I enjoyed this show more than I enjoyed last weeks, but I think it might have been because I find fashion a very boring area.

Lots of opinions of mine have changed, actually. So i'm just going to smiley face review all of the contestants:


Andrew - This guy has the right idea. He had a strong performance last week and even stronger this week. Looked like he'll be PM next so good luck to him. My favourite so far.
Navdeep - She got a good edit last week but was a bit lost this week. Seemed to have the right idea though and I liked seeing her be a bit feisty at times.
Steven - Easily one of the strongest. He's been the biggest contributor in his team both times now and this week their win was solely down to him, in my opinion.


Lucy - She was better than they made her out to be this week and I like her on a personality level too. She comes across as a very nice and genuine person, which is nice to see.
Alice - She has what the people who look at the edits call a 'Complex Personality', I think, at least. I don't know what to make of her but for some reason I root for her so, good luck Alice. She's the PM next week (I think?) so will be interesting to see how she copes.


Amy - I really liked her last week but my opinion of her fell a bit this week. Not her finest moments and she didn't really seem to do much, not even proofread a dyslexic persons rushed work...
Ashleigh - I don't know what to think of her so she's in the middle of the road pile. She did well last week but I didn't like her much this week, negative personality edit.


David - Last week he was vile and misogynistic and whilst better this week, only slightly. He was pretty much invisible so
Sean - He was okay last week, nothing groundbreaking and very middle of the road. But this week he was useless and let everybody walk all over him. Two people in the team were worse, in my opinion, but him being fired isn't unjustifiable either.


Maria - She was one of my favourites last week but i've gone right off her! What a nasty person and I think she 10000% should have been fired.
Patrick - Last week he was useless in his area of expertise and should have been fired. This week he was equally useless, being invisible for the majority and then being crap in his pitch and should have been fired. Hopefully he goes soon. I remember last week him saying something like "Is it because i'm feminine?" or something similar to David too which just annoyed me.

Apart from Alice being a and the fact that I think you're being overly-harsh with Maria (She did deliver two very good pitches), I agree with most of this. It is your opinion, though!

The PMs next week are Steven and Andrew. Andrew and Alice are on the same team so they can't both be PM.

I don't think it's entirely fair that Sugar, and the others they were pitching to, went on about spelling mistakes in published books, and suggesting that books do not contain spelling mistakes. This is simply untrue.

I buy books all the time and I spot spelling mistakes frequently. Quite wrong to over-critise them on this, I think. Book publishers employ supposedly experienced people who mis-spell. These are youngsters, most of which are new to the book publishing field.

These were simple words though, and it would have taken a minute to run it through a spell checker. Also, how many pages does a book have, comapared to a 3 recipe cookbook?


I can't believe that the student book won tbh, thought the professional woman one would.

Just me being stupid here, but was the one who came up with the comic book idea Steven or Andrew? On my phone so the bbc page won't load.

Steven came up with the comic book idea, Andrew was the one who went to the focus group on the other team and pushed against going for the female market.

I sort of see where you're coming from, but I still don't really agree.

I wouldn't call words like Ratatouille and Courgette exactly 'simple' to spell (I had to google the former to spell it properly here, and I consider myself a very good speller), although there's no excuse for them to not have spelt Rasher properly (I'm with you with words like that).

Yes, they should have put it all through a spell-checker but there is such little time to think, especially when you have lots of bickering going on, and they are only on their second week - it is a learning process for them.

Also, the close shots of the book, when Sugar had it in his hand in the boardroom, actually appeared to have many pages, I'd guess around 60-80 or so.

Whilst some of the words would have been caught by spell check - courgette, ratatouille etc some of the others would not - off/of, rash/rasher etc because they are actual words just in the wrong context.

So it may not have been a case of it being spelt wrong and nobody noticed but a case of the girls being in a rush and skimming through and because they see a word that's close to the word they want and a recognized word their brains may have filled in the rest and to them it was "right". I know I've done it - written a essay, working on it for ages, checked and double checked it, and then asked a friend to do a last read through before I submit it and 9 times out of 10 they will usually find some little mistakes my brain has glossed over - "Did you mean 'X off Y' or 'X of Y'? - because I just haven't registered it was wrong.


It seems that the teams had to come up with 3/4 "signature" dishes that they could create and cook themselves and the rest of the cookbook content was done for them.

You don't really think they created 80 recipes do you? They only created three recipes as a preliminary trial. They certainly didn't have time to think up 80 recipes. My guess would be that 70 odd pages of the book was blank.
This leaves about three pages for Alice, Amy and Ashleigh to spell check, which, I'm sure you'll agree, isn't a lot. Personally, I'm only a couple of years older than them and I knew how to spell 'Ratatouille' and 'Courgette'. Even if they didn't, they should have spell checked the pages at least.

Pitching to retailers with a book littered with three pages of spelling mistakes is a ridiculous and unforgivable mistake to make.

I said 60-80 pages, not recipes. 70 odd pages were blank? I hardly think so.

I really don't mean to sound patronising but your reply is a perfect example of my point. You have made a grammatical error in your comment to me (the word I've highlighted in bold). Whether you knew the word should have been "were" in this context, or not, it shows that errors, whether spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are easily done. You made 1 error in 116 words. That's a high error rate as well.

At some point in the series Suggs will berate somebody for having too wide a target audience and not aiming at a specific niche.

'Og' instead of 'of - Dyslexia or because g & f are next to each other on the keyboard? Anyway,would 'hashtag' anything in a cookery book title be problematic as it might seem like Twitter are somehow involved, and as they are not it could fall foul of 'passing off' laws? Nobody mentioned this though.

Ultimately, I do think that the loss was down to the Professional Woman concept. Everyone was saying how good a team Maria and Andrew were when it came to pitching, but only managed to secure 800 orders from one of their two retailers. Patrick's useless pitching wasn't the only thing to blame.

Maria kept going on about aiming for a niche market. Isn't 'professionals' niche enough? And that's quite apart from the the problems they might have had by suggesting that women are the only ones that cook... Her performance didn't impress me this week at all, mostly thanks to her steamrollering over the market research results (and scoffing at the idea of doing market research at all!) and bullying Sean into going with her idea.

Still think Sean was the right one to go, but I haven't warmed to Maria at all this week. She's clearly getting the 'ballsy woman' edit and will no doubt follow her arc, calm down in the next few weeks and make it to the final five at least.

I see a lot of people are saying "why didn't they use a spell-checker?", but they are not infallible, and actually can be more trouble than they're worth to someone with dyslexia (I am a Learning Support tutor who works with 16-19 year old students, including those with severe dyslexia, and my daughter is also dyslexic!).

This little poem is a salutary tale which I often use in my lessons!

Ode to My Spell Checker (author unknown)
Eye have a spelling checker, it came with my pea sea
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong oar write, it shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid it nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it I'm shore your pleased to no
Its letter perfect awl the way, my checker told me sew.

Ok, maybe I'm being a little facetious, but spell-checkers are not the Holy Grail of Literacy!

I'd like to hope that the 'og' (and possibly some of the other mis-spelt words) points more to a typo issue, rather than an out-and-out mis-spelling, but it should still have been picked up by anyone with a basic ability to proof-read their own work... but sadly proof-reading is a dying skill in schools these days You wouldn't believe some of the things I see at work!

Haha of course they were! When we had close ups of LS looking at the books, only the first few pages were opened and flipped through.

I find that hard to believe, because if the book was mostly blank, don't you think Sugar would have said in the boardroom that binding the book with mostly blank pages is decieving the potential buyer (who may decide to buy it in a hurry, as a Christmas present perhaps, without really looking inside) into thinking it has more content than it really has.

There is no potential buyer, these books will never be published, and they probably just had a few pages and recipes so were full of blank pages (or the same thing printed again and again) so it didn't look like a pamphlet.

I find it hard to believe some of the stuff written on here. Some are forgetting they are still children and cannot have the maturity and experience of the older candidates on the normal Apprentice.

Older candidates on The Apprentice have been mature and experienced? I missed that series!

I just don't believe you're being serious with me. The books have been published as if they are to go on sale to potential buyers. Their content, the cover, everything about it has to be viewed in the same way as if they are actually going to go on sale to the public. Your second 'point' I have already answered in a previous reply (#391).

The pages were blank, and the books were never going to public, so the orders are only figurative. There isn't feasibly enough time in a day or two to create 60-80 recipes, and the companies taking part know it's for a TV show, not an actual order. Their involvement is to test the candidates in as a close to real life situation as they can get.

I don't need this.

How don't you need this You were mistaken and two people corrected you?

Why do you believe this?

Yes, older means mature and and you have more life experiences.