Hello.

Right, this has been bugging me since Wednesday night.

I was surprised that Melody's lying about the products, and the feedback she received on them, was not mentioned in the boardroom.

A friend of mine pointed out that no one else would have known about it, as Nick wasn't there and Leon couldn't understand French.

This satisfied me for a while, but then I remembered the grilling that Tom got (unfairly, IMHO) for deciding who would pitch by playing paper/scissors/stone.

There was no one else in the car, other than Tom and Natasha, yet Brady was clearly aware of it, hence her pushing her question about it to Tom.

So, what exactly are Sugar, Nick and Brady shown?

Tom chose to mention this in the boardroom himself. No one asked him about it until after he'd already said that they'd flipped a coin.

But they pressed a seemingly innocuous matter because they already knew that there was something there, and then Brady made even more of it later on.

I'm pretty certain that the method used to decide who pitches doesn't usually face such (pointless) scrutiny.

I agree.

I am quite sure the matter was brought to the attention of 'the board'.

It was clear from the way they zeroed in on it.

If The Apprentice was anything more than an entertainment programme, your point would merit consideration Super_Furry.

None of it is real and is just a television package so it matters little.

If they are not shown footage prior to the boardroom then I would imagine that LA and team get a bullet pointed rundown of the task, each contestent and anything 'interesting' that has happened ....

It's pretty obvious that they do as you can see when they start asking questions to lead the candidates to spill the beans over certain incidents.

The director following whichever sub team doesn't have either Nick or Karren in attendance would be an ideal candidate for the job of unofficial grass.

It's quite obvious that much of it is stage-managed as LS always asks for the results in a sequence that the last result given is the deciding one.

They've really overdone that aspect so you can spot the dramatic twist a mile off.

There is an element of double bluff, though. Last week's episode, for example.

You can say, though, that the team that gets the final result has either won it or lost it dramatically.

They don't see any of the footage. They do get reports from other production staff. We can only guess how detailed and accurate those reports are. In general, I think Lord Sugar rarely asks a question he doesn't already know the answer to.

A case which fascinated me occurred in series 4, when Jenny C was seen as bullying Lucinda in the car driving home late at night during the laundry task. I don't think Nick or Marge was in the car. The production crew obviously picked up on it because they interviewed Lucinda about it that very night, before she went to bed. But what got back to Lord Sugar I have no idea. It didn't get mentioned in the boardroom.

To us, from the footage, it looked pretty horrendous. However, Lucinda had been at fault for wasting time when there was no time to waste, and her being reduced to tears in the car may have been portrayed as weakness on her part. It entirely depended on what spin the production crew put on it.