Hello!

I'm posting the link a little earlier than usual this week, as I'm going to be tied up with the DSA pitch at the time I normally do it. It's time for another Apprentice re-watch, and this week, it's Series 1, Episode 4 - The Harrods Sales. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6-li92Rjk

Jack (TXF0429) will be opening the discussion at nine. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to take part tonight - as I said, we have the end of a DSA task, so how much time I have really depends on whether or not my team wins the task (fingers crossed!) For reasons that I won't go into for people who haven't seen it, this episode has a much shorter boardroom session than usual. For this reason, I believe that you see more of the task on this episode than on any other across the series. I might be wrong on that, but I think it's a reasonable hunch.

Enjoy the show!

Hello everyone!

The fourth person to depart from the competition was

Spoiler

Adele

Were you surprised by the manner of their exit? Do you think that they deserved to go?

James was PMing for the first time, whilst Tim became PM for the second time in the competition, the earliest ever someone has PMed a second time. How do you feel they performed?

How did you find the supporting characters, like Marigay McKee?

Do you think that Impact deserved the victory overall or could First Forte have reason to be aggrieved? Were there any other candidates that impressed or disappointed you at all?

Who are your favourite and least favourite candidates at this stage of the competition?

This episode probably shows the most amount of task time in the history of the show. Do you like this much task time or should there be more boardroom analysis?

As ever these are merely just starting points for discussion. If there are other topics, feel free to raise them and even if you haven't seen the episode today, feel free to join in. The more the merrier!

Adele was obviously going to go in this task; Sir Alan said as much. It's interesting to think about who would have been the other person in the boardroom if they'd got to that stage though. Ben or Sebastian, I reckon.

A very good task for Saira and James, but a poor one for Paul. He was funny in the Rosie Bear costume, but he did a very bad job on the figures. Up until this point, he's seemed like a strong performer, I think this was the task that he started to go downhill. He would surely have been if the boardroom had they lost.

First Forte came very close to winning. As Marigay said, 'One full shopping bag could make the difference at the end of the day' and it did. Although it did seem a little unfair, as Impact seemed to be getting a lot more specific help than First Forte were.

I liked Marigay! She seemed like a really nice woman, and she seemed to appreciate the fun aspect. I actually have a friend who quoted her 'Teeth make smiles, and smiles make sales' quote at a job interview - and she got the job! Honestly, out of all the Apprentice quotes to use at a job interview, you could do a lot worse.

I really liked seeing more of the task. I like this episode a lot.

Definitely would have been Ben in my view, in spite of Tim sticking up for him as he was the only one, apart from Adele, that made any tangible mistakes by stopping selling halfway through the day. An argument could have been made that he cost the task considering the narrow margin of defeat.


Definitely James's best task so far, I think he was a very good PM (but not as good as Tim but I'll come onto that) He seemed to be critical when it was deserved (as with Paul and the figures) but also gave out praise when it was due (as with Saira and her excellent figures). Saira had another good episode, but that's nothing new. I thought Paul had a decent edit initially with the Rosie Bear thing, but come to think of it he made quite a few very arrogant and quite malicious comments about Adele and First Forte so it was firmly a mixed edit I'd say. His friendship with Saira is very intriguing considering what happens later. Interesting that



That was something I noticed a lot on a second viewing. It seemed rather unfair that Impact got all this extra help with more demonstration lines. First Forte had the insight to actually think about what would attract customers and I think that they deserved the victory overall actually considering they all sold well, got the face-painter and the piano and got their product list in on time unlike Impact. I thought Tim was really good this episode and he deserved to go 2-0 up (as a PM).


This is very interesting to me as I specifically mentioned it because I didn't like Marigay at all to be honest. She seemed (to me) to play up to the cameras and was critical for the sake of it. "I would fire anyone who would produce this as a table" was such a lie. The thing which really annoyed me (apart from the Floppy Dog thing, which quite clearly wouldn't traumatise a small child...) was how she tried to get First Forte to move when they were deciding their products. It shouldn't be her role to do that. If First Forte wanted to make their decisions like that, then that's their choice.


Me too. I forgot just how many decent episodes were in Series 1 actually!

It did seem that Impact got a lot of extra help, and that did seem unfair. Thinking about how that worked, it makes me wonder whether Adele did have a point about Sean/Shaun (can't remember how it was spelt) being difficult to work with after all. She mentioned that he said he'd be able to give them advice after nine, and then after nine he didn't give any advice... it's the only thing I can think of, because the other team did get a lot more help than they did.

Yes, I know you didn't like Marigay, I seem to recall you mentioning it on another thread. She was obviously exaggerating about certain things, but I like people like that. I think Saira does that kind of thing as well, and she's a very love her or hate her character - and we both love her! I think Marigay would be a great boss to work with. As for highlighting mistakes that they had made - maybe she shouldn't have done that, but I can't say I blame her. If I was in her position, I'd find it really hard to watch people totally mess up and not say anything, especially as she was quite a senior Harrods person, the customers probably wouldn't know that they weren't professionals and their mistakes could potentially harm Harrods' reputation.

[quote=george.millman;67910519]It did seem that Impact got a lot of extra help, and that did seem unfair. Thinking about how that worked, it makes me wonder whether Adele did have a point about Sean/Shaun (can't remember how it was spelt) being difficult to work with after all. She mentioned that he said he'd be able to give them advice after nine, and then after nine he didn't give any advice... it's the only thing I can think of, because the other team did get a lot more help than they did.

I will confess to having a certain amount of sympathy for Adele on this task. I certainly don't think she definitely deserved to go unlike last week. The Harrods staff appeared to be very unreasonable and frustrating. However, had I been in her situation, I wouldn't have voiced my concerns, if only because of what Sir Alan said outside Harrods as that's a sure-fire way to get fired, by contradicting his advice.


Hmm... I do see what you mean but the table and the Floppy Dog situation was utterly ridiculous. Certainly, I thought Impact's presentation was quite nice actually.

I don't think Adele really cared if she got fired by that point. In fact, I think she might have walked even if the team had won.


It wouldn't 'traumatise a child' in the way Marigay said, but it did look quite unprofessional just hanging there. It looked like not much thought had gone into it at all.

Yeah, that's a fair point. I don't think the experience was what she thought it would be and that, combined with the four straight losses just made her lose it a bit.


It was understandable though considering it was early in the morning and the candidates were under great time constraints to get the store ready for opening time. I thought she was a bit unforgiving. I'll have *SPOILERS* similar reservations about Matt House in five tasks time...

Although I quite liked Peter Hollison, the man who ran the Series 2 Cruise Ship task.

Matt House, I think we will agree on

Saira complained about Marigay being negative about their ideas, but actually at least she was giving suggestions of how to improve. The other team weren't getting any from their guy. You should count your blessings.

Watching back this series its interesting noting the little things that the program tried out, but then dropped.
We had them having to buy their own lunch in episode 1 - but that seems to have been dropped straight away. The gameplay of the boys not informing the girls about the phone call in episode 2 - can't recall anything like that ever happening again.
In episode 4 they got an update half way through the day on the sales. I suppose this has since been dropped so the drama can be maintained all the way through to the boardroom about who actually is ahead. It did look like First Forte were doing better but we found out this was not the case.
I thought the attempted gameplay over getting seed money for the site pretty pathetic - both sites were much the same so why on earth did they think the other team would pay for one over the other?

I've always though Sir Alun rather defensive and petulant over Adele's resignation - was he upset a mere minion took the decision out of his hands?

Possibly, but Sugar does like people who are up-front and honest about their mistakes, so I'm guessing he was a little annoyed that Adele refused to admit any fault in the way she dealt with the Harrods staff, tried to further dodge blame by pointing to her family problems as the cause of why she had done so badly up until that point, and then capped it off by playing the "You can't fire me because I quit!" card.

Funnily enough though, Adele was actually the only person who actually tried to assess what the team did wrong, while all the other First Forte members were saying "Oh, we all did well on the task, we were just a little unlucky to lose." Had Adele not quit however, doubtless that would have come back to bite her in the final boardroom, as Sugar would undoubtedly have been asking her why she took such a small role in the task when she had the most retail experience out of the group.

As an aside, I wonder what exactly Sugar meant when he said "Regardless of what Tim did, you were going to go," since there's the (admittedly VERY small) chance that Tim might not have brought her back. It could mean that either Sugar was giving Tim the benefit of the doubt and assuming he wouldn't be stupid enough to let Adele go (meaning that he meant Adele would have been fired regardless of who the third person in the final boardroom was, and presumably Tim himself would have been fired had he not brought her back) or whether he, as some have suggested, meant that he would have just fired Adele straight off, without even asking Tim who he wanted to bring back into the boardroom.

We don't know that these things didn't happen in future series; we only see a very small amount of what happens, after all. The things with the boys not telling the girls about the telephone call obviously wasn't something that the production team decided, that's just something that went on in the house.


I don't think Sir Alan would have fired Adele without asking Tim who to bring back. Firstly because I'm not sure he was allowed to in those days; the formula was a lot more rigid then, and he wasn't allowed double firings or anything, so I doubt he'd have been able to change the boardroom set-up on a whim. Even though he has more control though, we have seen that he very rarely uses it for anything other than double firings. There has only been one occasion in all the series (Jenny Celerier) that he has fired someone in the initial boardroom discussion. What I think he meant by that comment was that (assuming Tim would have brought Adele back, which was very likely) she probably would have been fired despite how much Tim defended her. Earlier in that discussion, Tim was defending all the members of his team who were challenged, and he was given a very clear warning of, 'Don't dig a hole for yourself by being too nice and defending everyone else, because you're going to have to point the finger in a minute.' But Adele would surely have gone if she'd been brought back - unless Tim didn't bring her back, in which case he probably would have gone for not bringing her back.

I really like this episode. Seeing Paul and Saira get on so well is so lovely... too bad it wont last long.

I didn't find Adele too bad this episode, certainly not as bad as episodes 1 or 3. She has some of my sympathy because of her situation but I'd agree with her firing should she not have walked.

I think both Tim and James led the task well, all went fairly smoothly and hiccups were dealt with quickly.

I have just caught up with this -sorry I'm late.

I definitely prefer more time spent covering the task and less on boardroom bickering.

I did notice how Impact were given specific advice when they asked for it. I think Sean was abiding by his instructions to highlight issues but not give answers, while other staff members were being little more flexible. It feels as if in later series sessions with the experts have been more carefully controlled with appointments during preparation time only. Somewhere like Harrod's cannot risk leaving a team to totally mess up which is probably why locations tend to be more generic nowadays.

Despite the fact that Adele may have had some justification for feeling lack of support from Harrod's staff, she possibly prompted this by her aggressive attitude and demanding manner. She did seem confrontational rather than building rapport.

Tim seems to be getting much more attention in the edit than I remembered. I had the feeling that he flew under the radar for a lot of the show when I first watched, but it was not true. I probably got more caught up with the louder characters such as Saira at the time.

They all wear different outfits in every boardroom. At what stage did they start having to wear the same all through the series ?

In reply to the final paragraph, I think it might have been series 5, bit they stopped doing it this year for sure

The only time I have really noticed it was with Zara, because she wore a very distinctive outfit to the boardrooms. At first I thought it was a little odd that she kept wearing the same white dress, but then I read somewhere that everyone wears the same outfits to the boardrooms.

It was commented a lot with Zoe in the first young apprentice as she was wearing some sailor type outfit - then people noticed all the others were doing the same. Certainly been true of adult apprentice since too.

Only series eight and the Young Apprentice. Think it's been flexible every other series. Series nine definitely changed each week, and so did series seven.

Finally caught up with this episode, glad I did as it's the first time I've seen it and was one of the best.
Impact getting extra help from Harrods was odd and imo very wrong as it changed the result, they would certainly have lost big time.
Lot of Saira love on here, I find her annoying. She does get results though.
Thought both team leaders were good would give Tim the clear edge.
Without Harrods staff giving Impact that big helping hand, they would have lost, Adele would have lived to fight another day, and possibly Paul would have gone.

I think that as the Harrods staff are not involved in the competition, it's not reasonable to expect that they will give no help at all. After all, it is their shop, the customers won't know about The Apprentice and it could look bad on them if one of the teams badly screws up.