It wasn't a great first episode. Buy some fish, sell some fish. It was tripe. Although not literally of course, it was fish. But it was quite dull uninspiring start to the series. Don't think I can remember an episode where so little of note happened. With the exception of making the fishcakes too big, of course. A highlight that's bound to define the entire series - I don't think.

Just felt it was a really, really rubbish and uneventful task and a bizarre choice to kick-off the series as it leaves me underwhelmed and not really massively bothered about tuning in tonight. I will because I'm a fan of a show but for someone who is a casual viewer who wanted to test the water last night to see if they'll bite for more episodes (excusing the fish puns) I can't imagine they'd be excited for the rest of the series.##

If it wasn't for Ruth's jacket and April's unrealistic pricing structure the highlight of the whole episode would have been the time they let the calamari get too warm.

Was that the most uneventful series opening ever?

It would have been more appropriate to tell us which first task you found more inspiring. I thought it was an excellent first task. One can already tell who wont be his partner. I cant yet remember all the names but those in the boardroom certainly wont be. The one lady who even taught Karen how to sell is certainly in with a chance if she can do other things as well. She was really the only one who stood out.
I can never understand why these candidates never understand the task at hand. Here it was to make money. So you buy the cheapest (rubbish) and then 'pretend' its high 'quality' and sell at a high price. After its cooked its hard to tell the difference without tasting it. And by the next day they are gone.
Buying something which has a low price (not where you knock it down) cant be good quality. Do these candidates not know that.
It always amazes me how 'unwordly' they are. LS I am sure has almost made his mind up and one can tell early along whom it is going to be.
A pity we dont know their business plans in advance.
Last edited by rosset : 15-10-2015 at 14:44

I never enjoy the first few tasks which is why it's good they are showing the first two episodes on consecutive nights. It only gets going when we truly know all the candidates and know what they are all about. Too many faces currently.

Have to say that I wasn't mad for the task, but then I don't generally enjoy the buy it cheap, make it a little less rubbish then sell to mug punters tasks.

I know you have to take the show with a pinch of salt and these tasks have their merit in minutely demonstrating certain skill sets, but it's just not at all realistic. No business could sustain itself by selling poor products in Central London. Word would get around the business district/Camden and it's not like you even get much of a tourist passing trade in these areas. The customers will be the same generally at the start of the week as come the end of the week.

Realistically, all this task demonstrated was who'd make the best Delboy, selling off cheap tat one day to move onto the next enterprise the following day selling car stereos.

The go and buy 9 obscure items is always the best one for me.

Thankfully that's happening next week.

It's generally the same tasks and they just switch the order around a bit

I like the tasks where there are more things to do. Here it was just buying fish, making it into a meal and flogging it. There was no need for sub teams who'd work on marketing, sub, those who'd pitch to potential buyers, those whose job it was to work on packaging, or any of that.

It was just - we've made some fish, who wants to buy it?

The task let most of the contestants doing virtually nothing other than arranging salad and awkwardly selling food to passers-by

It was no mean feat. They had to be creative, manufacture, and sell. Pretty standard for the first task. The Series 1, 2 and 4 first tasks were literally buy and then sell. I'm not sure what you're complaining about to be honest.

The first task is nearly always selling something on the streets. Easy way to test their skills. Although they don't always need to create something. There was a fish task in Series 4, but that was just selling the fish, not creating meals with it.

The biggest deviation was in Series 8, where they had to sell printed materials. It was still street-selling, but they had to do a lot of brand designing in that.

Don't forget Series 5 in which they were selling a cleaning service as opposed to a product! I really like the service / event management tasks.

Yes. I felt like that didn't really work when they tried to recreate it last year.

What did they recreate? The cleaning products? The difference was that they were selling cleaning products as opposed to using them! Last year's first task didn't really make sense - they seemed to have to have an added value item although that was never made clear to us as the viewers.

Also, I felt like the edit was much better - so much time was dedicated to Sarah and Steven that 5 or so candidates were totally invisible, and Chiles and Robert were brought into the boardroom neither being particularly prominent in the episode.

Well, that's why I don't like having loads of candidates. Eighteen is still too many, but it's better than twenty. (Actually I think sixteen is slightly too many).

I wonder if anyone would buy if it wasn't for the TV cameras. I wouldn't want to eat something thrust in my face with the price coming down as soon as I walk away. I'd like to think the vendor will be there tomorrow and therefore has observed basic hygiene rules and used reasonable ingredients.

Of course I might make an exception for the "one chicken per pizza" team, if I was hungry enough.

The whole profit of 200 pounds odd where they had no rates or rent to pay or other expenses like the car for nine people is hardly worth spending a whole day on it.

Is the law so lax that anyone can pitch up, assuming they have a pitch and sell food?

Its all well planned and they have to follow the law, you can't just roll up with a food truck and sell like that.

Each task has a purpose, this was a buy low sell high task...nothing more, those city high flyers probably couldn't tell £1 cheap crap from £900 premium stuff so in a project like this you go low on the ingredients and max it out..do any of the candidates ever watch the previous ones?

Flogging fish to a vegan shop is akin to asking a Muslim butcher for a halal chicken in its stupidity

The selling tasks are ok, I thought it was a pretty good first episode but the show generally gets better as the weeks go on and the candidates get whittled down.

My favourite task is always the create your own product and advertise it one though, which is tonight's episode. I always find those tasks very entertaining

Muslim butchers buy and sell Halal meat. Vegan restaurants wouldn't buy or sell fish.

Where's the similarity?

Oooops meant Kosher chicken

Yep. I like this as a first task, as it's one which allows everyone in a big team to have a role and make a contribution, which isn't the case in many of the tasks. First episodes (first two episodes, really) are always slightly flawed as they have to cram a lot into an hour - in the 25 or so minutes we actuially see them on task, we have to be introduced to as many of the cast of characters as possible (by the end of episode 2, each of the 18 has had at least a moment or two for us to find out a little about them), tell a little narrative about how the task is won and lost, and then show why the people who end up in the boardroom failed in their roles. It's an awful lot to cram in to that opening hour. Short of making the opening episode 75 or 90 minutes (which would be too long in my opinion), I think we have to accept that it will always feel a little compromised.

Of course not. There is an awful lot that has to be set up in advance by the production teams. For one thing, you need permits to have a stall of any kind on the street - this is why the teams don't have a free choice about where they pitch up with their stall/van/horse-and-cart/whatever. And, as we saw in Wednesday's episode, health and safety regulations regarding the storage and handling of food apply to the teams just as they would to any other seller. That will have been the case on any food task but (I think) this is the first time it was woven into the narrative of the episode as a way of casting doubt on the result of the task.

There are countless other logistical things that have to be arranged well in advance depending on the nature of the task. One example - rarely seen - is in creative tasks where the teams have to come up with a new brand. Suggested names have to pass legal checks (you can't have the same or too similar a name to a brand in the same space already on the market) and have credible marketing claims (e.g. you can't say that your cactus-based shampoo will cure baldness).

In reality, while this constrains the teams' freedom to do some things (because they don't have the requisite legal permissions), it also means that certain aspects of the task are effectively handed to them on a plate.

This was also a production task. The losing team lost partly because (a) they spent too long on production and so missed the lunch hour; (b) got the production wrong and made 80 fishcakes rather than 300.


So they noticed the shop was selling food, but not what kind, and it cost them a couple of minutes. Not really a big deal in the scheme of things.

Absolutely. This was an exercise in logistics as much as cost control, something the candidates often seem to forget (or, at least, we're never shown them talking about it, which isn't necessarily the same thing). If April's team had started selling at the start of the lunch rush, the outcome might have been very different. Ultimately, it was a bit like trying to sell Christmas cards in January.