We've gone up to Series 6, so I thought we needed one for the first Junior Apprentice.

Week 1
Boardroom: Jordan, Rhys and Tim
Fired: Jordan
Should have been fired: Rhys

I actually felt quite sorry for Jordan in this one. When I first saw it I hated him and wanted him to go, but whenever I have watched it back I always think he's not as bad as I remembered. He was very arrogant, but on performance I didn't think he deserved to go. The mistake that he made was rushing in to be PM so quickly that he hadn't really thought about it, and it took him a while to find his feet. However, he did find his feet, and the team admitted that as the day went on his leadership got a lot better. I think that that, in addition to his really astonishing achievements on the outside, should have been enough to get him another chance. Rhys, on the other hand, was always complaining about things and didn't really show much of anything. He suggested the wrong location, but he had good reasons for that, so I'd forgive that. However, he didn't seem like a good salesman, he didn't seem to contribute very much and I think rather than whining about the leadership, he could have put more effort into actually helping the team to win.

Week 2:
Boardroom: Adam, Hibah and Zoe
Fired: Hibah
Should have been fired: Hibah and Adam

Hibah hadn't really impressed in either of the tasks, despite her PM win the previous week, so there was no point in keeping her on. However, I don't think that there is any way Adam should have stayed. I thought he was a really bad PM, completely lost control of things, claimed to know more about camping than he actually did and as a result made poor decisions, and brought Zoe into the boardroom when she was not at all responsible for the loss (I think Emma should have been brought back for suggesting the cardboard). I agree with the firing of Hibah, but I don't think losing Adam would have been any great loss.

Week 3:
Left: Adam. To be honest, I think he was lucky to still be there this week, so I don't feel especially sad that he lost out there.
Boardroom: Hannah, Rhys and Tim
Fired: Rhys
Should have been fired: Rhys

Rhys was an obvious decision in my book. I don't think he was a very good team leader at all. I appreciate that Hannah and Tim made some jibes about him which may not have been very professional, but I don't think that they intended them to be as victimising as Rhys took them, and he allowed them to wind him up so much that he couldn't actually lead the task. Or maybe he just wasn't a very capable candidate anyway - after all, he didn't impress me at all in the previous tasks. I felt that he was very out of his depth compared to the calibre of the other candidates, and there was no way to justify keeping him on. Also, I didn't understand his constant assertions that his height put him at a disadvantage - I didn't notice that he was particularly short. Arjun and Kirsty were both smaller than him, and it didn't seem to bother them.

Week 4:
Boardroom: Hannah, Kirsty and Tim
Fired: Hannah
Should have been fired: Hannah

This was a difficult one for me to decide on, as I genuinely liked Hannah and I thought she was quite a strong candidate. As Tim had proved a really good PM, it was a toss-up between her and Kirsty. I actually thought that Kirsty was more responsible for the loss than Hannah, but Kirsty had been consistently strong on previous tasks. I rated Hannah, and I thought she was a great PM on Task 2, but I did think that she did come across a little bit more as Tim's right-hand woman than as a standout performer in her own right. Also, Kirsty hadn't had a chance to PM yet. It's close between the two of them, but I think that just clinches it.

Week 5:
Boardroom: Arjun, Emma and Zoe
Fired: Emma
Should have been fired: Emma

It was a bad week for Zoe, but she had proved herself to be one of the strongest candidates generally, as had Arjun. Emma wasn't dreadful, but she'd got off lightly in the past with cardboard-gate, and even though she had improved since then, I thought she went down again this week. I was genuinely shocked at how rude she was to the designers. Also, I felt that generally she wasn't quite strong enough to stand with the other four.

Week 6:
Teams: Arjun and Tim, Zoe and Kirsty
Winners: Boys
Series winner: Arjun
Should have won: Arjun

I think that Arjun was the right person to win. After a shaky start, Tim had improved a lot, but Arjun had been very strong from the start. He has been one of the few winners who really seemed like they were going to get it from the start, and did. Usually the original favourite gets sidetracked by someone else a bit, but I think it was always going to be Arjun or Zoe who won this series. Meaning no disrespect to Tim and Kirsty, they were both phenomenal, but the other two generally stood out more. Zoe also had some flaws, so I would have put Arjun above her.

it was 4 few years now and i still remember it clearly.
Loved this and i was a big Tim fan.
One of the funniest moments is the classic bit in the first ep about the wind - i just re watched it.
One of my fave lines has to be Tim's 'Wind is my least favorite weather type' Still cracks me up.

So, who would you have fired each week?

Ok, here goes

Week 1:
Boardroom:
Fired:
Should have been fired:

Week 2:
Boardroom: Adam, Hibah, Zoe
Fired: Hibah
Should have been fired: Adam.
Adam really wasn't a great PM. He was just so flustered, and had little organizational skills. Yes Hibah should have contributed more, but she wasn't directly responsible for the team's loss - Adam was.

Week 3:
Boardroom: Rhys, Tim, Hannah
Fired: Rhys
Should have been fired: Rhys
He contributed very little on the first two tasks, and on this occasion his management was shyte. He literally did f*ck all, and didn't organize his team at all.

Week 4:
Boardroom: Tim, Hannah, Kirsty
Fired: Hannah
Should have been fired: Hannah
As George said, this is a difficult one. They all had good reasons to go... Hannah really didn't perform very well on this task - she didn't sell very much, and when she did, she wasn't very good at it! She had kind of been carried this far by Tim.

Week 5:
Boardroom: Arjun, Emma, Zoe
Fired: Emma
Should have been fired: Emma
Another difficult one, I think. I feel the best three left were on the same team. All had negative points, but I feel Emma had shown the least during the process.

Week 6:
Teams: Arjun & Tim and Zoe & Kirsty
Who should have won: Zoe & Kirsty
I know that Arjun & Tim had a better concept for their water, I think that Zoe and Kirsty had been better candidates collectively throughout the sries, particularly Zoe.
Who should have won: Zoe
Why? I feel she had been at the forefront of the series - she had excelled in everything... Yes, she'd be a nightmare to work with, but I am sure that's not what she'd want to money for... eg. I think she'd set up a business or something. She had excelled in pitching, creativity, sales the lot really.

No comments for Week 1?


The problem is that you can't say that the winning team from that task will be the two people who have a chance at winning and then just choose the team that has generally done better throughout the series. It's not fair to keep two people on, make them work really hard on the task when they have no chance of winning it anyway. Actually I don't agree with the overall concept of this task, as I don't think it's fair to eliminate people on the grounds of just one task - it's not quite as brutal as the semi-finals of Young Apprentice Series 2, but I think the winners of a task-based final should not be clear-cut.

I agree. I am not so sure about four-person finals where they had to do a task... They just didn't really work...

It would normally either be really obvious which team was going to win, or which person on the winning team would be hired (or both).

Eg. In Series 4, It was obvious Claire and Lee would be the winning team.
And In JA, it was obvious that either Arjun would win over Tim, or Zoe would win over Kirsty.
And IN YA3, it was obious Maria and Patrick would lose...


And about Week 1, I think Rhys should have been fired... he was just too obnoxious, and was only questioning the strategy AFTER the decisions had been made.

That isn't why I don't think they work. I just don't think that people should be arbitrarily eliminated based on one task. Imagine if in a two-person final, the winner was the person who managed the winning team, and there was no other discussion. That would just be rubbish, as it should be based on the whole process. I don't know why they didn't have different teams in Series 4 and YA3. It would have been awkward choosing a winner if the other team had won. (Having said that, I did like and rate Patrick, and I thought he was a considerably stronger candidate than he was made out to be.) The teams for JA1 were more well-matched.

I'm not so sure that Zoe would have beaten Kirsty actually. She was exceptionally strong in certain areas (sales and pitching), but had had a few bad weeks - she had a bad week in Week 5, for example. Kirsty hadn't shone as much in specific areas as much as Zoe had, but she was very consistent throughout. She seemed pretty competent across the board, straight-talking, she'd only really made one mistake in the series (when she was pitching to the art people in Week 4) and also she had PM'd a record-breaking win the previous week. I'm not saying she would definitely have won, but I don't think it was as clear-cut as it came across. It would have been less certain between them than it was between Tim and Arjun anyway. (And I know this is a little contrary to what I said in my initial post, but I've thought about it a bit more since then. Zoe had a better edit, but Kirsty was actually really competent.)

I totally agree with you - that's another reason why it just doesn't work.

Week 1 - Jordan. Tim and Rhys both made mistakes, but neither were really directly responsible for losing the task. Jordan got too many things wrong in his leadership role.

Week 2 - Adam. Simply because he didn't bring back Emma, who was responsible for the cardboard design of their furniture.

Week 3 - Rhys. He was just out of his depth, and couldn't deal with the stronger personalities on his team.

Week 4 - Hannah. It's true that Kirsty blew the negotiations with their artist, but given how knowledgeable Zoe was on the other team I don't think Tim or Hannah would have done any better. Of the three on the team, Hannah had slipped into the background on the last two tasks, so she was really the one who needed to go.

Week 5 - Emma. One or two mistakes by Arjun and Zoe on the task, but Emma was pretty easily the weakest person left on either team.

Week 6 (task) - Arjun and Tim's team deserved to win. It was a close call, but Arjun and Tim seemed more on the ball with their market research, whereas Kirsty and Zoe read too much of their own (particularly Zoe's) tastes into what they ended up producing.

Week 6 (winner) - Arjun deserved to win. Tim had started doing well by the end, but he left it too late to start shining, whereas Arjun was pretty consistent from Day 1.

Incidentally, does anyone else remember the BBC News website's little cock-up on the day of the final episode? As I recall it was broadcast opposite a pretty significant World Cup match, and so several people went to the news website to check up on general events after the match, only to be greeted with a gigantic headline reading "ARJUN HAS WON THE JUNIOR APPRENTICE!!!", which needless to say caused a lot of gnashing of teeth.