True.

I just can't imagine that it wasn't noticed.

Of course, what is absolutely clear is that Susan didn't get the public recognition she deserved (in as much as neither Karren or Sugar was seen to acknowledge here input on the programme), and that is something that is quite important as a hell of a lot of people are quite prepared to be led by the nose and just go along with what A/K/N say.


I think it's fairly clear that Karren is not entirely unbiased when it comes to female candidates. When she sees one she thinks is good she pulls out all the stops so I'd agree that she may well have 'over egged' Helen's contribution to the tasks.

Lots of things are possible, that doesn't mean they happen. its possible Lord Sugar would get on his bike and dash off to the wholesalers himself - its just not very probable. Because it would be impossible to draw a line between what what was permitted and what wasn't - and you couldn't sustain a competition where one team had help and one didn't - its pretty certain that the rules prohibit drivers or production staff from helping at all. Drivers just drive from A to B, in the same way as producers don't google suppliers for them , cameramen don't sell goods and runners didn't help carry the scrap metal. Its not only that we have never seen that rule broken, its that if it wasn't there they would have avoided many of the problems and tradeoffs they have fallen down over over the years.

Susan did get credit on the last 5's story show -explicitly for her Paris sales. Lord Sugar seems a bit more aware of what the editing is showing this year too? I wonder if she doesn't get enough credit for the last task because she went outside the intended rules and it would have been difficult to praise her for doing something else.She actually showed the skills the task needed - but did it on prior knowledge.

Her problem may be that while Helen has got the last minute negatives for the last task and Natasha got a lot of blame for a winning strategy, Jim seems to have got himself back in the running and Tom also picked up some praise for staying with the literal, Sugar, interpretation of the task.

Karen doesn't seem to think much of Jim or Tom anyway, so she will end up backing Helen or Susan regardless of sex?

It kind of buged me that in neither ep (either the normal one or the final five) did we see what they thought of the bracelets imo it wasn't outside the rules as he only said reinvest in what you know will sell and ok the bracelets weren't in the original selling stuff but if she knew they'd sell from previous knowledge so what. As she technically did reinvest as she used the money from the previous sales to get them.

Tom and Melody would be likely to want to discuss things in relation to the task that they would not want the other team to know about.

Probably. They seem to be the best candidates - although we can only get to a certain point without knowing the business plans.

It's not as if Karren's slight bias is actually unfair - she just make sure to point out the strengths of good female candidates - she's done for males as well. And, anyway, Sugar will be well aware of it.

Yes, but we don't know what he was selling. There's no reason to think it was umbrellas.


No, Melody went to a different wholesaler. She says in the boardroom that she didn't want to prioritise a wholesaler who had nodding dogs over one who had electronic items.

This was a mistake. It meant the knowledge she'd gained over the first day was wasted, and she was starting from scratch the second day with a new range of goods. It turned out that the rechargers sold well, but she'd spent a lot of her budget on other things which didn't sell as well. It's part of why she lost.

Where-as when Natasha did deign to reinvest, she at least picked the right products. That's probably part of why her sales were better than Melody's.


Helen didn't know when the supplier closed or when the buyer closed. She didn't know the deadlines she was working to. That's poor planning. If she had known, she might well have realised she wasn't going to make it.

(I suspect some of the reasons for the long times involved were production-related. Things on The Apprentice often take longer than they would in real life. For example, they need to get permission to film, and they sometimes need multiple takes (eg to show them entering a shop from outside, then show again from inside). I also think the distances were greater than people realise. It wasn't just there and back. It was from pitch to wholesaler, from wholesaler to retailer, from retailer to pitch. If the pitch and the retailer were distant, there would have been extra travel time. If so, then the traffic conditions may not have been as pathological as you suppose.)


It's my belief that Lord Sugar continues to analyse past tasks after the boardrooms are over. Especially the winning team's. Before the boardroom he has to focus on the losing team, first on all the candidates in it, then on the 3 brought back, in order to decide who to fire. It's only after the boardroom that he has time to study the winning teams. It seems to me he sometimes changes his opinions of candidates between episodes.

I don't know when the Final 5 is filmed, but presumably it's after the main series is filmed, so again he's had more chance to reflect. It is possible that the production team have by then decided which shots and what stories will be included in the main show.

I could be wrong. I stopped watching Final 5 partly because it seemed like it was filmed early, and that Lord Sugar wasn't bringing any fresh insights. That's true of his pieces on You're Fired. What he says in the "unseen footage" is generally less insightful than what he says in the main show.

This has been said quite a few times and I cant understand why people believe it.
IF he wanted her gone, she'd be gone, the task is easy to manipulate. I cannot see that he made that fine to make sure natasha would loose, if thats what he wanted he would have found out from Nick how much the fine needed to be.
I cant see any case for suggesting otherwise.

Oh I agree, she is driving me nuts with her bias in Helens favour, its so blatant.
And , yes, it's really unfair.

I get the feeling she is a bit jealous of Susan. Although Karen 'made it' she does come from rich parents.

But given that he sold £50 there's also no reason to suppose he was selling things that didn't sell well.



She didn't know that one supplier closed at lunchtime but then I'll bet none of the others checked that either.

It's all very well for you to sit on your backside in a nice comfortable chair with no pressure and having had a good night's sleep and after the event, blithely say that they should check every little detail. A counsel of perfection is very easy behind your keyboard but I'm sure it would be quite a different story if you were actually doing the task.

There's no reason to suppose Helen didn't know what time the retailer shut. If it took four hours to get to Enfield and back, that's how long it took. Knowing when they closed wouldn't have made a scrap of difference.

I suspect Sugar knew full well that traffic/production difficulties were to blame for that debacle because he didn't say a word about it. Whereas if he'd been able to blame Helen he'd have 'done his nut'.


That actually makes it even more unfair. The fact that filming takes priority over the task and production difficulties could have been what caused her to miss getting to the retailer and thus missing the £90 and thus losing the task makes the abysmal task design even worse.


Sugar didn't really contribute this time.

Susan should have NOT got credit because she didnt follow or LISTEN to the task.

The task was to have a variety of goods on a pallet .... and in Lord Alans words ....... SMELL what was selling then buy some more.

Not sell what youve got, then after youve had a days worth of market research, ignore all of that to buy an unproven product to begin the whole process over again.

She didn't listen. She failed.

You're just spinning it one way.

You can spin it another:

Sugar said to smell what sells. He didn't say that you had to limit yourself to the exact stock on the pallet.

Susan got a 'smell' that jewellery would sell - there may even have been something in that line on the pallet - we were never shown the selection of goods.

She went with her instincts and it paid off. She did exactly the sort of thing that Sugar wants to see from candidates and her performance will have strengthened her in his eyes.

Neither team listened to what they were suppsoed to do. Sugar even asked Susan whether she thought his goods were a load of "tut/toot" (how do you spell it??) and went off to sell what she thought would sell.

The first aim was Market Intelligence - ie: what sells and what doesn't, which both teams failed on.

It wasn't "Think up a product, which will sell" - they could only get round that by using some reinvestment money to try something similar to what was selling.

Tat.

Not quite, it's a sound for which there is no accepted representation in written English in that context.

It's the vowel sound in 'sooty'. However, if you write 'toot' you get a completely different word.

That - even if I haven't described it very well - is the word he used.

But at no time did Sugar say to the teams that they should only have sold the original goods.

It puzzled a lot here (me included) when the teams sold other items, but this wasnt brought up as far as I am aware in the boardroom, unless anyone knows different, and could say what part of the show that was said.

And as for Susan saying the stuff was a load of "toot", well frankly it was.

It seemed to me that this so called 'rule' was something pulled from thin air on this forum.

Whilst it's true that Sugar didn't explicitly say they could sell items that were not on the original pallet he certainly didn't say they couldn't.

Had they been restricted in the way some people think then at least one of the following would have obtained:

1) He would have told them.
2) We would have been shown the range of goods available
3) The producers would not have allowed them to buy other things
4) Sugar would have said something in the boardroom.

It's inconceivable that that rule existed and none of these things happened.

He's clearly unhappy with his sales in the second call. We don't know the times, but £50 isn't much (we see Tom getting £40 for a single sale).


She was tired and made mistakes. I'm not condemning her for it, I'm just saying that's what happened. You seem to be denying she made mistakes.


She phones him to tell him she's on her way, and is surprised when he has already closed. She wasn't expecting him to be closed so early.


She could have left earlier. I don't understand why she didn't deal with the previous day's orders first thing, instead of waiting until the afternoon. It seems like an unnecessary risk to me.


Karren raises it though. The way it's portrayed, the fact that the sale fell through is less important than the fact that Helen attempted it.


Filming issues are something that all candidates have to deal with. By the 10th task they should be aware and factoring them into their considerations.

Nope. He's clearly unhappy that he has no stock given that they seemed to sell just over £200 each. £50 is quite in line with what you would expect for an afternoon's sales.


But you know perfectly well that that is atypical because it's way out of line with the total sales for two days.


I'm not denying she made any mistakes. Just that some of the things you are attributing to her are unreasonable.


That was the wholesaler, not the retailer.


You would have to ask Melody that. It was clear from the conversation that Helen was acting on Melody's instructions.

Possibly it was because they had restocked from a different wholesaler the previous night and Melody wanted Helen to wait until midday so that she could restock with other items at the same time if needed. That would be a very sensible way to proceed. (Had it not been for the fact that the producers set them up with a wholesaler who closed at midday.)


You still don't seem to understand that it was a perfectly sensible thing to attempt. Had what should have been a trivial journey not take FOUR HOURS, she would have made the sale and that team would have won the task.


You continue with you pig headed instance that the candidates have to allow for mind numbingly long times for what should be straight forward journeys. And it won't wash, I'm afraid.

You want to have your cake and eat it!

You've been saying that the candidates should have restocked more often and yet you are at one and the same time saying that they have to allow that a ten mile journey will take four hours. You position is self contradictory.

He said 'To smell what sells.'

Obviously based on what you had been selling that day.

Its sheer commonsense that if you went and bought electrical alarm clocks that you HADNT been selling at all the previous day then you would have no idea how they would sell.

My argument is that it's typical of the business they could do with fast-moving products. Their overall sales were lower because they spent so much effort on slow-moving products.

If you don't understand this, you've not been paying attention to my argument at all. They could have made much more money if they had restocked the fast-moving lines. That's why Lord Sugar was disappointed even the winning team's takings. It's not just that they didn't follow rules, it's that they made so little money. They were given pallets worth £1100, and they brought in only slightly more than that. (£1154 in Melody's case).


It's 31:15 on iPlayer. She's talking to the retailer. Both wholesaler and retailer took her by surprise.


Agreed; that's plausible. (Although I still think 2:30 was a bit late, given the journey times.)

(The wholesaler who closed early was not the one the producers set them up with. On the phone, Helen mentions having to go back to the one they started with. Melody hadn't wanted to use it because it was too far. The one Melody favoured was also the one that didn't have nodding dogs.)


Karren knows it will take four hours. She says as much in a piece to camera, when she is pointing out what a dumb decision it was just after it was taken - before the outcome was known. The 4-hour duration of the journey was not a surprise.

I think the team probably knew too. Tom and Melody are both concerned about it being too far. Tom says it's a disaster. Melody acknowledges that it's a risk.


No it isn't. Partly because we aren't talking about the same journey. Note that Jim does a restock, starting quite late in the day (long after Helen), and he does get back, albeit just too late. There was enough time for restocking trips. Partly because the gains from restocking would have been more than the £90 hoped-for from the retail deal. Partly because I believe they had more choices. I have, in any case, said that allowing 50% of one person's time on restocking would be reasonable, and that's making a substantial allowance for travel times.

The task what to "smell what sells"

They were given what apperared to be a a load of absolute tat to shift.

Susie was sent to restock - and used her previous experience (she's been helping her mum run a stall in Greenwich market since they arrived in the UK) of street markets and sniffed out the bracelets which knew would sell a lot more easily and for a bigger profit than the cr*p they were given - and she was proved right. They all seemed to sell - mostly at £5-6 when she bought them for £1.50 - so her sniffing out of good selling items was spot on.

It was pretty obvious that both teams didn't stick to restocking with more of the same - and as neither was pulled up for it in the boardroom - it seems to be safe to assume that they were allowed to do it. Had the items they chose themselves failed to sell - it could well have been a different story though!

Again, where did he say that they went "off task" during the boardroom session?.

What LAS pulled them up for is lack of restocking, NOT selling items other than the original ones.

Susan didnt need to have sold the bracelets in this task to know that they did sell, as she had done so before.

Susan wasn't supposed to sell the bracelets, she went against the wishes of Natasha obviously.