I was gutted that Tim left last night, he seemed like such a nice guy. He studied at my uni (University of Birmingham) and owns the burrito van on our campus

Tim going was so sad. You could tell he was a really nice guy and I think his enthusiasm and eagerness to learn would've appealed more to Lord Sugar. Francesca should have gone!

I agree Francesca shou have gone, athough you have to ask why none of the others were able to help out - it's not as if she was sat in a corner on her on struggling.

Also, remember that Yasmina Siadatan also struggled with her maths in a similar way - remember the sandalwood incident? - and not only did she survive but she went on to win. (Not that I'm suggesting Francesca will win, though!)

Tim didn't really stand a chance, the girls took over his role pretty much, and this lil mini review pretty much sums up the second episode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWhy9If0dxE

And i dont even know who I want to win this year, but not Francesca

I really like Tim, shame he went but them gals are divas

The guy with the horrible bearded neck makes me want to hurl because of the bearded neck. I have to look away as my skin crawls seeing it. Ugh. {{{shudder}}}

Tim was adorable.

I want to wrap Jason up in cotton wool and keep him safe. There is something so vulnerable about him and you can tell he is different as they all want to bully him.

They don't seem to have a lot of common sense do they?

Can't stand Leah. She sounds like something off Rainbow the old kids programme.

I like Uzmah - and the gorgeous doc. Bet lots of guys want appointments with her!

Errrrrrr! Leah IS the gorgeous doc!

OMG just WHERE did they get this bunch of tossers from? The only one who seems to be even civil is the guy with the phd.

I don't think I want any of them to win, bloody hell.

I think the BBC should publicise the names of the businesses they are running so I can avoid them.

I have a feeling the bitchy black haired lady and luisa will go far. They wont win but they will be kept in for entertainment purposes which is a shame because tim should have stayed.

Id have liked to have seen someone nice get far for a change rather than ones why manage to stay under the radar and creep through.

That's big mouth/ego Neil and I agree its an appalling look .

Tim was a nice guy, but he wasn't a good PM. He was primarily to blame for the team losing, and it was right that he went.

I watched the Beer episode and it is amazing to see group dynamics when there's only one guy - as PM - in a team full of girls. Dunno about the women here, but for most men it was obvious Tim was truly incompetent as leader, not only did he not make any decisions - which would be fine if others had better ideas - but he just let everyone do their thing, regardless of their ability - he just went with the flow.

But despite all this, it was incredible - something for sociologists and psychologists to pore over - to see all the girls DEFEND him. Alan Sugar made it so obvious - "Girls, what did you think of Tim as a project leader?" Oh, he's good!!! Oh it was Rebecca for choosing the location (despite her actually just pointing to it, and Tim giving the nod), and despite the blonde (can't remember her name) doing the numbers wrong (which was a major screw up) - problem was, Tim was right there with her, as she got the numbers wrong, and he did nothing to help or get the others to try it.

It shows that all logic goes out the window when the women see an alpha female - Rebecca - in the group. They see her as a threat, so never mind the incompetent nice man. I'm sure a girl in a group full of guys would have the same outcome.

But despite this, I think Tim had a chance of staying - when he picked the two girls, he could've backed up the numbers girl and went out against Rebecca. He didn't - instead saying "I'm not the one at fault" - and the girl did her numbers wrong - at this point, the blonde must have been thinking "Screw you pal, I've backed you up all along" - and that was his downfall.

You could actually see it at the end when the two girls walked, hands together, out the boardroom.

Fantastic piece of TV for sociologists and the like.

Another thing for sex sociologists to pore over is that, even when Tim was criticising Rebecca and the other girl in the boardroom - two very outspoken women - they were very controlled and relatively quiet in their response. I can't help but think that if a woman had criticised them, they would go all out on the shouting (as was shown earlier on with the asian girl).

Oh I totally agree with this. Pretty much everyone on the men's team are a bunch of pricks... I think the shortie is the only half decent one.... the rest, you have the arrogant arsehole team leader, the posh toff who really does act like he's a prince and then complains when the welsh guy - also a **** - swears at him, then the asian who is as slimy as you can get, then the guy who named the beer with his sleazy lines..... uggghhh, hate them all.

Love the girl fights on the other side though, that and their beauty is the reason why they were chosen.... and their penchant for wearing tight short skirts as well, BBC knows how to get the audience figures...

He is a nice guy, but he was fundamentally incompetent. As manager not only didn't he make decisions - sure, tough in a group full of outspoken girls - but he didn't realise when things were going wrong, how to correct things and when and where to help out. The icing on the cake was that his business proposal was a drinks company.

I just found it really shocking that NONE of the girls picked up on it until the very end.

Both also made the big mistakes. Francesca got the quantities wrong. Although that wasn't the cause of the fail, it was such a basic mistake as to be near-inexcusable. The only other person you could really blame for that is the PM: he picked her for the job when she didn't have the right skills, and he was present when she was getting it wrong and let her continue getting it wrong.

Rebecca did pick the location. She did more than merely point to the page. Again, the only other person you could blame was the PM for going along with it, and for not switching to a different location earlier. (And when he finally did, he got the second location wrong too: a wine bar to sell beer.)

So Tim did quite a good job of identifying who made the mistakes. His only real alternative was to bring in candidates who didn't do anything at all. It's hard for us to judge that because of the edit. Perhaps Sophie did loads that we didn't get to see. (Certainly a lot went right on the task. Their artwork was good, for example, and they sold well to trade.)

I think Tim did better in the boardroom than on the task, but it wasn't enough to save him.

Disagree, he made a major mistake in bringing back Rebecca, the top seller . LS would never fire a top seller in the early stages of the competition.

I mean he also had Leah, Uzma, Sophie, Luisa and Natalie on his team and we have no idea what they contributed to the task . Leah, Sophie, Natalie hardly spoke .

I don't think he knew she was the top seller. He seemed surprised when Lord Sugar mentioned it.

Given what he knew, and how the earlier boardroom had gone, I thought it was reasonable. Granting it was a mistake, he still made worse mistakes on the task.


Some of them were involved in producing the artwork. The artwork was probably the best thing about their task.

It's hard to be sure someone "hardly spoke" because of the edit. We only get to see about 15 minutes per team of a task that took them 2 days. The boardroom takes another day to film. The vast majority of what happens gets cut. People who aren't involved in the final boardroom tend not to feature much.

Its a firing though when no one deserved to be fired. The really cras mistakes were made on the other team

Francesca got the sums wrong - but then so would most of the population in coverting from different scales of volume, and then converting again into whatever units the casks came in. Everyone else with her was equally incapable. That was only part of the reason for failure in that they had lower stocks to sell.

Rebecca picked the wrong locations - but a beer festival and Richmond were not inherently bad ideas - particularly without more knowledge of the scale of the festival or the potential market at Richmond.

Tim fails at correcting either error - but then how was he meant to know more himself?

The show failed because it didn't tell us how the boys won. We can only assume that there was more custom at the south bank and a few sales at a higher price early on by the boys team counted. If the girls sold out anyway, prices and lack of stock are more important than location. If they didn't, location mattered Its also posssible that selling more kegs meant selling for less than the pints would have made individually - thats a strategic issue that was never was raised, so its a bit odd to blame Tim for doing that, or his team for doing better at selling to trade.

Tim doesn't actually do much wrong. He keeps The argumentative team working, and picks the right people to sell. One mistake is not using his science trained asset to produce his product - but again thats largely hindsight. Another is not to realise his locations were wrong and redeploy quickly - but we have no idea what his options were. There may be more reasons why the boys did better, but we don't know what they were, nor, it seemed, did Lord Sugar.

Tim had a basic lack of self awareness. The fact that his business proposal was a drinks company, and his complete lack of any expertise right from the start (he had no idea who the market should be aimed for - women - to appease the team? Before the women pointed out that men are the bigger market) shows that he was incompetent for the task and certainly for the investment.

I just find it startling the women backing him because he is "nice" rather than failing to see the obvious logic that he couldn't lead, and couldn't perform. Every significant factor in the team's failures, Tim played a part in (either through his actions - or lack of actions). For example, when the girl was struggling with her numbers, she wasn't in some remote room somewhere - Tim was right there with her. He did nothing. As team leader, even if you were rubbish at maths, you would not leave a struggling member on her own without aid.

You've made this point before and it's really not true that the show didn't tell us how the boys won.

The boys won because their retail selling was significantly better than the girls' and retail selling means higher profit margins as trade buyers are going to add their own mark-up so can't buy for the same price.

On this sort of task, it's always a case of whether to gamble on putting more effort into selling at retail prices (which are going to give much higher profit margins) or whether to play it safer and go all out to shift big volumes to trade but at lower prices. If you go for retail, you risk not being able to shift enough volume to make your high prices worth it but if you go for trade you risk selling too much of your stock at a low mark-up.

This has been explained by others (and probably more accurately and succinctly ) but -

If you have 5 kegs containing 72 pints, then even at a mere £1.50 a pint, you're still going to make more per keg than the higher end trade prices (around £90 per keg). The boys were selling at between £2 and £4 per pint; even taking an average pint price at the lower end (say £2.50), they'd be making double the amount per keg of the highest trade sales.

It's obvious how the boys won. They sold more beer at higher prices. I don't know how anyone can say the show didn't make it clear.

What matters to Lord Sugar is the bottom line. The guys got lucky, but they made more money. In fact, they made well over twice as much. In a one-off task, how they did that was pretty much irrelevant. For example, the fact that the name of their beer was naff didn't matter one jot as it clearly didn't put enough people off. The fact that they failed to sell to one lot of the trade because they didn't have samples, was of no consequence in the long run as they shifted so much beer to the public.

Tim's team deserved to end up in the boardroom because they lost. Tim deserved to get fired because he was an ineffectual leader, and when it comes to the crunch, someone has to have screwed up big-time before Lord Sugar will get rid of them before he gets rid of the Team Leader.

Watching the show again, I can't see what Tim actually did! A nice guy, but about as much use as an empty beer bottle at a trade-sale!

He may have nothing at all to do with the market for beer - he might want to sell lemonade. Men as the main market for beer is an obvious choice for the task - and it may be more so if you have a list of venues where you know there will be men, or mostly men. It may not be the best market left to target if you were doing this in real life. Its not an unintelligent question to ask if there's a female market untapped - and if a women's rugby match was on the list of places to go it would work. He jumped quickly back to the best for the task conclusion when the girls pointed that out.

The girls liked him, because he managed to avoid the worst rows between them, He was also energetic and positive which they liked. They did mostly sensible things and he left them alone and let them perform to their strengths, and didn't make stupid decisions. In those ways , he did better than any other PM so far as a manager. Its also relative for them to the male alternatives they may have been given - and from their viewpoint he was better than the other louder and dumber males they might have been given.

Its true he didn't sort out the maths problem , but as he seemed no more able to work it out than anyone else there, and no one could do the sums, its difficult to see how he could have done any better. Even if he had asked them all to work it out, he would have had no way of picking the right answer. You can't sack people for not being able to do maths that no one else could either.

I don't think we learnt anything about his ability to manage his proposal. He lost to the other candidate with a drinks proposal , but the other candidate won despite doing more things poorly, with less good reason.

The show basically failed to show how the figures were achieved. On what we saw, the girls team did most things better, we don't know how the boys team won, or what other options the girls had on offer.The drinks loss was accidental and could have happened to anyone, as was turning up to a beer fest to find 10 men and a dog rather than 1000 people. Lord Sugar describes it as a massive failure, but can't actually think of any significant reasons for the failure.

I think he's the second PM sent home for no really good reasons, just because someone has to go, they lost, and the PMs were responsible for anything that could possibly be argued to have created the loss. Its two weeks where the win is decided by luck getting the mix right, location choice, and getting somewhere first - not even the scale of errors made. The result is they have lost two of the more energetic positive types who might have a decent proposal, and we still have all the hopeless cases on the male team.

I can see the problem with selling to the trade - thats why I raised it - , but its obviously not at all clear to the candidates or both teams would have ignored the trade buys and sold the lot to the public for more. There's only two possibilities. Either both teams made the same mistake, and selling it better counted against the girls team - or there was something in the rules that suggested they target the trade or told them to do so. Given there's two subteams, going to different places, it looks as if one was told to sell to trade. If its crucial, Lord Sugar never mentions it - which suggests either he doesn't know its a crucial factor, or he does, and he's not saying so for some reason. If its an error he can't see, its a bit much to ask the candiates to spot it, and if its an error induced by the instructions, it distorts things too much to admit.

What we saw didn't support the male team winning. We saw them failing to sell retail at first, because their prices were too high. we saw them selling kegs at less than the girls did. We finally saw them selling on the South Bank at low prices . We never got any figures on how many pints each team sold, or whether the girls sold all what they had - all we see is the contrast between Richmond and the South Bank and we see nothing of the girls selling to the public in the last couple of hours. . The boys can only win because they sell less to trade, because any sales at the high initial price count more ,and because they manage to sell an awful lot at low prices levels. The girls have less to sell and higher costs per unit as they wasted some, and less left to sell retail.

Even then, the figures are not that clear - even if the girls selll none of the 100 bottles they say they have left to sell when they start their last sales push at Richmond, and you allow for 198 lost pints, and costs lost to waste, it doesn't add up to the scale of the boys win. If the difference is the trade sales, and the girls suffer from doing better doing what they were told to , there's something wrong with the task.