It does me
But at the same time it makes me feel bad seeing the best we have on show here are so poor:cry

no not at all

No. They are set up to fail, through a combination of sleep deprivation, short deadlines, and editing.

Don't forget being really thick is also a factor. I mean Natalie and the cow/dog/horse pallarva this week. Seriously?

I was thinking that.

What kind of sadist is it that phones up at <insert ungodly hour in the morning here> and says that the car is picking them up in half an hour? Then they have to work all day and night.


Well, yes, that too.

And satsumas being in season (which, to be fair, they might have been but Francesca ought to have known they are not grown in the Home Counties).

Twice we have seen candidates struggling with simple arithmetic: the beer task and now Alex.

And I am choosing to believe that in holding up a bunch of carrots and asking "what are these?" Alex was enquiring their price.

By the way, what's that smell?

I don't think it is being thick, though. The candidates too often seem to lack general knowledge rather than intelligence. In previous series, it has been the same. Are candidates too focused on business from childhood that they simply have no time for anything else?

I don't think you should be feeling superior with grammar like that

I think the beer task was an example of tiredness and pressure. They said they'd been discussing numbers in the car on the way there, and all had been throwing percentages around confidently and correctly. Somehow that went out of the window when it came to mixing the beer. I expect Alex was the same. Sometimes we get a mental block. It doesn't mean we're stupid.


There are people who live in cities who have simply never been on a farm. And proper horse or cow manure doesn't smell like human poo, or even cat or dog poo. It's mostly made of grass. Farmers compost it in big heaps. If a compost heap smells bad, something is wrong with it.

Watching a show makes you feel superior? Christ almighty.

What exactly do you have to feel superior?

Using that logic people who watch gardening shows therefore care more about the environment?

Not really. It's deliberately edited to make everyone in it look stupid. Sort of like Come Dine With Me but with weekly evictions. I'm sure the producers could make each of us look thick as dog muck too if they filmed us enough and only showed the bits where we act like a spoon.

I think it's TOWIE and all those z listers which have started a trend. They know fully well what they are talking about but come across like they have no idea thinking it will make them more likeable. Big Brother is also another one where they do this.

I totally forgot about Alex and the carrot. I mean hello.

The beer thing though was inherently difficult. You had to understand metric units of volume, where its easy to get the decimal point wrong, and then convert it into dose per cask when the casks seemed to come in some odd total volumes (are they still imperial in size?) and then actually work out what that quantity was in a syringe. I doubt if most of the populaion woudln't have trouble - and they didn't seem to have any mathematicians, chemists, nurses, or even cooks working on the problem. Indeed if it had been easy I doubt if they would have been made to do it themselves. Yasmina made an even more costly error with the samdalwood - getting her decimal points in the wrong place too, and she was still winning material, and someone who seems to be doing very well post Apprentice.

There's also the data issue. They seem to be expected to know things they couldn't unless the data is in their folders. What sells how much normally, at what time of day, on the TV selling tasks? What does a rare antique shoe look like? We don't know if they can't read a brief, or were set up for a fall. And that merges with the rules and limitations we don't see issue. Did they have any way of knowing that the beer festival was for ten men and a dog? Did they have to go to find out? When they got there. how were they expected to know what passing trade would be like in Richmond , and why didn't they just decamp to the south bank if that was the other option available on their list? Looking stupid may sometimes just be having bad luck with an otherwise logical looking choice and no other options.

There's also other differences that get blurred. Believing that Syed could order ingredients, after he claimed to have managed restaurants, isn't stupid, ordering a chicken per pizza is. Not knowing what a kosher chicken is, or what a cow is, reflects a lack of general knowledge, but neither may be necessary to wave a winning proposal or to win. Turning up to try and sell beer with none to taste may reflect sheer stupidity - unless there's some technical reason for that we never saw.

Compared to people who don't like this show but like big brother. Yes

iirc it was the volume not price they got wrong, and it should have been obvious that the beaker was half full and weighed a lot more than a packet of crisps.


Agreed, although again, sometimes there is an element of common sense or common knowledge -- the test being, of course, me: if I know a thing then the Apprentices are idiots, and if I'm flummoxed then the producers are dastardly cads. Cloches, for instance, they ought to have been able to identify.


The cow/horse mixup was doubtless a slip of the tongue.

Geography often seems to flummox the teams. You should not have to live in London to know that it is too big to criss-cross by car. If you have five team members booking appointments or locating items, and each is using a different local Yellow Pages, then your destinations will be too far apart. This is not rocket science.

Lunch sells best at lunchtime. 200 baked spuds in one lunchtime is one every 15 seconds or one every 30 seconds depending on whether there are 50 or 100 minutes in "lunchtime". That sort of quick, back of an envelope calculation makes it clear that 200 is too many: they could never cook them quickly enough even if they could sell them.

But you are right that the producers should tell the viewers what are these task restrictions so we can jeer with a clear conscience.