Have to admit I found all the fawning over Mark in last night's episode a bit sickening. Yes, Mark was a good and strong candidate, but he was also a gameplayer throughout, setting up Daniel, Lauren and others for falls, manouvering himself into strong positions by playing on the sympathies of the easy-to-manipulate candidates like Felipe and Katie, turning team members against the outsider, and generally making sure to cover his own arse first at all times.

I don't know a) why Nick and Karren didn't see through this or pull him up for it; particularly after Karren made that snide comment to Sanjay last week or b) why the edit made him out to be such a gameplayer and manipulative person; when knowing that he was the eventual winner. The edit seemed to be setting Roisin up for the win every week with focus perhaps shifted to Bianca's qualities in the last few weeks - if it was meant to be a 'shock' win I don't think it was edited very well.

A strong candidate for sure and not a bad salesperson; but not someone I'd trust or want to share an office or a team with, I feel - and felt throughout. Being able to watch the show back I wonder if any of the candidates and Karren will change their minds about his 'team-player-ness'?

I think the view of Mark as someone who wouldn't be trustworthy in life or in a real world work environment is totally over the top and no where near an accurate reflection on him... certainly not based on what we have seen.

On a reality tv show where supposed business candidates are vying for the top spot, you're not here to make friends or play some nicey nicey bland banal type. It's a competition and there are many who have been similar throughout the years.

Does this make him a bad person? No of course not.

There is nothing I've seen about or from Mark to suggest he is anywhere near as bad as many people on here seem to be making out, and for me, the claim that Karren and Nick (or anyone else for that matter) didn't 'see through him' are totally wide of the mark.

To complain about someone being a game player and trying to gain an advantage on what is in effect a kind of game show made for entertainment purposes is, to my mind anyway, absurd.

Each to their own though.

TBF they're hardly likely to call him a manipulative little shit after LS had partnered with him.

They showed a few clips of his slimy behaviour on You're Fired. It was so funny watching him squirm as they played it back. You could tell he was embarrassed, and I felt embarrassed for him. He still won though, but it came across that he had to rely too much on underhand tactics and game-playing to secure that win rather than his own skill and merit. He tried to take a moment to defend himself after the montage but did a poor job at it.

Hummmm...sounds like a similar strategy, a so called music mogel implemented during another reality TV show. .and he won that show's series too!!!

A contestant?

Mark may have been outspoken but he did work well within a team and did his best with whatever task he was given, unlike some (Daniel). His team last night worked so well together, and you could tell they were all rooting for him, unlike Bianca's team who were for the most part sneered at and ignored.

It was Karen's job to champion Mark last night and Nick's to champion Bianca...that's the way it works.

Yeah the fawning over Mark was a all a bit strange, he was a strong candidate but no way near as good as what was being made out, and definitely not a team player. They surely must have told the 3 panelists to say what they did on You're Hired? I can't believe they would have got 3 people who conveniently thought that way about the winner? Particularly when it's the opposite of what most people thought.

I also agree that this series was edited very badly, when they set up a character to be head and shoulders above the rest and then fire them before the final, and when they edit someone as a villain and then make them the winner it just annoys the audience more than anything.

Fawning? Karren was arguing Mark's side just as much as Nick was arguing Bianca's. You guys may think he isn't a team player but contestants who lived in the same house and did the tasks with Mark say he was. In the final it was proven that he works well in a team.

Ehh. Who were his team? Loyal 'lads' Solomon and Sanjay, James who will follow any strong male leadership, and dippy Sarah? Easy enough to manage those ones if you're the right kind of person; James was the only one that might've taken some work and only women struggled to manage him this series because he talked over them.

But I digress. My point still stands; if he's going to be a good team player and likeable; why go out of your way with the edit to keep in times when he's being sneaky and never show anyone calling him out on it? That just creates bad feeling within (most of) the audience watching.

Because he was playing a very good game by being the way he was. He was logical and, yes, sometimes sneaky but never a bad person that warranted being "called out". I and quite a few others found him likable, it just depends on how you look at it I suppose.

It's not just Karren who has said that about him though - Katie too, and you think she would tell us straight if he was as bad as some make him out to be.

I'd say blame the edit - in the Mark vs Daniel clashes it was never really signposted as to who we were meant to side with (I did usually side with Mark though), and it has just been pushing Roisin all the way through: normally there's 2 pushes, 1 for the winner, and 1 for another candidate who falls at a late stage (see Tom/Helen, Ricky/Nick and Leah/Neil), but there was never really a push for Mark.

As for whether he was a team player - you could argue it both ways: yes he was trying to benefit himself whenever possible, but more often than not he was right in what he was saying (he is a great pitcher and a better seller than Daniel, as we saw earlier in the series). In other words, he was benefitting (or trying to anyway) both himself and the team. By benefitting the team you tend to benefit yourself, so it's just how you go about it.

What i noticed was that having broken down during the presentation, mark almost broke down again in the file.

Clearly flaky under pressure.

he used 'underhand tactics' to put himself into the position where he would stand or fall ie selling the hot tubs and doing the supermarket pitch. he was the obvious choice to do both these things as daniel is a poor salesman and shouldn't have been trusted with the hot tubs and theoretically Mark should have been the best guy to pitch to the supermarket (obviously didn't go so well).

the apprentice is all about getting noticed during the tasks and candidates ultimately fail or progress due to their own performance.

so how did his so-called 'underhand tactics' win him the show?

the sheep on the forum that think Mark is the devil-incarnate seem to me to have engineered some vastly exaggerated persona that is actually pretty far from the truth

I think it was the "comedians" who got him right on that show and the sheepish grin on his face said it all. Te first guy said I like how you say horrible things and then laugh so it doesn't seem bad and the other said he doesn't stab people in the back, he stabs them in the chest. Those are not good qualities and they were on show for us to see during the whole series.

Another example which was so brief if you blinked then you missed it, was after Katie had completed a purchase, Mark was with her. And she did a good job. But just after that it showed a talking head clip of Mark saying to the camera that he reckons he could have got it down by one or two pounds more. He then said that it might not be an issue, but they'll see if it comes down to the team being the losing team and ending up in the boardroom.
He was eyeing Katie up as a potential target over a measly couple of quid.
Not a team player at all.

If he was relying totally on his own skill and merit, he would have demonstrated that he was the best by being outstanding with the opportunities he was given. In actual fact, he fluffed a lot of the opportunities he had (such as when he was PM) and used underhand tactics to secure additional opportunities which he also sometimes fluffed (such as the supermarket pitch).

I didn't say they won him the show. I said it come across that he had to rely too much on those tactics rather than just demonstrating his ability with the opportunities he was given. It seemed to me that Mark simply wasn't that good.


Nobody thinks that.

Its not only that he's not many people's ideal team player. Its that he spent so much of his time positioning himself, and positioning others for firing instead of him, that it undermined his team's performances. He didn't stand up early on, and avoided the tasks most like his proposal because he would have been in danger. As with Katie he continually picked up arguments for the boardroom, and as PM he made sure someone else was culpable for every subproject rather than stepping in when things were sinking. They usually are not basically positive traits to show - in most cases your colleagues won't trust you, and the boss may catch on, and your credibility may be questioned.

He also committed arange of offences that in the past show lore would have seen him fired. Identifying errors and not solving them has been some poeple's downfall - you have to be more careful how you do it. Not standing up as Pm when it was in your own field proved fatal to others in the same series. There was also the case of Ruth - who got labelled as manipulative - as Lord Sugar got it in his head that she may have deliberately ignored the rules and allowed Tre to muck up on the cruise task He may have just invented that as an excuse, or something to say, as it looked unfounded, but if you are going to make such stands, you have at least to be consistent over the eries. Overplaying teh game playing is either wrong, or it isn't.

But the problem is, that's exactly how the process works. You have to set up someone to blame, because if you don't you will not survive. There have been a couple of people (mostly in the early years before the format was understood so well) who have used a different tack, not tried to scapegoat anyone and took the criticism for the task on the chin, and it often would backfire. You need to point the finger of blame, because Sugar is going to do that and if you don't help with that, it will look like you're just hiding. It's a flaw in the format of the process that in many situations you cannot behave as you would in the real business world.

Another thing is, the people you choose to blame have to be people who have a reasonable chance of getting it. In Series 3, Natalie was criticised for not bringing Katie into the boardroom on the art task, and she was fired on that one. I read an interview asking why she brought Adam back instead of Katie, and she said, 'Because I knew that Katie wouldn't be fired.' To me, that speaks volumes. Lord Sugar always tells the losing Project Manager to bring people back on the basis of that task and not for any other reasons, but this isn't always the most effective strategy. If someone has performed really well on previous tasks (as Katie had at that point), then even if they've been partly responsible for the loss on that one, there is no point bringing them back over someone who has been a bit in the background and never been especially impressive. You have to choose people who have a decent chance of being fired instead of you, bringing back people who have been generally strong puts you in danger. It was the same with Sandeesh in Series 6 - she brought back Chris and Liz, who both had things to be criticised for, but that decision made her very vulnerable, because those two were not going anywhere. My point is that although it is a serious job interview/business proposition, it is also a game, and you have to treat it as such and be tactical if you want to win. If I were a candidate, I would make no bones about doing that.

For the record, Ruth and Tre were in different series. You mean Syed, I think. And overall, Syed did end up fired for that task, so that criticism (which I believed was unfair anyway) didn't make that much difference to the overall result. Of course, that could be why Michelle won over Ruth - we'll never know about that, but I think it was more to do with the fact that Michelle charmed him.

More to do with Ruth being underequipped to do the job on offer. She worked for someone as a sales manager. Michelle worked in IT, had negotiated major contracts, and overseas contracts, and worked for herself doing similar jobs. Ruth's sales technique looked inappropriate for the type of people who would need to be negotiated with, and she had no technical expertise in the area. Michelle was also sitting on the better show record, and her sales record may have been in the same ballpark - given someone made the winning sales for her teams when we didn't actually see her figures. Ruth had also done what Saira did, and missed the key strategic issue on several tasks. On top of that, there was the trust issue he had invented over Syed, and the underlying argument that he's never, ever, hired the brash females, or the saleswomen - car or corporate.

I think there's playing the game , and creating the situation, and spending much of the tasks documenting other's failures to camera. You need to know whats gone wrong., but noting it, continously, suggests your mind is elsewhere, and leaving people to fail is reckless. The better way to do it is to find a convincing way of explaining what went wrong ,and feeding it to him in the boardroom in a way that gets around his defensiveness - Katie B-C , Luisa, Leah and Zara were all good at this - although Katie sounded a bit too obvious at times. .

I agree its unpredictable what matters in the boardroom as there's no consistency there in the criteria or decisions. You can go for being useless, or too perfect, or for making a muckup, or giving someone else to do a simple job that they muck up. Some people , as above, can also tell him what to think, and watch him repeat what they say, others get their heads bitten off for trying to lead him, or not solving the issue at the time.