Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention but did they actually go to a department store to pitch their products? I got the impression that they were filmed in an unfurnished, unmarked office with two people who weren't ever introduced as being from a specific company. Did I just miss the bit where they explained who they were?

I always assumed these were people roleplaying, who have those jobs in real life but take some time off to film this.

They said John Lewis. An hours advertising free on BBC1, you aren't going to turn that down

True, but yesterday they filmed people from JD Sports and Firebox in what looked like their company offices, plus two unidentified guys in a random room. I just wondered why.

edit - OK, if they said John Lewis I'm clearly mistaken.

The BBC have rules around how prominent any brand can be in a programme - otherwise it is tantamount to free advertising.

Typically on The Apprentice this means you will hear the store (John Lewis, in this case) mentioned by name once with perhaps a flash of the store logo, and then they are referred to generically as "the department store" or "the supermarket chain" or whatever. It also means that whatever meeting rooms they are filmed in are cleared of anything that obviously bears the company logo, such as stationery, posters and such like. Occasionally you will even see where production team members have taped over logos to blank them out.

I wasn't paying particular attention to it, but I don't think JD Sports or Firebox were mentioned by name more than once or twice - didn't they then become something like "the sporting goods retailer" and "the online retailer"?

Fair enough, I must have missed the mention of JL.

I do think that viewers sometimes need visual cues to be sure of what's going on. Like the teeshirt printer was in a printer's office, the zoo managers were by the penguin pool etc. Maybe John Lewis buyers always work in empty offices, but it looked wrong to me.

It's a good point, but I'm assuming they used a conference room at their central London head office or possibly one of their flagship stores - I can't remember what exterior establishing shot, if any, was used - which had been stripped down to be logo-free for the purposes of filming. But given that the narration told us it was JL, that really ought to be enough.

They looked incredibly young to be buyers for a major department store.

If it was on Channel 5, that room would have been John Lewis branded to within an inch of its life!!!

Explains the skinny jeans o plenty against the lack of boot cut for us older folks!