I preferred the show when a job was up for grabs.
In my opinion, (regarding who is fired) I think it comes down to who has the best business plan. Therefore..completely inept people are still in the running.
The show has also kinda lost the shows 'villain/hero' element to it too.
I presume the interview process wouldn't be as tense either. It wouldn't actually hold much precedence over the choosing of the eventual winner.
I truly miss the old format.

I invite everyone claiming the firings are based on business plans to go back to last year's final, see how terrible they all were and then come back and make the same claim.

Totally agree. If Stephen has the best business model he could win on that alone, regardless of anything he did in the competition.

Thats not clear. It could be he kept the hopeless Stephen because he's just a better TV character.

My bigger problem is that only Nick hasn't mucked up so far and he got close with mirroring Tom's strategic mistakes this time. Tom has now got the point wrong three tasks in a row (I forgot one earlier) - he sjhould be disqualified for the win. Adam and Ricky are just out of their depth. Stephen is worse than useless on a serial basis. Jade wasn't good as a PM. Gabi has creativity but also failed most basics as a PM . There's a distinct shortage of credible winners left there - and half of those left are weaker than many who have gone.

Last year wasn't even won by the business plan . it was won before the series started - when Lord Sugar saw some potential in Tom's nail file rereading his CV. Thats the only way one of the worst contenders ever could win with a silly business plan for the final stage too.

I think this series is the worst series ever. I just watch one more episode next week (hopefully Stephen will get fired). After next week, I don't care who's the winner. 7 candidates left & I still don't have any favorite candidate.

Notwithstanding thenetworkbabe's demoliton of this argument, it starts from a completely illogical premise - that because last year's series firings allegedly weren't based on the business plans, this year's can't be either.

I would add another reason for the poor quality of this year's show - the obsession with providing a bait-and-switch twist every week and compounding the problem by doing it in a transparently contrived fashion.

We were clearly being set up to believe that Ricky's team had impressed the clients the most. The point that they were the only ones who had understood the objective was hammered home repeatedly. Similarly, the narrative pushed the point that the other side had completely missed the point of the task and that moreover, every element of their final campaign was boring - yet hey presto, in the final analysis that was all discounted because a solitary element of the campaign went wrong for Ricky's team.

t seems the production team are determined to follow the Big Brother suicide template and like Endemol, fail to understand that if twists become routine, it defeats the object of having a twist in the first place - any entertainment value in the element of surprise is fatally undermined.

I pray that the lessons are learned next year.

Either that or the other finalists came across as being proficient in administration but lacking knowledge on how to set up and run a business (Helen), being naive and unable to admit when they were wrong (Susan) or just completely full of sh*t (Jim), and Tom ended up winning by default since he was the only one with a proven track record in running his own business.

It's not that illogical when you consider the fact that people were complaining about the exact same thing last year.

ITA. They should have stuck with the old one.

True there's no opposition by the end - though in the event all Sugar's reasons for not going for Susan seem to have vanisjhed by the time he also went with her proposal. She had a better record and offered a plan that could have worked. My issue would be why Tom gets to the end though. I think if Tom had been judged on his performance as a PM or after his success producing dire biscuits, he would have gone. i also suspect some other people (like Zoe) may have had decent business plans and, like Susan, a record of running their own business. He didn't have to keep Jim - there was ample reason to get rid of him too.

There's another criteria in there somewhere too. The plan on offer has to be more than viable and coming from someone competent. The business has to be something that interests him, something he thinks fills a niche, something that he thinks he knows enough about, and on a scale thats doable within the prize money and time he wants to spend on it.

It would I think be very interesting to know what Ricky, Gabi Nick and Jade are offering him.

They had to change the prize because the "job" had become discredited. It wasn't really as advertised, and by all accounts not a happy experience for some winners. He's not giving much more away with the £250K investment. The winner gets a half share in that, £125K worth, or just over a years "six figure" salary. But it is something which the winner has more control over and can make worth their while. Therefore more attractive than before to the winner, but not much more at stake for Lord Sugar.

For those insisting that it's the prize that's made things change please ask yourself this: Even if Stephen had a brilliant business plan would you go into business with him? Business partner or employee makes little difference. LS has to be able to work with either. Based on Stephen's performance so far he'd be getting someone who didn't listen and doesn't have many good ideas.

Lord Sugar has always been able to ignore task performance and fire someone he doesn't like, or alternatively keep someone in he does like. The prize hasn't changed that. The theory he's keeping people in because of their business plan can't be proved, but it becomes a handy way for people to explain unusual firings, and it's impossible to argue with because we will only get to hear about the finalists plans. However to confound the theory, last years winner's business plan wasn't wanted. Tom won because of his CV (his inventions).

Tom didn't win last year because of his business plan, but he did win because he had an investable existing business - the nail file, which has since relaunched. He certainly didn't win because of task performance, did he? It was a pretty damning indictment of how poor everyone else's plans were.

I disagree that the new format is ruining the show, although it doesn't help that it creates a bigger disconnect with task performance.

I think it's more that the series is now 8 years old (effectively 10 if you count the juniors), and it's inevitable that the show has lost its freshness. We have seen all the tasks before, and we have seen all the characters before too. The series is just getting a bit tired.

You're absolutely right it can't be proved, but equally put yourself in Sugar's shoes. You're going to invest £250k in someone's business plan - you want it to be the best possible investment with a business partner you can trust (i.e. not Stephen).

He won't decide the overall winner based on task performance, although the tasks do give him a lot of insight into what the candidates would be like to work with. Tom P last year had a poor business plan but a good existing business in a market that Sugar knows well. He was obviously a strong candidate from day 1 as a result, even though it didn't show in the tasks. By comparison, Helen proved herself to be an excellent old-style Apprentice project manager, but her business idea was uninspiring. as an investment, she was much poorer than Susan, who was nowhere near as strong in the tasks.

The business plan isn't the be-all and end-all, but if I were Sugar I would be using it to draw up a shortlist of 'possibles' at the start of the process to ensure a good candidate wasn't randomly fired early on.

Even though the prize is now investment there still has to be a way of deciding who gets to actually show LAS their plan. Doing these tasks is as good a way as any and also highly entertaining IMO.
What else could they do? Show LAS the plans in the first week, so we have transparency and can stop suspecting that this happens anyway. Stop the tasks because they are pointless?

How exciting, 14 people show LAS their business plans and he selects the one he likes best after interviewing them. Sound familiar?

I don't buy this argument. After all, last year's series was better and its only two years since we had a good series. Personally I think there's mileage in the format, as long as the production team resist the urge to meddle too much. Sadly that seems to be the curse of reality shows in this country - the urge to change the wrong things. IMO its what killed Big Brother.

I watched the latter series of the Real World when I had MTV a couple of years back. It seemed to me that after twelve years or so it was still watchable, precisely because the producers had resisted the urge to meddle and change fundamental parts of the format - it was virtually identical to the show that started in the mid-nineties.

Keeping things fresh does not require fundamental changes in critical parts of the show - say in the prize for example. If they concentrated on getting the casting right, coming up with more imaginative tasks and cut out the 2-dimensional editing obsessed with obvious bait-and-switch "twists" the Apprentice still has life in it.

It seems to me that the best series I saw had a narrative arc that seemed to develop stories and characters naturally (even though in reality it was probably down to clever editing). As I recall, when it was made clear in the course of an episode that a team or a character did well, or cocked up, the outcome more or less reflected that. Where there was a twist, or a moment of drama, such as the girl who quit in the first series, it seemed more genuine. Now things seem forced and exasperating to watch sometimes. You almost know that the team being set up to appear winners will lose at the last moment without fail. What's the point of that?

I think people are just too into conspiracy theories now, you can't go into any of the TV sub-forums without people moaning that things are fake or staged or the voting is fixed etc. etc.

Sugar makes far far more from the series than he will from the investment or from any of the people who won a "job" with him in previous series. Making good TV is what matters, not choosing the right business partner for him. In every series there have been totally nonsensical firings and people have always complained that he doesn't fire the person who deserves to go, the only thing that changed is they now attribute a different reasoning to it ("the winner has been chosen because Sugar is going to invest with them").

Yes it is - you don't appear to understand the nature of logic.

The fact that people complained about the same things last year does not definitively prove that the validity or otherwise of the complaints and/or the credibility of the reasons for them have any connection over the two years - in other words your conclusion is not supported by your premise. You might feel intuitively that there is a connection, but it is not a statement founded on logic.

I agree some of the business plans were dreadful last year, especially Helen's. It will be very interesting to see what's on offer this year.
I think that if LAS is interested in a business plan he will invest in it anyway whether the candidate is fired or not (Susan), the rest is a mixture of making good TV and being likeable.

I don't disagree with you that an ageing show necessarily has to run out of steam - merely that this is what generally happens over time, and I do believe this is what has happened here.

I think the mistake that was made with Big Brother was that (a) they couldn't find a happy medium with the casting - either too many extreme personalities or too many uninteresting ones and (b) it became too gimmicky, with silly tasks, drop-in guests and too many obvious attempts to stir up conflict. Also, many people - certainly myself and many of my friends - simply outgrew it and left in search of something more interesting, like The Apprentice.

I do agree that the show needs to really work out what it needs to change. I think changing the prize was necessary - Sugar doesn't really have the businesses to properly employ an Apprentice any more (they can't all work for Amscreen!), and switching it to an investment makes it feel too much like Dragons' Den for me.

The fact that Sugar hasn't fired a single losing PM this series also suggests to me that the way he is judging performance has changed too.

Totally agree that the narrative feels more forced, with more obvious bait-and-switches which are in themselves utterly predictable.

The 'job with Lord Sugar' became a joke though with no such 'jobs' really existing and the winners either leaving within a year or being fired.

The whole programme is stale and unengaging and is as contrived as any other 'reality' (sic) format on tv.:sleep:

Look, I don't mean to be rude, but there are countless of other similar threads where you can complain...

I think it is a combination of thre things:
1) We have seen most of the tasks before
2) Candidates are failing to excite this year
3) They are editing it for thrills

The first problem isn't really a show stopper, some formats last for decades with minimal changes. With a fresh batch of candidates each year, doing very similar tasks shouldn't ruin the show, but there is less excitement or surprise. More a case of "oh, its the buying objects task" or "its the make an advert task" sometimes familiarity can actually be a good thing if you look forward to certain tasks.

The second one is disappointing. The only one I like is Gabby, and I don't think she should/will win. Liking someone doesn't mean I think they will be a great business person. Most are just bland (except Stephen, who I dislike). Adam is a "character". I'm glad they haven't gone down the BB route and used a bunch of freaks as candidates, but they are a bit dull this year.

The third is the big problem for me. Going down market and trying to shock us with which team wins, and who is fired EVERY WEEK is pointless and makes the whole show annoying. We want the best to go through, and the failures to be cut. That is the point of the show. The odd surprise is fine, we can't all agree on every decision, but the stats show that almost every week the DS viewers think LS fired the wrong person. I think this is mainly due to the editing leading us to think one team did much better than they really did, so we are "shocked" when they loose, and editing of the tasks to set up one person as the obvious failure so we are "shocked" when someone else is fired.

I don't think the prize has anything to do with the show being less enjoyable, it is just trying to hard to be entertainment and missing the whole point of a business show.

I don't mean to be rude, but no is forcing you to read or contribute to this thread. The show had just ended, and I was merely putting my view(s) across. I'm not sure I can be ar8ed trawling through copious amounts of 'said threads'...