The implication is that the criteria for judging the tasks are sufficiently vague, or opaque, to allow LAS to pick and choose who he wants to lose. This is most obvious in later creative tasks, especially the finals.
We don't know how or why the 25% refunds were arrived at but could easily be manipulated to allow a specific team to lose.
Add to this the idea that the finalists are chosen before the series starts (does anyone believe Tom wasn't picked from the off because of his existing products and patents?). The rest are chosen for ratings and a few maybes. The maybes that don't do anything (Rebecca) are quickly fired while the chosen two or three can do no wrong. The ratings winners are kept in.

I doubt that they would get away with fixing the results of the tasks. Obviously who goes is Sugar's decision, but for the tasks it is essentially a game show. Games and competitions have certain rules that have to be stuck to. Think about what happened a few years ago with the premium rate phone numbers scandal, which resulted in nearly all viewer competitions being pulled. If it was revealed that the tasks were being fixed and that the candidates were being misled into thinking that they could win or lose the task, there would be a huge scandal. It would lose Sugar and Mark Burnett any credibility, the BBC would come under fire - I don't think they'd risk that.

As for the producers swaying what Sugar decides - I'm sure they have tried to from time to time, but I doubt he takes any notice. He has always struck me as someone who makes up his own mind. Whenever he has fired someone unfairly, there has always been some kind of justification for it, even if we don't agree with it - Rebecca didn't stand up for herself in the boardroom, and while I agreed with her motivational speaker, she also championed the wine-tasting. I don't think that she should have been fired, but there is at least a reason why that happened. Similarly, there have been many times that very entertaining candidates have been fired over and above not quite so entertaining ones. If it was all on entertainment, there is no way that Melissa would have been fired over Jamie, or Bilyana over Katie, or Mahamed over Harry H.

I understand the bit about fixing the task (even if I don't believe it) but I am asking how LS fixes it for the candidate that is to be fired that week to actually be in last three?

So really they could of done a "Prisoner of War" theme, spent hardly any money, fed the guys crap and most of the tasks would of involved team building, and over coming obstacles type tasks, and won!

There were too many constraining elements to this task.

Come on Kurt's not exactly a ratings winner, they wouldn't rig it for him

But why not? Who knows? It's up to Sugar and what he wants.

Just to clarify something, I'm not saying that he necessarily wanted to fire Rebecca from both teams and engineered who won based on that, but I did get a very strong feeling that from the losing group that he really wanted to fire Rebecca this week and tried his best to get Francesca to select her for the boardroom.

I won't complain about it not being fair, or that it was so wrong, because of course by now we should know that 'fair' doesn't even come into it and it's purely about what Sugar wants regardless of how we question the logic of his decisions.

Of course.

Sugar's logic was baffling to me this week. Regardless of what he was hinting - and I still think it was more "not Luisa" than it was "pick Rebecca" - once we had the final three I think it would have been unfair to fire Luisa and I have to assume that Francesca has shown more over the past few weeks than Rebecca (she has, in truth) and/or has a better business plan - whatever, Sugar clearly didn't want to fire her, despite her frankly abysmal performance on this task. So it had to be Rebecca.

On the basis of this task alone that made no sense. In the context of six tasks so far and the plans we have not yet seen, I guess there must have been more justification from Sugar's perspective.

Either way, neither Rebecca nor Francesca have stood out as potential winners, so I'm not that bothered about who went this week in all honesty. I just think it was an odd decision, that's all.

This is what I suspect. Pure speculation on my part, of course.
But my original point is that it has just dawned on me that the results "calculated" always have enough of a "discretionary" element to obtain any outcome desired.

I don't believe that the weakest candidates on task are always fired either.

Anyway, this is primarily an entertainment show.

They were both rubbish. They were both fined the same amount . Neil was cheaper.

The problem is the 25% fine. Thats saying they were both equally rubbish. How likely is that?

It then depends what the flexibility was in awarding a fine. Was the only option "you can fine them 25% if you were not happy". Or was there a range of options - say 25, 50, 75 100%, or could they deduct anything they wanted to.

If they can only deduct 25% its possible to do a bit better and still lose for spending more. If someone suggests there's an option to deduct 25% to them and the customers take that , who ever spent least wins.

Its a a very odd, arguably poorly thought out, task . Logically quality ought to matter, and the customers ought to just give a score and create a winning performance. However if they did that and you don't ignoring costs, you could get some even sillier looking results where the winner on quality loses because they spent more. If you avoid that, and have standard 25% fines you can't say who was really better - just who spent most being rubbish.

Taking money from the public under false pretenses is another matter entirely. this is Lord Sugar's business/cash and he can do what he likes with it. the two scenarios are not analogous.

But he told Francesca that he would fire her if she brought back the wrong people, if he was hinting that she shouldn't bring Luisa back then why didn't he fire Francesca... Based on that I thought he was advising her to put her friendship with Rebecca aside and bring her back into the boardroom.

The whole who to fire decision this week was just baffling, something outside the task had to factor into it.

I'd say there was further evidence of that with Rebecca's admission on "You're Fired".

She said Francesca had originally told her straight out that she wasn't going to bring her into the boardroom but that turned out not to be the case. Obviously I may be wrong but I think that goes a fair way to indicating that Francesca, at least, thought that Sugar was strongly hinting that she should choose Rebecca.

Yes, he can fire who he likes and choose who he likes to win. What I'm saying is that if the tasks were rigged so that one team was destined to win from the start, that would be a scandal if the contestants were under the impression that it was their efforts that won the show. Just as on a quiz show, if one contestant was secretly being fed all the answers so they couldn't lose, the same would apply if one team on The Apprentice was chosen to win regardless of their performance on the task.

I don't think he is rigging it. What he ends up doing though is criticising one team for terrible mistakes most weeks when the other team made the same or other terrible mistakes. The win is usually on one mistake less and that often sheer luck being in the wrong place or making a reasonabel choice that turns out to be a dud Tthis week he ended up sacking the quieter one because she was the one who produced the bit of the package that worked.

I also don't see what the show usefully proved. No one on Francesca's team did a motivational brief - but no one on any team is proposing to do motivational briefs. Francesca does organise things, but there's no similarity between organising something like that and a dance show which seems to be what she does. All he really learnt was that Luisa can make her cupcakes.

hardly scandal-worthy...
There have been other occasions when the weakest person has not been fired. Does "the public" really care? Would they care whether goal posts which were never made clear in the first place get shifted slightly? How & when were the Dubai penalties for each item decided and declared?

Again, quiz shows are quite different. I don't know about you but I'll choose to take this show with a pinch of salt and enjoy the entertainment for what its worth.

LAS is annoying in the fact he never keeps to his own rules. 1 week you can be fired for not listening to the PM and arguing, the next week you can be fired for not following your own instincts and forcing your opinion on the PM.

Well, I think the discussions on these forums prove that the public does care.


I think it depends on whether the PM is right. If you argue and make things difficult and that causes frictions within the team, you'll be in trouble. If the PM makes disastrous decisions and you don't suggest alternatives, you are in trouble for that as well. It's about making sure your opinion is heard, but not being pushy about it.

Similarly, if you are PM, it's the same situation. If you make decisions and don't listen to the team, it's fine if you turn out to be right. If you don't, then you've had it. You can listen to other people, but there is a difference between making a decision based clearly on other people's views, or just letting someone else make the decision for you. I think it was summed up in the fourth episode of Young Apprentice Series 2, when Haya made the dreadful decision to go with the pie-maker over the pillow. Sugar said to her, 'I don't have a problem with people who are forceful and make decisions, because I do that myself. The problem is, I'm usually right, and you made the wrong decision...' or something along those lines.

I wonder if LAS ever listened when he was told your Email phone is crap!! LAS doesn't have the best track record on listening.

He listened to Nick and Margaret when they said, 'Fire Syed!' He was going to keep him over Ruth, but they convinced him otherwise.

And considering this, never has the hiring of Michelle looked more obvious...

Realistically, if these clients were told "you can pay £5000, or if you find something to moan about, £3750", they were always going to find something to moan about.

They needed to get the client satisfaction expressed in momentary terms so it could be combined with the expensive to produce a single value.


I took him to mean Luisa.

It's long been my belief that Lord Sugar has a bias against firing team leaders. In this series he's already fired 3 of 5, and he was disinclined to make it 4 of 6. So he was eager to fire anyone but Francesca.

I was very surprised when he fired Rebecca, though. She has been the best seller on at least two tasks. She was also very active in this one: she'd had ideas which the team leader had followed, so she was hardly guilty of flying under the radar or of being someone no-one listened to. He really didn't have much rationale other than "instinct". (Personally I don't think he should have fired Zee last week, and had he not done so he could have fired the team leader this week.)

I thought that odd too.
And we didn't get to see how they arrived at 25%

That's true.
But. Never understood why he didn't hire Ruth

Yup... Absolutely. I think Francesca had no intention of burning Rebecca back, she was complimentary about her... Until LS made it clear he wanted her back in there.