David had better enjoy his win while he can - it's plain that neither Sugar and his sidekicks nor his team give him any credit for it. Very reminescent of Noorul being a vacuum as PM and still winning because of Paula and Yasmina's sandalwood error. I think Sugar made David PM as a last-ditch to see if there was anything to him, and there wasn't. Next time he's in the boardroom he's toast.

I felt sorry for the losing team, as I think they'd all done well. Admittedly they overpriced it, but their market research did seem to lead in that direction. I personally felt Alice was the right one to go, because I felt she and Patrick were rather swanning around stuffing their faces on the first day rather than doing real research. But I don't think any of them really deserved to.

David wasn't as bad as made out. The mad hatter's tea party idea was his. Also, the idea to put blankets on the ground so they could serve more customers at a time was a bit of genius. Even the bowls as teacups came from him and he did ask and charm the customers into seeing at as a bit of fun. Organisationally he's rubbish and will go as soon as he loses again, but he's had some good ideas this week and his camp awkwardness is endearing.
Maria is also probably much nicer than she is being portayed as they all wanted her to return and stampeded through Navdeep to hug her when she came in. Ashleigh seems the most sensible and business minded, but the pre-emptive strike on the project manager in the boardroom today has put me off her.

Agree that Alice's team made fewer errors, and if they had dropped the price mid-afternoon I think they could still have rescued the result.

I'm not sure their research did lead them to a higher price though. Maria erroneously drew the conclusion that because one person said £25 an one said £30 that £25 was OK - even though we were told that several people said £5-£10. Also bear in mind that the cost of entry to Blenheim is £20. That's not cheap to start with, and when someone then asks you to pay £16 for a pretty basic afternoon tea it's little wonder that people baulked at the idea. I think they might have got away with Alice's original idea of £12. £10 would certainly have been competitive.

David is a dead man walking. Every week has added fuel to my initial thought that there is very little behind his quippy soundbites. Tonight confirmed that. He's toast.

I have to disagree. The Mad Hatter idea was pretty unoriginal, and as Sugar said this task was really a test of organisational skill (not creativity). David had no structure, no process and at a time when the team was struggling to serve the customers they had he then sprung an idea which exceeded their capacity. The team won in spite of him. Not everything he did was awful, but equally he was a far worse PM than Alice was.

Is anyone else depressed at the message a task like this sends out to budding young entrepreneurs? As in so many other tasks (Young or Adult series), the message is that cutting costs is all that matters and that sacrificing quality, service or making customers happy is fine. An approach like that works on the show, where the business is a one-off and reputation and repeat business don't matter. In the real world if you run a business like that you won't last a month.

Anyhow, aside from the serious commentary, I've tried to see the funnier side of things in this week's recap:
http://slouchingtowardsthatcham.com/...-of-earl-grey/

I think with their markup being so much less than the other teams, they needed to sell a lot more to win. Organisationally he was terrible, but if they hadn't had the extra area and were restricted to 30 people at a time I'm not sure they could have won. Also the mad hatter idea was genius as it let them sell cheap kid food like chocolate spread, cheese and jam on rounds of bread like it was something special. It was also more family friendly, though this could just be because it was cheaper, I didn't notice any children at the other teams stall

They were both at Blenheim Palace? At the same spot for two days? And both have equal numbers of people likely to want some tea and cake? I assume whoever was near the exit had quite an advantage over those near the entrance or somewhere else, though i am not familiar with the place. Of course we were not given much info.

You're right, actually. I fell into exactly the same error that Maria did.

Of course, with a cheaper price they'd have needed a lot more customers than the other team to win. They'd probably pretty much lost with the spending they did, and reading your blog suggests Andrew was culpable there.

Really, they all made mistakes - Alice failed to communicate enough, Andrew overspent, and he, Maria and Navdeep (but especially Maria) pushed for too high a price. But they did so much right it's a shame the mistakes were so lethal.

Why did those people stay queueing for over half an hour? Were they paid, is the visitors cafe at Blenheim that bad or did they just want to get on TV?

I agree - ultimately the killer mistake was overspending on the cake ingredients, which was part of the reason for their high price in the first place. In the street food task in the last adult series, I seem to recall someone making the comment that a 300% to 400% markup is not unusual for a catering business of this nature.

As for whose fault it was, you can argue it both ways. Was it Andrew's fault for overspending or Alice's fault for not setting a strict budget? I can go either way on that one.

I'm unconvinced by Ashleigh's one-track focus on cheap, cheap, cheap, but on this task it was exactly the right way to go and that one decision that she pushed through was what ultimately saved David's bacon, backed up by the team rallying around their PM in a way rarely seen on Apprentice tasks (even if it was out of self-preservation rather than because of what David did).

As I've said elsewhere, in the real world David's business model would have failed horribly. But an Apprentice task, sadly, doesn't necessarily reflect how the real world works!

Never underestimate the power the presence of a TV crew can exert over people ...

They were only there for one day (the second day of the task).

Thanks. Location must have been crucial though, eh?

One on the left, one on the right. I don't know Blenheim, but I've been to a lot of historical homes, and it's very typical to go in through the main grand entrance, then exit at the rear where they have their own teashop on the lawn. I presume there were signs at the exit saying 'go left for mad hatters, right for 1940's', or something similar.

Alice deserved to go simply down to the fact she brought back the wrong two people. Anybody with half a brain would of brought Patrick into the board room.

How that guy is still there I'll never know. It's the same every single week, he does nothing. He's seriously got to be up there as one of the worst in Apprentice history. It almost seems that because a few of them get on with him (example last night with Alice), they don't bring him back into the board room.

Agreed. But Maria is ten times worse, so should have gone. I suppose we need to see her totally balls up being a PM first. I can't complain, I'm enjoying see what a little monster she is.

Cant stand her either...makes you wish someone would give her a slap! nice name by the way Silver Surfer

All the girls, as they were all screeching when he came back to the house after the boardroom in week 1.

Possibly they don't bring him in because they know he will never win. Another reason why they are happy to see him return. It's their rivals they want out. And you know girls, they often want to see other women fail more than to see men lose (sorry for the generalization). They've pegged him as a joker, they can see him going any time without their help.

Glad someone had the good taste to recognise it.

I don`t think they look at it that way otherwise they wouldn`t bring David back into the Boardroom at every opportunity.

Maybe they want him out to punish him for his arrogance and sexism.

Not always quite as simple as that. The Queen Mother was officially the Queen Consort , as a spouse to the monarch, they are usually known as the consort, just as Prince Philip is consort to the present Queen, but obviously isn't King , just as Camilla is expected to be Consort when Charles takes over.
Though to confuse the issue, one of the late QM's titles was officially "her Majesty the Queen".

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To be fair, they rammed it home that Platinum's cakes at least were of a far higher quality and more appealing than Odyssey's were, and there were lots of shots of people who had visited their tent leaving happy or talking about how much they'd enjoyed themselves. Just because they spent less doesn't mean their product was worser or of any lower quality, and it's a common trap I think that people fall into to think that it was. The most commonly cited example of this trope is Yasmina vs Rocky, with Yasmina going really dirt cheap and Rocky going mid-range. And yet when clients were asked to pay what they thought the products were actually WORTH after they'd been sampled, in the closest I think this show has ever got to a true buyers market, Yasmina destroyed him.

The one area where I think Odyssey did unambigulously offer a better service than Platinum was the service, but then they had one more team member, and had about a third of the custom, so it's not surprising (as much as that doesn't excuse David's crapness).

(*worse)