Misread your post, sorry.

Surely that phone had a conversion app they could've used?

That's Ok elasticlove, .......and couldn't they have 'googled' OUD. I found it was a musical instrument in 10 secs. Perhaps they are not allowed to use the internet per OP.

In Series 2 Episode 2 when the teams had to design a calander for Great Ormond Street Hospital, the girls team who designed a calander based on cats did research about the fact that cats were in the top 10 best sellers of calanders year on year, for the last 10 years. Infact both teams in the episode did some research on the internet.

Certainly though in recent years teams haven't used the internet. I assume it was decided that it would be a bit too easy to use the internet. This has never been explicitly said that they can't use the internet to the viewers though.

However anyone with a brain if allowed would use the internet. I therefore have assumed they can't. This didn't need explaining to me.

I can also find what an 'OUD' is within 10 seconds, on google. However if I had to phone up like the teams did it would be a lot more difficult. It would be obvious that they can't use the internet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0071b63/faq

How many people does it take to film the tasks?

The production team, including all crew, is large. On each task there will be four crews filming (each with a producer and researcher) - one for each half of the two teams.

Does Lord Sugar use a script in the boardroom?

Lord Sugar is not given a script of any kind for the boardroom. He is entirely in charge of what happens there. He does not wear an earpiece, so the production team cannot interrupt him or feed things to him in the boardroom. Everything he says and all the decisions he makes are his own.

Well that answers numbers 2 and 4 then for the OP I think. I know it doesn't say anywhere in there the exact words: "there MUST be two sub teams for each team."

As for numbers 1, 3 and 5 I would have thought it was clear from the show, that yes the PMs are decided as we see it on the show, that yes the PMs decide who is in what sub teams, and that yes the PM of the losing team does decide the two people to go back into the boardroom themselves.

Number 6 has already been answered earlier on in the thread.

To be fair the teams mistake was trying to convert feet into inches in the first place. Once they decided on that strategy the mistake they made always did have the potential to happen.

More like six months. The series is recorded in autumn (although the winner is not decided until the week the final is broadcast). You're Fired, on the other hand, is recorded a day or two before broadcast (which means, of course, that you can still apply for free tickets to be in the audience, as some people on here do).


It varies. Normally, the losers' boardroom takes place on the same day as the winners' treat.

Candidates invariably wear the same clothes for the boardroom, which makes it harder to tell when one day ends and the next begins. (Women in particular might be unfairly criticised for always wearing the same blouse or jacket each week.)

The walk from the door to the taxi is recorded in advance, although of course the interview in the taxi is not (which is why the weather may seem to have changed rather abruptly, and you can occasionally see that fired candidates have been crying).

We know from what previous candidates have told us that these boardrooms go on for hours as Lord Sugar delves into where the task was won or lost (which may be why, as this week, he gets annoyed when PMs bring back the "wrong" people for the final three).

It is the long, in-depth inquisition that explains why in early episodes candidates returning to the house remark on how draining the experience is, although one recent candidate, asked about often being in the boardroom, said he did not mind as he saw it as a business masterclass.

Paradoxically, winning all the tasks can be a disadvantage by the time of the final rounds because Lord Sugar will not have got to know these highly successful candidates , whereas he will have spent hours talking to losers.


I guess it is theoretically possible though it would be a logistical nightmare as they'd have to postpone the boardroom while the footage was located and retrieved.

Lord Sugar has Nick and Karren to tell him what went on, and we know he also gets information from the production staff who were with the teams during the task, and of course from the teams themselves.


2 teams x 2 sub-teams x 2 days for an average task -- so we see, what, somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent, if I've converted feet to centimetres correctly.

Disclaimer: I have no inside information but the above is based on what we have been told over the years.

Why would they have bothered? Kurt had mistold them it was 12cm in a foot, and once that had been accepted (because 12 somethings in a foot sounds familiar) Zee did not need an app to multiply 4 by 12 and 6 by 12. Even if they'd had an app, they'd not have used it. Similarly, even if allowed to use Google to look up oud, Zee would not have done because he already knew what oud meant (although Alex might well have done!).

The problem was that they did not think about the flag's dimensions for even a few seconds after ordering. It was not due to ignorance. They knew what 48cm, 72cm and a metre are, because that is what they were taught at school, and they knew roughly what 6ft looks like because tall people are 6ft tall. Crucially, though, they did not think about these measurements and relate 72cm (less than a metre) to 6 feet (roughly two metres) until they saw the flag which they immediately recognised was too small.

Perhaps school league tables are the problem and the important thing now is that seven-year-olds are taught there are 100cm in a metre, and 1000 grams in a kilogram without letting them learn what these things mean and how many bags of crisps does an apple weigh, because having infants weigh things and pour water from one container to another looks too much like playing. Have chemistry, cookery and woodwork disappeared from the syllabus for older children?

We've seen with the beer task, and in earlier series with sandalwood and frothy milk for coffee and even 100 chickens for 100 chicken pizzas, that too many candidates are not used to dealing with quantity or measurement. They do not make back-of-the-envelope estimates and have no sense of what is plausible or how many baked potatoes they will need to sell each minute in order to shift 200 in one lunchtime.

We see it in almost every boardroom, where most candidates don't react to the figures until Nick or Karren reads out the total, because doing the addition or subtraction themselves seems too much like hard work (which it probably is if they do not have the sense to round off the numbers).

Sorry, I appear to be ranting, so I'll stop now.

No, I agree - its shocking how poor so many of them are at maths - simple stuff that is essential to business. How they can expect Shugs to invest in them when they cannot tell if they are in profit or loss I just don't know.

Good post. As far as I can tell, everything you've said is consistent with what we've been told from various sources over the years. Just to add one thing - I remember reading somewhere once that they typically film over 100 hours of footage per episode, and that boardrooms can last in excess of two hours. Clearly there is a lot that goes on - much of it (a) dull or (b) shock, horror, actually showing the candidates getting things right - that we never get to see.

This is why there is so much scope for editorial influence. The reality is that if we had a representative view of every candidate there would be little to choose between most of them and we as viewers would get easily confused about who is who. It's much easier to slant the edit to pigeon-hole candidates as 'the ditzy one' (Luisa), 'the cocky one' (Neil), 'the smooth one' (Myles), 'the sexist one' (Zee) and so on. Anything that deviates from that categorisation is conveniently edited out.

Again, just to reinforce what you (and others) have said above, Sugar has in the past said that he gets a thorough debrief from Nick and Karren before the boardroom so he gets a good understanding of who did or didn't do what in the task. But Nick and Karren themselves don't see everything - they can only follow one sub-team at a time, for instance - so I assume that either they get some feedback from the crew who are following the other sub-teams, or perhaps there is even a designated 'second' Nick/Karren who acts as an additional pair of eyes and ears who we never see or hear mentioned. A bit like the Stig, only invisible.

I would assume that in the scavenger task, suppliers have to be contacted before the candidates head out and ok filming on their premises etc?

Which must lead to hours of hanging around while people are contacted?

Remember the task a few years ago where they turned up at the shop at the pre appointed time and the lady ignored them and carried on serving someone else, think it was the "till buying" task!

Im pretty sure that given the filming schedule LS doesnt see any footage at all. Karren and Nick will give him some idea of what went on in the groups they followed, and presumably, the producers will let him know if anything significant happened in the sub team, so he'll have SOME idea of what went on during the task, but wont have seen exactly what happened.

I gather that of the 30 mins or so we see of the boardroom scenes - they spend most of the day filming it - so it has to edited down to only show what the producers consider "good telly". I saw somewhere on here that Zee said in an interview that his final boardroom scenes had to be very heavily edited because of Natalie's language.

in the sessions just after they get the task briefing, you can see that they have a big file on the table - presumably with a full brief of the task and what they can and can't do during it. I agree that they will be given a shortlist of things they can do in that file. It was clear in the Beer task that they had only a limited choice of locations they could use (presumably because of filming rights), and last year when they had to invent a household item the choice was kitchen or bathroom - and presumably it was first come first served as to which team did what as i dont think we've ever had 2 teams doing the same thing. (for further proof - the young apprentices fragrance task was either men's or women's).

Yes it is shocking especially as the 16 potential apprentices are all highly intelligent, clever individuals with fab CVs chosen from the hundreds or is it, thousands of applications.

Perhaps the selection criteria should include some basic maths questions but if so, we would not have 'watchable' TV where the viewer can harangue the contestants.

Sometimes it's allowed, sometimes it isn't.

(Another task where I remember it being used, they spent ages trying to work out whether it should be "Mother's Day" or "Mothers Day", and eventually relied on a citation from (as I recall) The Daily Telegraph's site.)


In this scavenger task we were told they could only use the yellow pages and maps they'd been supplied with. The internet wasn't mentioned explicitly, but it seemed more than usually clear that it wasn't included.


Yep. Although much of that is done while they are being driven to locations in the cars. They seem to spend hours travelling each task.

As has been mentioned, the need for filming permission is a heavy restriction. In series 2, after Karen was fired for not buying a car tyre, she told fans that she'd found lots of places that sold it but none would allow filming.

Similarly Gerri in series 3 was sacked for not finding locations for kids face painting - she pointed out afterwards that she did, but as they were all schools, nurseries or shopping centres filming was not allowed.

Is there an unwritten rule that the 'you're fired' candidate has to walk out of the office building to the waiting taxi, wearing a scarf, overcoat and pulling their teeny wheely case. Every week, it's always a scarf and coat, to walk 20 feet! (not forgetting the contractual 'you aint heard the last of me' spiel).

Yes.

The walk to the taxi is filmed right at the start of the series and is cut in later. The overcoat is so you can't see that they seem to have changed clothes in the lift down from the boardroom.

The reason they do that is so it looks like they are getting the taxi home from AMS's corporate HQ whereas in fact the boardroom is really a television studio set (think about the number of tv cameras in use for all the different angles).

Nick has said in more than one interview that LS doesn't see so much as a foot of film before the various boardroom showdowns, and goes solely by Nick and Karren's reports, plus whatever the candidates tell him (though I'd be amazed if the producers don't also give him some "nuggets" to leap on to)... apparently LS is often surprised by how different the final filmed challege comes across to him when he sees it later, compared with how he'd perceived it in the boardroom.

As for the "unseen rules" in general, I'm fairly convinced that most of the task briefing folders are probably more like a multiple choice test than an open brief, i.e. pick one theme from this selection of 5, pick one focus group from these 3, pick one venue from 2, pick 2 suppliers from 5 etc.

To be fair I have passed A level maths, and its the way that Nick and Karren read out the figures which make it almost impossible to reckon up the figures. Nick and Karen have the very slight advantage of having the figures already on paper for them.

There must be so much pre planning done by the producers before each task which goes unmentioned to the viewers. For example whenever there is a task designing a product we are given the impression that the teams have a blank sheet of paper to decide what product they want to do and we see them in blue skies thinking brainstorming sessions. But then straight from the brainstorm the teams will head off to a prearranged market research session with a group of people perfectly suited to the product they have chosen. For example they pick a baby product and off they go to a meeting arranged with new mothers. Clearly the teams must be more restricted in what they can choose in order for the production team to set up these groups.

I think a lot of the time that's just given by Sugar in the brief though. On the baby product task (Young Apprentice Series 2, Episode 2), they were specifically told that it had to be for the parent/baby market, so the focus groups are naturally going to have new mothers.

Sales tasks tend to be straightforward. If Karren says Team A sold X, spent Y for a profit of Z, then you just take the profit figure and subtract from it the first number Nick says, which result you can then compare with Nick's second number. Drastic rounding makes the arithmetic simple and fails only in very tight wins.

Here are the numbers from the farm shop task (possibly after a youtube advert).

So to generalise, for the first team, only listen to the profit, and round off the numbers.

Incidentally, notice that Lord Sugar does not know the results until they are read out. You can see he writes them down, and later works out the winning margin.

That means that when he is asking the teams about what happened and whether the PM was a good team leader, he does not know which team won.

I can see that he appears to be doing that, but I find it almost impossible to believe he doesn't know before he enters the boardroom. His questioning before that is pointed, so he's obviously had at least some briefing. He knows this pre-results meet is the only time he'll get to grill the losing team. I don't think he'd chose not to know the result.

You could say the same about the contestants. The teams must have exchanged notes sufficiently to have some idea but often the result seems to take them by surprise.

So far as Lord Sugar is concerned, it is not his writing down the numbers so much as his clearly working out the margin that is persuasive.

That's not what I meant, actually there was a case in point tonight. The group apparently came up with archery in a blue skies session but then there was an archery hire firm magically ready to go. Likewise the team thinking about doing a chocolate thing had a meeting ready with a specialist. It's clear they were given some book of options by the producers.

I suppose, but who is to say that they don't find these people by themselves? On the buying task, they have a yellow pages; they may well have one for something like this. I imagine it's easier to hire people at short notice if you're doing a TV show, as it's free publicity for them.