I mean they were just completely outclassed by just an all round better and more intelligent team. I can't believe future big brother contestant Solomon is still in the game. I can only laugh at how much of a farce it would be if he wins. Besides wearing that constant stupid ass grin on his face, what does he actually do? Sanjay is also pretty useless judging by recent tasks. Lord Sugar has unfortunately ruined this task.

Sanjay is great and well fit. Roisin negotiated the best of everyone in the whole process. Bianca seemed competent with good suggestions. What's your actual point?

Unfortunately all the big hitters bar Roisin were in the other team and Sugsy had it in for them.

As for incompetence, Sanjay was on that team which says it all.

Sanjay was clearly the worst candidate this week. Solomon was dreadful as well.

Surprisingly Bianca did well

Bianca seemed to be the only good one this week

Sanjay and Solomon werent too good. Sanjay would definately have been fired if not for the skeleton mishap. I reckon Solomon is gone next week

Bianca seemed most competent on the 'winning' team - though she would've been vulnerable for a firing as she didn't often manage to get her correct insights over.
Roisin was surprisingly poor - not listening to Bianca over sourcing the diamond and then wasting two and a half hours to reach the conclusion Bianca had told her at the start. Roisin was so, so lucky that she met the most love-struck diamond dealer in Hatton Garden!
Sanjay and Soloman were just ineffective eye-candy on this task.

Yes I think lord sugar has possibly picked his top three or maybe even the winner and they are all on last nights "winning team" and he didn't want to run the risk of having to fire someone he didn't want to.
So that's why he unfairly Imo fined the loosing team so much to make them loose.

They're not even eye candy!

But then you could say that about any time any candidate has sold something - they were so lucky to meet the right person at the right time and said the right thing to them. I don't think Sugar takes 'luck' into consideration because if a candidate gets the job done, putting it down to luck is a bit unfair. (More unfair than disregarding a paper skeleton lol)

Like with Mark on the last task selling to the guy who needed 7 hot tubs, just how much did Mark do exactly?
Technically these tasks are all about luck. On a different day there may have been a different result depending on who the candidates got to meet.

Yes, fair point. But that just reiterates the two aspects of TA that I find rather disquieting:

1) There is absolutely no reward for giving a good service to clients so they will want to come back. James's beyond-atrocious behaviour on the coach tour was a case in point: he could claim credit for selling off the left-over crisps, but the fact that the clients had had a day from hell could not count against him (in the sense of contributing towards a team win).

2) One one-off nature of the tasks means that the winner can be determined by pure luck. Mark selling 7 hot tubs was a good example; and Roisin really didn nothing except look waif-like and pleading, and the diamond merchant gave her a price that the other team would never have been given even if they had started ritually disembowelling themselves.

Daniel's team performed leagues better than the "winning" team, even including the fines etc they still should have won for performance alone.

But isn't this the case so often with the programme, that the team that wins is on money made alone, and nothing to do with integrity or quality?

Bianca did really well this week, without her I'm pretty sure they would have only the diamond, as Sanjay "Mr Logistics" was awful, and Solomon would still be there chatting to the skeleton in the shop.

Roisin seemed only to care about the diamond, she did an incredible deal there, but I felt that she lost interest once that was done.

Sanjay would have been out 100% had they not been so lucky. He barely survived last week.

But in this case the money issue was arbitrary as Lord Sugar just decided to whack a £320 fine onto a team on a whim.
Where did £320 come from?

It is the standard catalogue price for a skeleton (and it was 310). Standard procedure for this task.

Is it not £260? In previous years, the fine has been guide price plus £50.

Solomon seemed to have reverted to being 8 years old. I often like Roisin, but to be honest she didn't really do a deal at all over the diamond. She just sat looking pretty until the vendor rolled over to have his tummy tickled. Daniel was never going to pull off the same trick.

I agree mostly with what you say, but I liked her directness to start with, she went under 50% of the original price leaving room for bartering. The guy was total putty, but I was impressed that in all the years of hearing how you set your stall out by mentioning a figure she actually bartered herself down to lower prices.

Daniel was of course never going to be able to do the flirty thing, but as I said on a different thread, he may have annoyed the dealer in the first place by the whole "I'm getting married" rubbish and treating him as a mug.

Oh god, yes. Cringe. I do find Daniel fantastically awkward. I am trying not to be gratuitously unkind, but he always looks sulky, and his way of talking about himself sounds like someone trying to get into an in group that doesn't want him.

I am 99.9% certain that Sanjay or Daniel will be fired next week. Sanjay was awful!

He did seem all of a dither.

And I always think in these treasure-hunt tasks that you MUST avoid wasting time in the morning, when the traffic is relatively clear. I appreciate that you can't get the task and run out of the door without a word, but EVERY TIME at least one team gets stuck miles away in solid tea-time traffic.

Sanjay seems completely clueless to me.

I assume he's going for an "enthusiastic" look on his face but, to me, he always looks like he's got no real idea what's going on and he's desperately trying to work it all out.