It isn't that she, or Helen, or Melody, don't make mistakes.

It's that both teams seem to have had one sub team selling sensibly and one sub team doing something idiotic.

Not just 'a bit daft' but seriously, mind numbingly, stupid.

Trying to sell to retailers and touting tat round one of the most expensive areas of London.

And not one member of either team (remember these are the six best of sixteen candidates picked from over 30,000 applicants) put their foot down and said: "No! Do that and we lose the task."

To me that's just not credible without some significant nudging from the producers.


I've never even suggested that they exaggerated the time. What I have said is that, for that particular journey, the time taken is so much greater than the average you would expect that there is no way the team could have anticipated it. And even if it been just a few minutes shorter they would have made the sale and won the task.

Its even more strange when they make the same mistakes year after year. Sheet selling in Knightsbridge is a close cousin of Truffle buying at the most expensive restaurant you can find. Its amost as if, as Vasa suggested, there's traps laid. Do they drive them to two locations - one East and one West and say get out and see what you can do around here knowing something silly will come of it.. On the other hand , perhaps the candidates just do have random thoughts and don't think them through at all. Want to make money selling sheets - find rich people. Want a cheap retailer - go to pound shop without realising what a pound is. Want scrap- go door to door in working day time. Want truffles - go to a restaurant that serves them. There's a kind of initial logic there behind most of their really dumb ideas - they just can't see whats wrong with it, and often no one else on the team can either.

I think it's much more the latter, candidate stupidity under pressure combined with desperation. I don't think it's traps set by the producers to catch them out. In the cold light of day I doubt any of them would make the same mistake.

However this is about performing under pressure, so mistakes made under pressure are still mistakes.

It would be interesting to hear from an ex-candidate, but I think it's much more to do with a combination of desperation and time pressure. That kind of thing leads to really stupid decisions, even by intelligent people. But to accept such daft ideas in the form of hints from the production team would take abject idiocy to new lows. It's just not credible, year on year.

What you seem to be suggesting is that the producers suggested door-to-door in Knightsbridge and Susan swallowed the idea, thus couldn't criticse the decision in the boardroom. For me the simpler, less conspiratorial, explanation for her not blaming anybody is that Knightsbridge was her idea, even if door-to-door might not have been.

Melody and Helen were much worse in terms of mistakes, but I don't think even they would accept a hint from the producers that a poundshop would be a great place to sell £20 watches, or that a hardware shop might want to diversify into duvets and towels. It had to be their idea, like selling to retailers.


Fair enough, but don't forget they'd already done the journey from the wholesaler to the selling area, so they knew how long it might take. I don't think an hour is that much longer than the average. Without much traffic you might average 15 mph in town. So it would still take you nearly an hour at the best of times to do 12 miles. In daytime London traffic it will take much longer than that, especially as the return journey would be well into "rush hour".

I agree. I still wonder why it'd never occurred to them to check a dictionary or call/visit a public library's reference desk to find out what whateveronthetreasurehuntlist was. The blue book, cloche and more. I couldn't help but shout at TV screen: "USE A DICTIONARY!!!!"

I still can't get over how almost all teams in most TA series don't seem to have the basic cultural and economic knowledge of London. I can't decide if it's arrogance on my part for assuming everyone knows where is what in London, or those candidates were idiotic for not doing homework before entering the competition.

That assumes that they are allowed to use a dictionary. Or that they are allowed to use a library.

Given that this come up again and again (and we have never seen any team using either) it seems likely that they are not allowed to.


I'm ever more convinced that the hidden rules lead them into doing these inexplicable things and that traps are laid.

Take the latest 'disasters'

For both teams it seems - from this and previous series - that only one sub team is allowed to sell from a 'pitch' at the start of the task. Doubtless someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think we've seen a single instance (with the possible exception of a first task) where the task has involved selling to the public and two sub-teams from a single team have been selling 'on the street' of from fixed pitches.

This very strongly suggests to me that there is a hidden rule that one sub team must try another approach at first.

So that means that they have to choose between:

1) Selling to people in their homes
2) Selling to people in their workplaces
3) Selling to small businesses

None of these are very attractive options and none of them have ever seemed to work very well. And yet the teams still keep doing them.

For the specifics of this task:

1) Susan selling door to door in Knightsbridge

Knightsbridge is just about the most expensive area of London. It's also not particularly big.

So how did Susan come to be there?

Did she really think to herself: "I've got this cheap tat to sell so I'll find the most expensive area of London and try to sell it there". Does that seem likely?

Or does it seem more likely that she's busy selecting her products and working out her approach and the producers just 'happened' to drive straight to London's most expensive area and drop her off there?

2) Melody and Helen selling to retailers

Two clearly intelligent women and yet they seem to go for just about the weirdest option available.

I can't even begin to imagine how that happened. I can only assume that they thought it might be the best of a set of very bad options. The fact that they somehow managed to get an order worth £90 in profit equally inexplicably seems to indicate they might have been correct.

On the soap task (Week 4) in Series 5 both teams start from fixed pitches and remain on fixed pitches (although they move from pitch to pitch as the day goes on as London footfall changes, there's no door-to-door stuff, and no pestering retailers).

To be honest I don't think there's enough of an evidence base to speculate about a general all-encompassing rule, especially if we're excluding first tasks. More likely if these hidden rules exist about having to doorstep they're set by the task. Most tasks involving selling to the public that aren't first tasks are stuck in specific shop-spaces inside shopping centres or individual buildings (like the beauty treatments task this series)

Certainly a possibility.

I just find it hard to give credence to the idea that the teams almost invariably, voluntarily, go for these ineffective strategies.

Away from a street or fixed pitch, they would either need to waste so much time going from door to door before they could even try and interest a customer in their products or have to waste time getting permission to go in and pester people in their workplace - and get permission and set up filming.

It would at least explain why Helen and Melody went for such an obviously unpromising strategy. They simply thought it was the 'least worst' of some very poor options.

No he did not throw a tantrum.....the idea of the task is to smell whats selling.
Natasha could have easily gone back to buy more of whats selling, whilst the other two continue to sell for example.
Its the nature of business, 'year end', stock plus profit....so he gave them a jumble of items to start them off (probably knowing from market research, some items would sell well eg, nodding dog. One of the easiest task to date actually.

If the two teams (the pms themselves or the other team members had been on the ball) they could have actually gone back on the end of the first day to stock up on whats sellig plus some other risky items thats not been tested (bracelet/emergency phone charger), for the next day selling, with plans to replenish if the needs arise.

He is giving them a lesson, in selling at a profit with high numbers, dropping items that does not sell, reinvesting on items that do.
Nothing unfair or 'tantrumy' about his behaviour.

I really can't see the point in trying to invent rules which explain to you the odd way some teams go about selling. The "rule" apparently is that they must try an alternative first. Well, in business you do try alternative strategies and go with what works. They have two days to make the most profit so they can't afford to exclude ideas which might work. To assume this is a secret rule of the competition designed to make us fall about laughing at the same idotic behaviour year on year is silly. Such jokes wear thin due to repetition.

I think you have to assume teams do what they do because they choose to do so. Anything else is just speculation to explain what you perceive as otherwise inexplicable. There are alternative explanations which don't involve rules to force teams to behave in a certain way. The whole idea of the "process" is to see how they react under extreme pressure. Distorting that by making them go down blind alleys first makes no sense to me.

Can't you?

Thank goodness that there have always been members of the human race who didn't think like that or we would never have advanced.


But some evidently don't work very well. And despite seeing this year after year they keep doing it.


I don't think the 'try a different approach first' is to make them look stupid. It's a perfectly logical that they would want to have footage of them doing something else other than working the street/stall as that would become tedious. That would explain why they only have to do the alternative at the beginning. Once they have got enough footage for them to edit in something different they are allowed to go back to doing what sells best.


Yup. That's the way human knowledge moves forward. Obviously it doesn't mean I'm correct, but there is a logical reason for the rule I've suggested and to me that seem a more reasonable explanation for observed behaviour than accepting that every team is so thick that they insist on trying something that has been shown not to work well for the past six series.

No I can't, because you are constructing your rule on the basis of unscientific observations and assumptions. Ignoring the fact we only see edited highlights, not everything that goes on, which might explain things better. The Apprentice is an entertainment show, just watch it and enjoy it, there's no need to explain candidate's behaviour by assuming there are rules about how they must approach certain selling tasks. What on earth would be the point in forcing them to make the same mistakes each time?

The simplest explanation is often the best. If you can explain what happens without the need to invent a rule to force it to happen then it makes much more sense. It's not about everybody being stupid each series and making the same mistakes. It's about being put under extreme pressure, often well out of your comfort zone, and knowing if you don't perform you risk facing the sack.

I think it's much more likely people go into headless chicken mode at the start of a task and flail around for a bit. I'm sure they all gameplay everything in advance based on previous series, but that goes out the window when "the process" starts for real.

Apart from anything else a rule which imposes idiocy on the first day of selling seems totally counter productive. The idea is to sort the good candidates from the dross. Saddling them all with a proscribed limitation seems completely unnecessary.


Where indeed would mankind be if it wasn't for people like you inventing pointless and artifical game rules to explain the effects of human fallibility.

Yes, when you construct a rule you base it on observations and assumptions. Your use of the word 'unscientific' is just a noise word. The observations are just that, they are neither scientific nor unscientific.


You would do well to take you awn advice. If you are happy to enjoy it superficially, go ahead and do so. Why spend so much time and energy in telling the world you have no deeper interest?


1) I've already explained that. It's so that they have more than one activity to show. Instead of having, say, eight continuous minutes of people trying to sell to passing trade they can switch between that and people trying to sell in shops or offices or door to door, which is much more likely to hold an audience's attention.

2) If they have to do it, they are not 'making a mistake'


You mean in the same way that the Earth seems pretty flat so why not just assume it's a disk?

Of that the sun, planets and stars appear to rotate around the Earth so let's just assume that's what's happening.

Great plan.


LOL, see above.


All this really depends on what you consider to be the 'simplest' explanation.

1) The producers want something other than street/stall shots so they make the candidates spend a little time doing something else.

2) In all of the many, many, cases where we have seen this happen, the candidate are given a choice:

a) Stand in the street or at a stall and try to sell to a continuous stream of people passing by.

b) Pack all your wares and go to a house/office/shop, try and get the owner interested, try to get permission to film, spend time trying to do the actual sale, pack up and move on. Repeat.

And every time we see this effect, one and only one sub team voluntarily decide to go with one of these inefficient methods and yet they never seem to stick with it (at least on two day selling tasks). The fact that it's always one sub team doing one thing and one the other should be enough of a give away that it is not just random decisions from the PM's.

ROFLMAO!

You completely miss the point.

It is the nature of some people to try and explain things that do not, superficially, make sense. Clearly, in the context of reality TV that is of no importance in driving the human race forward.

But, do you think if people such as Darwin, Newton, Dirac or Bohr had watched a programme like TA and seen things that didn't make sense to them they would have said: "Who cares?" Of course not. There are people who are happy to take what they see at face value and others who want to try and understand it.

You seem to belong to a peculiar sub category of the first of those: People who just take things at face value and also feel the need to tell everyone that they have no interest in what is really going on.

They'd probably say "oooh, that Melody's lost weight since I saw her last"...

It is in the nature of most to try and explain things that do not, superficially, make sense (and for those same people, to take certain things at face value). The danger is that a person, in their desperation to understand, creates a conclusion that fits with their pre-conceived opinion rather than appreciating life and people for their unfathomable complexities.

This conclusion can play a positive role in one sense, in that it alleviates anxiety. I've no problem with that. It's when a person then appoints themselves as an authority on the subject and starts to talk in a superior, condescending and aggressive manner that I get a bit upset.

Indeed.

That's why it's a good idea to state your reasoning and allow other people to see which possibility they think is more likely.

In the above example, is it more likely that the producers insist that one sub team does something that will allow them to make a more interesting programme, of is it more likely that by complete coincidence exactly one sub team of each team chooses to attempt a technique that is clearly much less efficient than the one the other sub team is using?

Clearly, it is up to each person to come up with their own view or, if they wish, propose a better theory.


LOL, do you think there was a lot of anxiety that the world was flat?


Indeed.

I simply wanted to offer what I thought was a more realistic interpretation of what we saw. I found it upsetting that someone then became condescending and rejected that interpretation out of hand simply because he, himself, was not interested, and the aggressively referred to observations that were merely that: observations, as 'unscientific'.

It's also a pity that people who do not like a theory cannot actually make some logical argument against it rather than just indulging is meta-argument.

Ah but Jepson you state your theory and then stick rigidly to it, half the boards on this forum are taken up with you in some argument or another, fighting to the bitter end. That's why I don't see much point engaging you - I come on the board to indulge my interest in the Apprentice and to find out some spoilers, I don't take it as an intellectual challenge, there are plenty of other stimuli for me. Your previous post took the biscuit in my eyes (indirectly associating yourself with Darwin and Newton was a classic).

The anxiety comes from a sense of not being in control, the faux understanding placates that.

If anyone came up with a better theory, or one that developed either mine or the 'they're all just stupid' theory, I would love to reconsider.


And yet you do.

You don't actually add anything to the debate, you just start arguing about the arguing. That's one of the most unproductive things a forum member can do. If you aren't interested, why not just save your time and discuss things that do interest you?


Absolutely fine, really. It's just not clear why you then wade into a discussion that doesn't interest you, fail to actually add to the debate, and basically just try and pick a fight.


We are all indirectly associated with Darwin and Newton.

I don't see a desire to emulate them in trying to gain a deeper understanding of what we see (even if it is not of any great importance in the grand scheme of things) is anything to be ashamed of. YMMV.


You seem to have a rather odd idea of what a proposal of a theory is.

It isn't an attempt to pretend that you understand something you don't. It's to try and get others to discuss the theory and see if it holds water. If it doesn't to either refine the theory yourself or accept someone else's refinement.

As you don't seem to be interested, it is, again, unclear why you are attacking, not the theory itself but the very idea that anyone would want to try and get closer to understanding what they see.

If you are happy with the 'they are all stupid and keep making the same mistakes over and over again despite having seen others do the same over many tasks' theory, that's OK. Why not just leave others who have different ideas to get on with it?

The level of time that you demand is unfeasible for me. I've engaged you to try and point something out - the length and content of your response justifies my previous post.

The point that I am making, and I will end on, is that you are not positing theories to stimulate a debate which will influence or further your understanding - you do it as an self appointed-authority and then treat any response that is not in agreement as a sleight to your intelligence.

Nope. You have just demonstrated once again that you want to pick a fight.

You have no interest in the question yet you make three posts that do not even attempt to move forward.


How can I be an authority? I know no more than anyone else? At least try and talk some sense.

The problem with people like you and allafix is that they don't seem to have the wherewithal to actually indulge in intelligent argument so resort to stating that some suggestion is wrong and making attacks on its originator.

You have added precisely nothing to the debate - merely tried to stifle it.

I've noticed these remarkable coincidences too. Melody for example in the boardroom made a comment that going into the pound shop only took a minute or two, but we know they have to get permission from someone with the relevant authority, do the paperwork etc, so in no way would it be a pop in and out in 30 seconds job, unless the producers had pre-arranged everything and it was at the very least on a list of allowed things the candidates can do. A similar thing with the Top Hat dry cleaners, whom had apparently been contacted before hand (according to local press) and declined but they still turned up anyway, so they were hardly just passing as the programme insisted several times...

I do wonder about these massive record breaking orders we have seen a lot of recently, it might just be that the producers ask that one huge order and very few small orders are made.

its looking a bit like Russian roulette at best from that. Here's your list of 6 destinations - pick one - 5 are duds and will give us a comedy shot and one might give you what you want.

You can look at Top Hat cleaners from the other angle too. There doesn't seem to be a tailors or hat shop in London called Top Hat on a quick online search. How likely is it that they just happend to be in the one street in the one borough (Chiswick) that just happened to have one of two Top Hat cleaners in London in it? There's very few possible explanations of how they ended up there - either they coincidentally happened to be there or for some bizarre reason they searched the Yellow Pages for cleaners, or they went anywhere with Top hat in its name?

This kind of comment is unhelpful.

Will this thread ever die?