LOL, nice try!

But Susan was a part of the team so her ideas should have been taken on board.

She was not armed so she could not force her team mates to take notice.


And when Susan was a leader everyone said she was very good. And she lead her team to victory.


When someone (i.e. Susan) says something and someone else lies about it (i.e. Jim), there is no way to break the impasse unless there was a witness (i.e. Nick) to clear the matter up.

It wasn't a matter of Susan waiting for the cavalry. It was a matter of there being and independent witness.

Her ideas are taken on board, when they are good ones and she argues passionately for them. Usually either she's wrong, or else she doesn't bother to make her case.


Her team performed terribly, just scraping a win despite the other team only getting 60% of the items. She made big mistakes, such as not walking away from the tea deal, and her team didn't seem to follow her guidelines on location. She wasn't a bad PM, but she wasn't great either. She was just lucky the other team happened to be marginally worse.

She didn't get much criticism from her team partly because she won. Had she lost, it would have been a different story.

as much as i liked joanna, she was just rubbish at the interviews.and her 'beach book reader' idea was the worst idea ive seen on the show.
she did well though.

How can you say that. Boots liked it. There was no better idea. She 'fell' at the interviews because she realised then that she had been duped and never had a chance to start with. On every single task she seemed to be the 'brains'. Liz had to go and even copy her ideas and never seemed to put a foot wrong. LS also liked her. Even now after the show she seems to be the most in the news. Being called to speak everywhere. All the others have been long forgotten.
About the present series. I think that in almost every task the other team if you go by effort should have won.
The last task which was based on who had the bigger market gap Jim should have won.
The previous one they didnt get the laid out contracts and still managed on their own to get as much - £6
The buying task they paid less for the articles and had less time for it.

Susan was a fantastic PM, Nick, who barely praises anyone, said that she was great and 'a little force to be reckoned with'. She was very organised and succinct. Shame they didn't have the internet available for them to google the real price of tea.

You don't give her enough credit.

Baggs is much more in the news then Joanna

Also being in the news a lot is a bad sign, as this means that you ain´t got a proper job (Liz for instance has snatched a top financial job and is therefore totally gone from the news headlines).



I would only agree with you on the apps task and the pet food task.

I would only agree with you on the apps task and the pet food task.[/quote]
So between the two of us thats the lot!

I sometimes think Brangdon gets his own, personal, edit.

Susan's team did say, quite enthusiastically, that she was a good PM. Without a doubt the two she brought back into the boardroom would have changed their tune but that's true for every PM.

As you say, if you deny people the means to research efficiently they are likely to get the prices of unusual items spectacularly wrong.

The main problem with Susan's team on the buying task was that they ignored her instruction on where to start looking. Once again she nailed a very important factor but was ignored. Unless she had tried to micro manage the team she couldn't have known that they were looking in the wrong places and if she had done that she would have no doubt got no end of stick for it.

Edward, Gavin and Felicity were great PM's

I agree with this post. But I'm surprised no one has said Jim for the interviews. He seems to be a great talker and I think he can charm his way through... thoughts?

I don't think he'll be in the interview stage sadly

That was not my point. My point was that the teams on the losing side every time worked harder and better with a lot more effort. I would make a suggestion that there should be a minimum difference to be declared the winner, Certainly more than £10 for any task. If not, both PM's should bring in one person.

Tom hasn't been PM yet and Helen and Melody haven't faced Lord Sug yet, so, I don't think these three are clear and dry yet.

I really hope Tom is PM in the next task, he should be as he it would seem strange for two former PM's to get the gig again when he hadn't yet. I would like Tom and Melody as PM next week because then we can become familiar with Melody again and see if Tom is actually up to more than just what we've seen of him so far.

Sorry, but this was only true on the apps task and the pet food task

Having just looked at a clip on the BBC website that shows Susan asking some questions about the French I'm beginning to wonder about her:

Do the French like their children?
Do they drive in France?

plus:

I know nothing about French culture (stated as if "and why on Earth would I" should have been tagged onto the end).

I would have thought that it was just something amusingly taken out of context but there is a clip of Karen absolutely steaming about the 'do they like their children' comment.

It wasn't based on who had the bigger market gap. I strongly suspect that the teams were given a list of themes, and if the task was merely about who could pick from that list the theme with the biggest market gap, the task need only take five minutes.

Jim made a fundamental mistake in not negotiating on the first pitch. The point of an agency is that they get a cheaper price than the clients would get directly - that's their business model, how they are able to money. He also got the tone of the magazine cover wrong,, and made the articles too patronising. It doesn't matter how big the market gap is when his product doesn't match it.

She was good, but not fantastic. Like I say, her team performed really badly despite having some good people on it, including Jim who is a great negotiator and Helen is a good organiser. Roughly the same team won the previous task under Edna and the task before under Melody and the task after under Zoe. It was a strong team.

It's not true that Nick never praises anyone. He has his likes and dislikes; he's not as neutral as he should be.

She wasn't organised enough to get the list price of the tea, or to get a second supplier, and she didn't understand the task well enough to know she should walk away instead of paying over the odds. She gave her team instructions but apparently never checked that they were being followed. It's not micro-managing to check that your team is going in the right direction.

I actually rate her fairly highly. It only seems like I don't because I am forever arguing with people who rate her far too highly, leading me to point out that she's far from perfect.

In terms of the buying task, there was an important piece of the puzzle missing in terms of discovering why they only won by £6. Susan and Felicity between them messed up the tea, but that was only half the story. The other half is who messed up on purchasing toilet roll in bulk, which was one of the more expensive items on the task, and therefore should have been a top priority. We were never shown this, despite it being important.

I don't think she was a great PM, or a terrible one, but a major part of the team's weakness is occluded from view. She might be better or worse than she appeared to be.

You've got her twice there for only one fault!

If she didn't know the list price of the tea then she couldn't have known to walk away.

If she had enough information to walk away then she must have been organised enough to get the price.

It is, anyway, unclear whether it was necessarily certain that you could get to more than one supplier of some of the items. When you have only telephone directories to use you are limited to phoning suppliers one at a time to try and find one that sells what you want. Maybe there were only a couple of suppliers of that type of tea out of a hundred tea merchants.

It seems odd that someone who was evidently very well organised should simply not have tried to get more than one supplier.


It would have been interesting to see how that panned out in the boardroom had they lost. Personally I don't think a manager (who, we must remember Sugar expects to be working as well as managing) should have to check that some of the supposedly 'brightest business minds in the country' can follow extremely basic instructions.


Most of the people who may be going a little too far on the pro Susan side are probably doing so because of the weird level of hatred she is generating.

At one point yesterday I counted seven anti-Susan threads on the front page! That's just absurd.

And this outpouring of opprobrium and resentment seems to have been engendered because she said 'It's unfair' a couple of times (amplified by the vicious edit she's had on occasion.)

Helen has a lot of sense. Remember she openly hated both "See their light" and "How to blow your load". So, I think you're right that anyone who turns on her in the boardroom might be in for a shock.

I reckon she'd be unflappable and well-spoken in the boardroom along the lines of Kristina and Stella.

In the Irish Apprentice a couple of years ago there was a woman who had been on the winning team something like 11 times in a row. The first time she was in the boardroom she got sacked!

If Sugar does that he'll look like an even bigger prize prune than he has with some of his other, 'interesting' firings.

In the second UK series, Paul had 6 wins out of 10, including both times as PM, and stayed out of the boardroom when he lost, so the interviews round was the first time Lord Sugar got to talk with him properly. He was summarily fired.

In the American version, some of the winning treats are a meal with Trump. Although a bit lame, I think they are a good thing to give the winners a chance to spend some time with the boss. You can't win if Sugar doesn't know who you are.

Lee won handily despite never having been in the Final Boardroom. Tim, Simon, Yasmina and Michelle all wound up there only once. I don't think never, or hardly ever being in the Final Boardroom has ever been a hindrance for anyone. Every single Final Two has been won by the person with fewer Boardroom appearances.

I don't think Paul's problem is that he was never in the Boardroom - his problem was that he tanked interviews harder than anybody else in the history of the programme. His CV was awful, he antagonised every single interviewer, and told Siralan he didn't care if he got fired, because he'd just go and get a job somewhere else. He made sure that hiring him would have been a PR disaster, and a nonsense. I doubt that getting to argue over the toss regarding a loss would have helped him out - he probably would just got fired sooner.

Quite right. But the judges meaning the agencies based it on that. Both mags were rubbish, their money for the ads was based on market gap. Jim got more money for that reason. The only reason the other agency gave such a huge amount was because they wanted to 'ditch' Jim for his arrogance. They knew it was an apprentice task.