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If he'd shouted his boring pitch at me the way he did with one of the shops, I'd have told him to do one.

Ugh, can't stand him when he says that.

Did he? He messed up yesterday with his zzzzzzz fest pitch!

Hardly messed up when his pitch earned the team 2500 orders and won it for them.

Something has been nagging me about Neil throughout.

He has been shown in numerous situations / clips selling himself to death with that serious face.

I have been waiting for him to break the spell; say something like, 'Nah, don't worry, I'm only kidding'.

But nothing. No cracking of the visage / image.

Then he gets his 12 minutes of fame on You're Fired' and there are only feint smidgens of the usual mickey take. Why?

In fact, Dara talks to him as if he's a little boy who has failed to get selected for his borough football team.

While I am all for a compassionate and empathetic and respectful handling of the candidates on this show (every time Ruby Wax starts on people, I want to reach in to the screen and drag her out), what were they afraid of?

Is Cloughie actually a very brittle individual whose fierce, single minded promotion of self is just a facade to disguise a poor self esteem and actually a complete lack of real grounded confidence?

Maybe, if this is the case, I might give him a chance as overall, his full on self marketing has made him out to be arrogant, self obsessed and overall, insufferable.

I'm afraid to admit it but I experience a degree of schadenfreude when he got his comeuppance.

PS And what's with all the short, tight fitting jackets - Brand Clough?

I too noticed that there was a different tone to Neil's interview than any of the other candidates on You're Fired. It was like Dara and the panellists were afraid to take the mickey like they normally do because they knew Neil would react badly to it. It reminded me a bit of an Alex Ferguson post-match interview after Man United had lost, where interviewers didn't dare ask him questions that they would routinely ask other managers. It makes me think Neil must just be really abrasive 24/7.

These do my head in in my place of work. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but suit jackets should be longer than sweatshirts imo.

it was the business guests reaction that was odd, she seemed to be in love with Neil

Indeed - a bit OTT.

Do the women fancy him?

Karrren Brady added just a tad too much 'ooh' when she relayed how the audience in the management training task, 'r e a l l y liked you'.

Was that another way of saying, 'I r e a l l y like you'?

With the business woman on YF, it was almost adulation.

And he didn't flinch.

Reckon he's a tightly wrapped individual who does not feel comfortable showing his emotions.

All that stuff about his dad attempting to make him / help him (???) become a professional footballer. Pushy dad syndrone??? Young footballer gets afraid of making a mistake for fear of incurring the wrath of his Alan Ball Snr dad for whom nothing is ever quite good enough???

'Show belief, son'.

'Yes dad'.

Yeah I found Neil and the reactions to him throughout the whole show to be a bit odd really. Maybe they didn't do a good job in the editing of him or something, because he came across as humourless, ultra-serious and big headed, yet in the boardroom and on YF he was bigged up like he was the most perfect person ever.

I think we need to bear in mind that there's a need to exaggerate the differences between candidates so that we as viewers can put the relevant labels on them so we don't get confused. So Jordan became 'the obnoxious one', Luisa is 'the game-player', Leah is 'the Doctor', Francesca was 'the fair one' and Neil was 'the guy we loved to hate but eventually loved'. Consequently these aspects of their personalities get played up in the edit and subsequently on YF, where they're reacting to much the same material as us.

Neil was clearly one of the key redemption arcs of this season (Luisa is the other), almost in the mode of the classic flawed hero. (Karren Brady hinted as much when she mentioned an unnamed male candidate on YF in week 3, but I thought she meant Alex initially.)

All we saw initially was the pushiness and arrogance, what we later saw was someone who was willing to listen to feedback and then change, then we understood his motivation and the reason for his intense focus (his dad), and finally we saw that his core strength (his unshakeable self-belief) was actually his fatal flaw, as he refused to alter his business plan.

We were always meant to dislike him at first before joining him on his path to redemption, so that we felt sympathy for him after his downfall. This arc appeals to many viewers - but not to all.

Very true.

However, while the editing can lie as well as position people in certain ways, I'm not sure it lies completely????

Really, it is a massive orchestration exercise (sounds painful ) as evidenced by often, how normal the candidates are in YF.

Neil did smile and laugh a bit and was very honest.

But all that stuff about letting everyone down - I can't help get back to what must have created all of that feeling that he has to deliver so much all the time.

We are complex beasts, that's for sure.

I noticed that lady was almost tearful with emotion about him, and he looked close to tears as well.

Yep. It may be unscripted (well, mostly), but there's always very little 'real' about any form of reality TV. Proper reality, whether it's The Apprentice or Big Brother or whatever, tends to be quite mundane.