. This weeks task ran from about 08:00 to 18:30 - two sets of cameras for each team gives 4x10.5 hours of footage - 42 hours footage in total

I'm not sure that's quite true. If the girls had got £7 off each of their purchases, or just 50p and not been late, they'd have equalled the boys' score. Yes, the boys' pricing was a million times better than the girls', but the fact that they missed out on 3 items almost lost them the task and getting the items was almost as important. With fines of £50 and a winning margin of just £70 it was a very close contest.

Or alternatively if the guys had got all their items for free then they would have STOMPED the girls.

Wait wha..?

Its easy to look back and say that if they negotiated all their prices down a bit more than they would have won, etc. But then the mistake was clearly that they did not. If we are going to overlook the mistakes of the girls and assume that they would win then, well, I guess every single task could, in theory, turn out differently if it was not for a few mistakes here and there.

I agree with your last sentence. What on Earth are you wibbling on about?

He's pointing out that you essentially said that "had the girls spent less than the boys, they would have won the task."

I get what you meant, but it was a self-fulfilling statement. 'Sall.

Except the boys were shown as getting better prices, and figuring out what the items were eventually, so they weren't really underdogs.


Or it was obvious the boys would lose the second they showed Jamie spending hours trying and failing to source the kitchen top. Or after any number of other details.

It's only bad editing if you believe that it is a means of filling a vacant position in Alan Sugar's organisation. As a television programme, which it is, the editing fits the bill - they are not interested in fairness as much as turning out an entertaining show.

Close-ups of bitchy looks, grins and raised eyeballs can be inserted anywhere to make good TV.

Except, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in the real world, if you have a business project that requires 10 items and you only have 7 your project is dead in the water and you lose:

All the putative profit
The wages and expenses of the staff who failed to get all the items
The loss of buying items for which you now have no use.

Whereas if you spend a little extra you just make a little less profit.

In the real world, if someone had needed all those items for some project that had to be delivered the next day they would have made a thumping loss on the basis of the efforts of the boy's team and just a little less profit on the basis of the efforts of the girl's team


Nope.

If you've watched all the series it's obvious who will win most tasks when they focus on one team doing particularly well and one team doing particularly badly at the beginning.

As they showed the boy's 'headless chicken' approach I was wondering how the hell they would be able to recover.

Of course I hadn't foreseen either the Deus ex machina of the unreal discounts the boys managed to get or the fact that Sugar would not penalise them for their OTT mandacity.

And in real life, having items too late can be as bad as not having them at all. Not turning up yourself on time can be even worse; you can lose the entire deal.

This isn't the real world, though. It's a task and the rules and penalties were fairly clear. That was the basis of the edit.


I've watched every series. The edit tries to make it unclear who has won, and generally succeeds. You might guess and get lucky in individual episodes.

For example, in the Top Shop episode of series 2, Michelle's team started off badly, improved as the day went on but eventually lost. The edit made it look close, but also showed them losing at the start. By your reckoning, the team that won should have been shown losing at the start. (I pick that episode because it's one I happen to remember.)

Yes but it's extraordinarily unlikely that turning up a couple of minutes late will destroy a project. If it did the project would have been grotesquely misconceived in the first place.

Whereas only getting 70% of what you need to complete would pretty much guarantee a disaster.


Indeed. That's why it was an absurdly designed task.

They had a highly contrived (and largely secret) set of restrictions placed on their researching abilities so that they could not do what someone with real business savvy would do and had to operate largely blind which, in itself, pushes the result closer to pure luck than any measure of business skill.


That's why I said: " it's obvious who will win most tasks when they focus on one team doing particularly well and one team doing particularly badly at the beginning."

It's only in cases where one team seems to have an unbeatable lead that it's usually the other team that wins.

Normally it's impossible to guess.

Only because in such circumstances people try hard not to be late. For example, if you are bidding for a contract there will often be a hard shut-off deadline. If you have to get goods to a ship or an aeroplane, you can't always expect it to wait for you.


Except by your own logic, you could get the other 30% the next day.


My point is that that's a separate argument to the issue of whether the episode was well-edited.


The Top Shop task remains a counter-example. The team with the unbeatable lead won.


If Liz's team had won - which they nearly did - the editing could have been the same.

You seem to be deliberately missing the point.

If you need 10 items for a project you need those ten items. The project fails with 9 items.

You are trying to equate a delay of a couple of minutes caused by the vagaries of London traffic with the complete failure to get 30% of the items required.

This wasn't a contract or tender delivery for which completely different rules would apply.

This was a task to get a set of items in one day which the girls completed 100% but the boys utterly failed. And the boys won the task on the basis of a set of lies.

If the judge had been less of a spiv than Sugar they might well have been disqualified.


Oh, good grief!

That's why I said 'most tasks ...' and not 'all tasks ...'.

If I say: "My train arrives on time most days", replying "well it didn't on Thursday six weeks ago" is not a sensible reply.

The task was about haggling. BBC offcially calls it "Episode 9: Discount Buying".

This is why the girls failed. It's not Treasure Hunt. They collected instead of haggled. Stella, for example being satisfied with a £1 discount on the tartan. They also paid a lot more than the list price was. There were clear rules. While they are more certainly more organised than the boys, they missed out completely that the primary objective of the task was finding the items, identifying the list price and obtaining it for less.

If that was the main criteria it only highlights even more noticeably the abysmal design of the task.

If you want to test people's haggling skills then you should set the task up to test that, not set it up in such a way that it's pot luck whether you happen to find an item in a few minutes or take a few hours.

Jamie was busting a gut trying to locate the 4m work surface. How was that testing his negotiating skills?

The girls lost £50 because their taxi got back a couple of minutes later than the boys. How is that testing their negotiating skills.

Even where 'negotiating' skill were, apparently, tested it was more a case of telling the most outrageous lie in the presence of a bunch of cameras and striking lucky as traders gave unrealistic discounts for who knows what reason. The producers need to get a clear idea of what they are trying to test and then apply a bit of intelligence to making sure the design actually tests what they want it to test. This task was allegedly supposed to test haggling skills and yet a large part of it was more concerned with what really was a treasure hunt,

The pressure of getting the items is obviously going to affect negotiating skills, which it quite clearly did especially in the case of the girls.

The boys didn't deserve to win, they were just very lucky, partly due to negotiating the lowest prices, but partly due to the girls losing track of what the task was really about.

I think the fact that they managed to accrue horrendously massive fines and still won shows that they absolutely were the best at the task.

That's insult to injury. Not only were their negotations better than the girls', but the horrendous fines STILL didn't swing it. And even if the girls turned up on time, they still wouldn't've won!

That's one hell of a chasm.

Yup.

If you are prepared to accept blatant dishonesty and ignore the fact that they only got away with that dishonesty because the cameras were there the boy's did a great job.

Hell, they could have done even better if they'd stolen the items.

With Sugar's sense of ethics and honesty who knows? He might just have smiled and allowed it.

Only if you take it out of context of the post I was replying to.

Any episode where Lordalan gives a limo interview at the beginning saying that "this task is dead easy, all you have to do is "x" " are obvious. This time he said the key was driving a hard bargain, so when the boys were shown driving a harder bargain than the girls (to the point of ludicrousness) it should have been obvious who won. I'm sure if Team Liz had won that limo interview would have been extolling the virtues of good organisation and and not treating your customer like a mug, or what have you. If nothing else the OTT interviews before the results were revealed of Jamie going "I suck, I failed, I'm going home" and Liz and Laura going "Oh we did so well, I'm proud of myself, I can't WAIT to see the results" should have tipped the viewer the wink.

Not really, no. The kitchen top makes good drama. Liz saying to phone her and the other girls not doing so only really makes sense to be included if it's going to have a pay-off later in the programme. And the only pay-off it could have is if the girls lost.

Either the deadline matters or it doesn't. If it does, then Liz's team failed to deliver 5 items before the deadline because they didn't turn up. If it doesn't matter, then the boys could have got their missing items the next day.

Basically, both teams had a choice: whether to risk being late in order to get more items, or whether to skip items but be on time. Jamie's team chose to be on time, Liz's team chose to be late. They were judged accordingly. In neither case was the penalty crippling.


It was a task. The task rules applied, according to which Liz's team lost. What's the problem? The tasks are always going to be artificial.


But that totally undermines your point. It means that a prediction as to who has won based on that statistic is going to be wrong, some of them time. It can't be "obvious" if its sometimes wrong. It's just an unreliable guess.


Few tasks test only one thing.

Jamie's problem was that the work surface was an unusual size and therefore had to be custom made. That meant there was a lead time. Liz's team figured that out, ordered the item early in the morning before they even got into the cars, and then picked it up later in the day after it had been made. Easy. This shows Liz's team as well-organised and planning ahead. Jamie had no plan and not only failed to source the item at all, but used up time he could have spent on other items.

In your world everything may be black and white but in the real world things just aren't that simple. If you can't see the difference between a couple of minutes and however many hours it would have taken the boy's team to find the three other items that's your problem.

The reason that that aspect of the task (London traffic) was so animal stupid is because it would have been so easy to remove it from the equation by having the minders report the situation at the selected deadline. That way the entirely random element of traffic would have been eliminated.


Did you watch this episode or are you arguing from some précis transcript? On the edit I saw both teams cut it right to the bone but the boy's team got lucky with the traffic. Neither team mad a choice to be late.


Again, did you actually watch this episode?

There was no time penalty for the boy's team. Why would there be? They weren't late.


If you haven't figured the problem yet then I doubt you're ever going to. The NetworkBabe' has given a very good analysis which I strongly suggest you read if you still can't see the problems.

Basically, the stupidity of the task's design turned it into something where the outcome was almost entirely random.


Of course it's a (n informed) guess. I never suggested it was anything else.

Why are you having such a problem with this?

I simply said that a lot of the time if factors X and Y occur the outcome is Z. You know, like: "If I see thick, black, cloud and there's a forecast for rain it usually rains". Not always, but usually. You're creating a straw man argument by finding a counter example and arguing that something I said tended to be the case isn't always the case.


Don't quote things out of context.

That comment was directed at someone who said that the task was about negotiating skills, not finding the items.

You're effectively just amplifying the point I was making.