I sadly don't think we'll ever see another - the girls for the last two years have generally jad poor business plans. Also none of this years girls strike me as winners.

Actually, if you include Young Apprentice, then bar one anomaly with Simon and Lee, the winners have so far alternated male and female each series.

Natalie's business plan was to sell dresses, and Rebecca's to sell marcasite rings. I can't see that they would be businesses that Lord Sugar would be interested in to be honest. I was hoping they might be more innovative ideas TBH.

TBF George, YA is meaningless, ie. far less.people watch it, so the average apprentice viewer that doesn't watch YA will be shocked about the low numbers of female winners.

The female candidates for this series and the last have generally been rubbish, but I wouldn't include Series 7. That crop of women was stronger than the men, and Susan Ma was absolutely robbed blind.

I actually think that whether a TV show has meaning depends less upon the number of people who watch it, and more on the impact it has on the people that do. If you're going by ratings, then the series of The Apprentice that have the most 'meaning' as you put it will be the ones that had the most ratings, which means the ones right in the middle of the series, and less the early series and the more recent series, which had fewer ratings. I'm not sure how it looks when looking at it from that angle, I find it a little confusing. I just count every series of The Apprentice - minus the celebrity editions because they weren't really series, they were just one-off tasks.

In that series, there were no men who won as PM over a female PM. There was only one man who won as PM in that series - Glenn - and that was against another male PM.

I think if it weren't for that damned nailfile, Susan would have won S7 quite comfortably. I honestly don't know why she didn't win despite this. I mean, he did invest in her business plan anyway, but he didn't invest in Tom's. So it'd have made far more sense to have Susan win and then invest in Tom's nailfile afterwards. Although I'm guessing her personality put a lot of viewers off and Tom's ineptitude was something many found endearing.

Its such a shame, though . Why can't they pick talented women?

Don't worry, if a woman doesn't win this series or even make the top 2, chances are they'll push for a woman next year. 4 male winners in a row would raise some eyebrows.

I think they got unlucky with a couple of women last year - Jane and Katie I think had more potential than they actually managed to get out, Gabrielle was a bit of a damp squib that could have been more, and Laura had a major emotional trauma going on. I can buy a lot of the women last year being more savvy in real life than they managed to be on the show, or at least looking like it during casting/the CV stage. Even Maria seemed a bit like of a "Joanna The Cleaner From Leicester" archetype gunned down too soon for minor reasons.

This year there's obviously been more of a swing towards "reality tv characters" and female "reality tv characters" tend to be of a type. Tits out, extensions everywhere, tons of make-up, shouting and crying all the time. Male "reality tv characters" on the other hand tend more towards the eccentric and the weird and the "pathetic" (in the Greek sense) (like Jason or Alex) than their casting being looks or "drama" based. Obviously people from either category can be good business people, but I think you're more likely to get them drawing from the latter pool than the former, and the latter will come across more likable to a general audience.

Well to be fair, you can't really blame him for being wary of choosing female winners, because the women who have won the adult show - Michelle, Yasmina and Stella - haven't worked out, and the male winners generally have (although in all honesty, in the cases of Michelle and Stella, the fact that they were both women is really just an unfortunate coincidence. It's only Yasmina for whom being female was part of why she didn't work out, as she got pregnant on two occasions.)

He's clearly not sexist though, because as I said, even if some people don't count it, two out of the three winners of Young Apprentice were girls. Zara and Ashleigh were both great.

Michelle was also pregnant and I don't that he is bitter about Yasmina at all (with the other two it has been all over the press).

And personally, I don't see that the leaving soon (from the job) is anything related to being female. And don't forget the show is called the apprentice and not the job.

I think it's more that Susan and Helen really screwed up in the endgame, and Tom ended up winning by default since he had the most direct experience in running his own business (let's face it, Jim was never there to win, he was there to be told he was full of crap and fired first). If Susan had recognised the faults in her business plan instead of going on about how the interviewer didn't know what he was talking about, she would probably still have had a decent shot at winning.


Shocking to think that as absolutely useless as he was, Edward was the only male PM from that season who managed not to get whipped by at least a 2x-3x margin!

BIB I don’t remember that. Thought it was Susan’s projections which were rubbished but they couldn’t have been that diabolical for LAS to have invested in her.

I think that if Lord Sugar could choose Tom, but change his bad chair business to his nail file business, why couldn't he choose Helen but change her bad concierge business to a bakery business?

The women need to step up if they want to win, its as simple as that.

They've simply not been very good in the last couple of years despite having every opportunity to prove themselves.

Yeah, her financial figures were what they had problems with; other than that they actually said it was the best of the four plans, or at least on par with Tom's. Unfortunately she refused to back down on the figures twice (once with the interviewer, and then again with Lord Sugar, albeit not in an obnoxious manner), and while immediately backpedalling would probably have been an even worse mistake, it probably made her look too stubborn and naive to be worth investing in right away.


Tom's nail file business was already up and running (through struggling a little, IIRC), while the bakery business that Helen suggested was clearly something she'd thought of on the spot.

Well, Helen said that it was honestly her second business plan, and it was a tough choice between the two. Maybe I'm just too trusting, but I believed that.

'The women' arent an entity. They're ten individual women every series. The show's edited so what we're seeing isn't necessarily the truth of what's happening (see Susan Ma's comments on the French and their children taken out of context in S7), and also, the producers choose which women (which candidates, actually) go through to the live shows at all.

It has got very reality tv in recent years. Grates on me a little and its why I've stopped watching, it started off as a gameshow with reality tv elements and it seems to have morphed into a reality tv show with 'dramatic' moments. I honestly believe some of the humour used to come from unexpected moments between candidates who were chosen to clash but not necessarily chosen deliberately to make funny tv. Ever since the candidates have seemed to become tv-value over business-value the laugh out loud funny moments have kinda petered off for me.

Ironically the best thing about reality tv is unscripted funny moments whereas the show's seeming to become more and more regulated and candidates chosen by 'type' as you would tv show cast characters.

If outward appearances are true, from her website Susan has been very successful, and from her CV was verging on that when she appeared. She seems to be picking up awards for her products, and, if sales match, looks a big success. They seemed to turn her down because they had no proof of that at the time and she may have looked a bigger risk. There was zero risk with Tom. He had the product. And a patent. He had shown it could be sold to trade, it was low cost and, as it existed, he was needed to do very little - so other areas of competence didn't matter if it could be provided to him. A follow on product may have been a bonus.

It looks as if the winning proposal has to be in something that interests Lord Sugar, has decent figures, low risk, people he can stand and trust, and political and popular acceptability. He's also yet to go for something thats geographically distant. I think an awful lot of good proposals just don't make it to the end, or he's not interested in what they do, or he's already picked another winner for doing that. Looking at what they do, and websites at face value I suspect candidates like Laura, Uzma, Francesca or Zoe might be a good bet too for ayone who just wanted to invest money in anything.

You make a good point that Sugar tends to prefer low-risk investments. As I've said on another thread, one of the reasons for him rejecting Tom Gearing's wine hedge fund proposal last year was that he was concerned about the damage to his reputation if the fund failed and his name - which would have been a key marketing component for attracting investors - was attached to losing other people's money. That's fair enough. He's essentially a private investor, not a venture capitalist, and he wants a return - both financial and reputational - on his investment.

I doubt Tom Pellereau's Styl-Files are pulling up trees in terms of generating a stellar return - he doesn't have wide enough retail distribution for them - but I imagine it's producing steady gains which will eventually net Sugar a handy return. Susan's business has, I believe, a better chance of being a big success, but also a bigger chance of bombing spectacularly after some initial gains.

It's a basic rule of financial investment, really: if you want a bigger return, you have to accept a bigger risk. That's why keeping your money in the bank (safe) earns you a low rate of interest, whereas investing in the stock market (medium to high risk, depending) is more likely to return more in the long run, but you also run the risk of spectacularly bombing out. You spend your money, you make your choice.

I think it's quite possible that Leah could win, but it's not likely.

I agree, I think the funniest things are there when they're not set up. One of my all-time favourite moments in The Apprentice is the TV selling task in Series 1, when Saira shows James the wolf-jacket she has got, and neither of them can stop laughing! It's so funny, you laugh along with them and you're laughing even though no one has cocked anything up. You cannot choose people who are going to cause moments like that, they just happen when they happen...

I think if someone went up to Lord Sugar and said 'So you have to have a female winner this series don't you?' he'd probably give them a scathing look and bark 'Don't be so ridiculous'.

I don't think he'd let anyone think he bases his decisions on trivial things like that.
Plus, as has been mentioned, the last 2 winners of Young Apprentice were female so I bet he feels satisfied that he's not neglecting the females.