Well, that's the thing. Up until Week 6, both Paul and Saira looked like very likely winners, and they completely screwed up Task 6, their personal disagreement seeming to be one of the main reasons. If Lord Sugar was very interested in both of them (and he apparently was) it would be in everyone's best interests for them to be split up. Whereas with candidates like Katie and Adam in Series 3, there wouldn't be much point in doing that, because I think Adam was on his way out anyway, and Katie wasn't bothered in the slightest by him.

Anyway, how do we know that that hasn't happened in a later series? They don't usually say the reasons that people are being moved, it could have happened since. I felt that there was a bit of that in Series 8 when Katie was moved over to the boys' team in Week 3, as she had been ganged up on a bit by the girls.

As someone who watched the first 2 series live on BBC2, I think that both Tim and Michelle were the deserved winners in their respective series (the BBC 1 series only produced Yasmina as a winner on that level). Never understood the hatred that some people have had for Michelle (as for being the most undeserved winner......uhhmm Tom, Simon, Lee.......really???).

I didn't hate her, I just didn't think she was right for it. Firstly, I thought that Ruth and Ansell were both stronger than her, and secondly I felt, rightly or wrongly, that she wanted the job more for the personal achievement than because she actually wanted to work with Sir Alan. She ended up leaving after a couple of months. I think that Nick picked up on that, but I think Alan Sugar went for her because of her sob story and because she was charming and pleasant, and I think he probably regretted it afterwards. I think he was definitely thinking of her in his 'No one's going to make a fool out of me!' speech in Series 3.

Ok I have to put in here, in Tom's defense he just got very unlucky and was actually a very credible winner imo. Sure he wasn't necessarily particularly strong in voicing himself but he had to work with difficult characters who at the end of the day refused to listen to a voice of reason. If it had still been a job on offer then he wouldn't have got as far as he did but as a business partner he did have credibility which very few of the others that year really had. Even Helen didn't have as much credibility as a business partner as Tom which is why he won it in the end. The only person who was really anywhere near close was Susan.

I have to say that of all the series I've seen (1-3 and 7 onward) Tom's year had the weakest male candidates overall, sorry as entertaining as Jim was he was not credible at all imo. As for Saira and Paul I don't think she should have gotten to the final in the first place but that's neither here or there they clearly couldn't get on professionally and to stop them from sabotaging the next task Lord Sugar would have split them up and as has been mentioned before its probably happened since they just don't necessarily put it into the edit.

I completely agree. He was unlucky to be on the losing team a lot, but in fairness to him he was very rarely brought into the final boardroom - in fact he lost the first five tasks, and was not one of the final three in any of them. I think that a lot of the time, being on the losing team but not being brought back is more impressive than being on the winning team - if you're on the winning team you might just have been lucky. If you're on the losing team, but aren't brought into the boardroom, you must at least have been impressive enough individually to escape.

Yeah he was brought into the boardroom once the entire series (I did a quick wiki search of when he was in the boardroom), the rest of the time he was in there by default either for being the losing project manager or because there were 3 or less people in the team. The one task where he was really in line to get fired he was let off by the skin of his teeth and though he then lost yet again the next week he was least to blame for the loss and so was let off allowing him to go on to win it deservingly albeit with a lot of luck.

Although I did think that he should have been brought into the boardroom on Week 4, because he focussed on selling the products when he had been brought down to the sales floor specifically to promote the treatments because they weren't getting enough notice, but I didn't think he should have been fired for that.