...giving the producers complete freedom to decide which team "won". I can't believe is taken me all these years to notice this!

What is your reasoning for this?

I didn't see the producers decide. I saw it that it was judged on profit that they made, and customer satisfaction - the customers could get refunds if they weren't satisfied. Unless the numbers are totally faked, I don't understand how on this task at least, the producers could make the decision.

Both customers asked for the same refund. £1250 is 25% of £5000. So in the end it came down to how much each group had spent.

I would use the word "arbitrary" rather than "totally faked".

I also like the idea that the 'clients asked for a 25% discount' ... well, in any real business, the clients could ask for the moon on a stick, doesn't mean they'll actually get it...

'Oh, the clients have asked for a 25% discount have they? well, guess what, they aren't going to get it... oh, they are? I'm sorry, I was under the impression we ran this business...'

Well yes obviously it wouldn't happen quite like that in real life, but in real life an away day business wouldn't survive if it wasn't providing what it was supposed to provide. This task only takes place over a couple of days, and they needed to find a way to judge customer satisfaction, otherwise there would be no incentive not to just cut costs wherever possible, so there was clearly a rule that they had to refund whatever they were asked for. I think for the purposes of the task, that was a fair way of doing it.

Like many of the tasks it was decided on one days profit rather than if the product actually had legs. Having said that it would seem the better product won on this occasion but if Francescas team had ditched the best part of their day (paid speaker) they may have won with a poorer day

We don't know what flexibility the customer had with the fine. Could they pay nothing to reflect the real value, or were they both limited to 25%. Seems odd they both picked on the same number out of 100 available.

If the fine is the same regardless, spending more to achieve that level of awfulness loses .An odd criteria to win on.

We saw someone pointing out that the paid for speaker was the best thing about that team's day. Rebecca got fired for spending the money on the element that worked.

Francesca rejected the alternative. and picked the events - but stayed.

We had one man saying Neil was good, and Karen told us twice he was. However, all we saw was him rambling on nonsensically. The supposed winning move looked like excruciating irrelevant waffle. If they want to suggest something brilliant happened, they have to show it. if they don't, we have to believe what we see, and wonder why they didn't get fined more for it, and how anyone could be impressed.

It was a silly task because to meet the customers goals would have taken a llot of preparation, a script , and probably some people who could act. They had none of that , so waffle and childish games were very likely.

Fair points - though, I have always suspected the quoted bits were AMSTRAD's business plan

I would personally pay good money for someone to bring up in the boardroom, any time they are challenged with not providing good quality in this show, all the times AMSTRAD has been had up by Trading Standards for providing shoddy goods...

The person who talks to the clients for the results could easily try to get them to ask for a refund

Well in that case, what is the point of the fines? They might as well ignore them and judge the task purely on profit.


Well, that's just your opinion. I personally thought Neil's speech was very good, from what I saw of it.

The point was we don't know why they both came up with the same figure, or how it could be the same, or why it wasn't 99%.

You couldn't judge it on profit because the winner would just have to spend nothing.

They could have judged it on scores from the participants and the customer's management, and just told them to spend a couple of thousand and no more. That would weigh the ability to design and present the package and would have been unlikely to produce a tie. They added cost and got the old problem back that doing something cheaply but poorly wins.

All we saw was some stuff about his father dying which was irrelevant to anyone, and anything else, and a conclusion that you needed to follow a goal to achieve one, which was blindingly obvious. And he was spouting that nonsense to people who had achieved more than he had, probably both educationally and careerwise.

No - the people at the event said the motivational speaker was the best part about the day. IF they didn't buy the motivational speaker, then the customers would of been less happy than they were and subsequently, would of asked for more of a refund.

I think Rebecca's card was marked today. I think which ever team she was in would have been the "losing" team and regardless of her performance relative to others, she was going home.

I got that feeling too.

Out of interest does anybody know how much difference in profit there was between the two teams?

Well if whatever team she was in would have been the losing team, that implies that she deserved to go because she would have caused whichever team she was in to lose. Which isn't actually what I think, but that's what you seem to be saying.

I think the OP is implying that she was stitched up as opposed to performing bad.

As the winning margin was less than £1250 if a team had done a decent job and got the full fee it would have won.

£483.69. Full break-down in my review here ... http://slouchingtowardstv.com/2013/0...rching-orders/

Frankly, I find the idea that the result was engineered to fire Rebecca unlikely in the extreme. I agree that Sugar may have her card marked, but why single her our before, say, Jason? And equally, why engineer things to fire her THIS week when there are still plenty of opportunities to fire her later, not least at the interviews at which point he can basically pick who he wants?

I wouldn't like to say if the result was engineered - although the rules and instructions on what to do to win were handily vague enough - but I would hazard guess that by this point in 'the process' the production staff know who is likely to make good tele and become the show mascot.

I think there are 3 or 4 people that could really go at any point between now and the interviews and it wouldn't really make a great deal of difference whether its one week or the week after and it's just a case of which one is sitting in front of the firing finger at the time. I do think if Jordan had been brought back in to the boardroom, Rebecca would have been safe for another week.

The subject of how much the producers influence Sugar to encourage good telly has been speculated about a lot here, but no one really knows for sure. My general point is that there is no need to engineer one week's result so crudely when the entire process is set up so that Sugar ultimately has the final say no matter what. All he has to do is to ensure that the strongest 2-3 candidates don't get fired prematurely - who goes when out of the also-rans really doesn't matter, so there is no need to engineer a result in what is only week 6 of 12.

I very much doubt Jordan would have been fired. He has been a bit obnoxious with his celebrations in the boardroom, but he has been a strong performer on virtually every task so far, and I thought there was only so much he could do here given that Francesca was so focussed on spending to get quality. It was the whole strategy and its execution that lost Evolve the task, not the spending - why Sugar elected to focus on the cost of the speaker (the best part of their day) is beyond me.

I thought that Rebecca got a bit of a short straw. They complained that her motivational speaker cost them the task but the footage appeared to suggest that it was the one thing that saved the day from being a complete shambles. Who's to say that the wouldn't have asked for 50% back without him?

They lost of the task because the rest of their day was rubbish. The reason the other team could get away with using Neil as the speaker was because the rest of their activities were ok.

Quite. As I've said elsewhere, I didn't think Rebecca was a particularly strong candidate anyway, but for Sugar to fire her for recommending the part of their day that actually worked well seems nonsensical. Fran should have gone - not least because she had little reason to bring Luisa back in other than personal animosity and the corporate rant, which had no real impact on task performance at all.

Yep I saw this too.

She really didn't deserve to be fired. Her contribution to the task was bringing in the motivational speaker which to be quite honest was the only business focused part of the entire day. I really can't imagine anybody in their team doing a good job at motivational speaking, whereas in the other team there are people who quite obviously are capable. What needed to be considered were the costs to the task which didn't improve the day. The wine tasting? The cupcake making? The decorations? Why weren't the people responsible for those things hounded a bit more in regards to the waste of time and money which these things caused? I think the answer is quite obviously that today was Rebecca's day to get fired and nothing was going to stand in the way of that.

What made me sure that she was going was Sugar's rant about bringing the right people back at the very end, especially as it was right after he had a go at Rebecca.

So, you not only think they fix the task results but also fix who gets brought into the boardroom for the firing?