It had a weird vibe to it.It almost seemed like james was reading from a script.It was a bit too much panto villain.At one point when he was being an asshole to Rosin at the lawnmower place,i was expecting him to grin and wink at the camera.Also,are we to believe the subject of him saying the wrong name did not come up since it happened,until the boardroom.i don't believe it.

If i was cynical and knew how reality tv worked these days i would say they knew he was entertainment value from early on.they knew they had to keep him for a while to entertain/annoy us, so they protected him in final 3,with the understanding between him and producer that they would set him up for a big fall majorly later on,crank his nastiness up to 10 perhaps feeding him a few lines along the way..........the apprentice gets a talking point and james gets more tv time/media exposure/a few quid in return...

to keep myself watching,as i like the show,ill convince myself the above would never happen and there was nothing dodgy about it,but was there?

Also,while i am venting,and to prevent a new thread.Why do they insist in showing that opening sequence,with clips from future shows.it is easily deducted who was not fired from some of them,as their scene has not appeared yet.

It seemed really fake that no one knew James lied about the hot tub/lawnmower loss until the boardroom. Surely they didn't go straight from the Somerset trade show to the boardroom? I'm sure the others would have asked more about it back at home before the boardroom.

Also, did the two subteams stay at different hotels/places after the first day? James seems not to have encountered the other half of his team until they all arrived at the show, even though it was the day after they negotiated which items to sell.

With regards to him having been kept in for entertainment, I would point out that he was actually only in the final boardroom once, and that was back in Week 3, so there haven't been that many chances to get rid of him. It was heavily implied that he would have been fired in Week 5 had Sanjay brought him back.

I know that Lord Sugar can fire people without them being brought back, as he did with Robert and Lindsay, but that is a very, very rare occurrence, and prior to this series had only happened on one previous occasion.

Seemed very odd to me as well. Unless he simply refused to talk to anyone until the boardroom, which does not seem to fit with his character.

Do you think anyone could hold a business converstation with James? Along with Daniel and Mark, I'm sure he spends most of his time taking about himself.

It was very weird, you'd think they'd of cornered Roisin at some point and asked "what the hell", but with him overriding the sub team's choices on products, perhaps they weren't that bothered and knew his time could be up.

Just got around to watching last week's show and, I gotta say, James reeked of petulance and insecurity.

The way he threw all his toys out of the pram when Roisin managed to flog a lawn-mower seemed eerily similar to the strop he threw at Bianca the other week.
... and then, when the smarmy brat finally managed to sell a mower himself, he was suddenly all smiles and high-fives.

As I've already said, I really don't understand why so many spiv's and wide-boys think they're "businessmen".
Sure, I can see James selling novelty phone covers and plastic dog turds on a market stall, and possibly doing very well out of it but, seriously, can anybody see him being able to deal with, say, a planning meeting to address environmental issues related to building a new factory, carrying out risk-assessments, coming up with marketing strategies or doing any of the other stuff that real managers actually do every day?

Frankly, I bet my Spaniel, Ollie, could make just a good a job of it all.
And he'd roll over on his back so people could tickle his tummy.

S'funny, at the start of this episode, I was starting to think "y'know, I guess I do admire his straightforwardness" but then, almost immediately, he spent the rest of the show being a complete and utter nobber.

Incidentally, I was just googling to remind myself of Bianca's name and stumbled across THIS article.

So, Dan's gone from driving a Mini to buying a Ferrari 458 Spyder and having a £200,000 wedding?
Hope that doesn't mean AS gave him the money for it.

I know what the OP means about it seeming weird, but I think what we saw was just a massive explosion of egotism, the likes of which we really haven't seen before, even on a programme as full of Alpha-idiots as The Apprentice.

James, once given the PM role, decided (maybe even pre-decided) to follow a course whereby a win would be shown to be 100% his achievement, with no credit due to anyone else, hence his stomping on the sub-team's choice of products (sight unseen!), his attitude towards Roisin (very overtly rejecting every offer of help/advice), and even depriving his teammates of information...

If James' team had somehow won, he could (and undoubtedly would) have quite reasonably have gone on to claim the whole win as "his", and hence cast himself in LS's mind as the instinctive maverick talent he clearly imagines himself to be...

As things actually went, we saw the edifice start to crumble early on when he forgot the hot-tub guy's name, and hence the concession to sell the best big-ticket item, which was when he started laying into Roisin in earnest... in a way it was on the verge of being a "psychotic break", when someone deluded is confronted with reality, and has no coping mechanism to fall back on, except more lies...

The Apprentice is what one would call a "staged" reality show.

Some scenes are created for our entertainment.

Yeah I agree... There's no way that they weren't aware of what happened until that point, and the 'reveal' was clearly set up and not very well executed by James either.

It's the first time I've doubted the pure 'reality' element of the Apprentice which makes me sad. I mean of course there's a large amount of selective editing for comedic and entertaining effect, and the 'board room' is not real etc, but this is completely different. Disappointing

I think he simply went over the board because he believed that since he got away with it a few times in the board room, Sugar liked what he had been doing so far. He was a dick from the start so his ego going out of control didn't come a surprise.

What are you actually suggesting happened?

Well I assume he's implying that the team already knew that he'd screwed up the hot tub deal, and it was a staged reveal in the Boardroom.

To the poster this is the 2nd time (if you believe this time) that James has been the subject of a "staged" accusation. I made the other day when they got the trip to NY, he would of known maybe days/months in advance that a trip to the US was on the cards, as he would of had to apply for a VISA.

I suppose, but I don't see why it was necessarily so unlikely for it to be genuine.

James does not seem to have a huge amount of common sense, so would he have told the team after the day was over? I don't find him to have a great amount of humility. Roisin would tell the truth, but Solomon and the others presumably would only ask her if they already suspected there to be foul play at work, and I don't think she'd blab to them if they didn't ask her outright, as that would basically just be bitching and she's too professional for that. Besides, if by some stretch of the imagination the production team asked them to pretend, I don't see why James would go along with it. It didn't especially present him in the best light, did it? Why would you fake something that would harm your reputation?

It did seem a little odd initially that the discussion within the team never took place, but I tend to agree with your interpretation. James kept his mouth shut because he thought he might get away with it in the boardroom (especially if they'd won), and Roisin didn't feel it was her place to break the news because it would then look as if she had been telling tales behind his back. From her perspective, much better for her to let the truth come out that way it did.

If you think about it, the bigger surprise was that the teams weren't sure of the results. I mean, I know there were the finance checks and everything to clear first, but given that Tenacity had sold 10 hot tubs, you'd have thought that there'd have been some discussion among all the candidates back at the house overnight that would have suggested that it was unlikely to be a good boardroom for Summit. Or maybe the teams are asked not to discuss the task amongst themselves until after the boardroom?

I suspect a reason the boardroom discussion felt artificial may have been because Bianca, Sanjay and Solomon had already worked out amongst themselves that James was lying about having made a decision not to go for the hot-tubs, but were hamming up a shocked reaction to make him look even worse.

As a sidebar, someone got fired on The Apprentice USA for telling the opposition how much their team had made prior to the Results Boardroom but after the task had finished. Nothing to do with our version necessarily (although I wouldn't be surprised if teams were told not to discuss specifics prior to the official reveal), just a sign of how effing stupid that programme got.

You would assume the boardroom took place the day after the show, so unless the teams are kept apart, you'd think they would of mentioned the hot tub sales, but then they don't know if the credit went through, so perhaps they keep quiet so as not to look a plonker should they fail the credit checks.

But with that in mind, you'd of thought, either the other team or at least the sub team would of asked James "hey why didn't you go for the hot tubs", because he said "I decided not to go for them", not that the guy turned him down. Especially with Mark and James being quite pally.

Ah, interesting, thanks! A salutary lesson of the dangers of tinkering with the format too much - or allowing Trump the freedom to basically make up the rules as he went along ...

FWIW, Nick seemed to be suggesting it was all fairly genuine, judging by his comments on YBF.

I mean, he could've just criticised James for being slippery if it was all a set-up but, instead, he expanded on it by saying how he thought James was hoping his team might win and he wouldn't have to admit it'd all been a cock-up.

Personally, I think that fits with the attitude James had displayed throughout the series.
He likes being "the main man" and he really doesn't like it when anybody else overshadows his achievements so admitting he'd screwed up and cost the team their golden goose wouldn't have been his style.

And, the whole thing about not wanting the team to be demotivated was, of course, just retrospective rationalisation rather than a genuine concern.
The guy is a total bullshit artist.

They would all have had to know at least 72 hours before to apply for their ESTA to enter the U.S. James has a criminal record so he may have required further and longer checks.

^^ Yeah, we never came to an absolute answer for this on the thread in which we discussed this point. He would of needed a VISA and maybe Felipe (not sure on Columbia's status).

Felipe's Colombian-born but do we know what passport he has? Could be has been in the UK for much of his life and taken British citizenship. He certainly did his university education in the UK (Kent then Oxford).

Opps how could I forget he went to Oxford, oh I know that bloody awful talk he did, must of fell asleep...lol

Looks like he completed his secondary education in Colombia, then moved to university in the UK. So probably not a British citizen is my guess.

He did his law degree at Kent (where he got first class honours) and then a one-year Bachelor of Civil Law (where he got a distinction). Of course, he could be lying about his grades, but as a professional lawyer he's much more likely to be telling the truth. He's also worked for two law firms that are well known enough that I recognise their names. He's clearly a very smart chap, but of course academic/intellectual smarts does not necessarily make a good entrepreneur.

Anyhow, there are more details on both his LinkedIn profile and his personal website. Just like in the programme, he refers to himself in the third person!

I read an interview with someone (I think it was Yasmina) and it said that on the tasks, the producers are really good at keeping the teams apart from each other. On the design tasks, they never know what the other team has done until the boardroom.