Nope, just the dimensions.

I think this scenario's probably more comparable to something I remember from one of the Young Apprentice editions, where the teams were told to buy a pocketwatch, and one of the teams assumed it had to be made from gold, whereas the other one just bought the cheapest thing that fit the vague description they were given.

In Your Fired Claude cleared it up by stating the toy dingy just met the specifications they were given. I actually think they were meant to get a toy one cheaply but the girls didn't realise that.

Yes, exactly!

It annoys me how people harp on and on about that skeleton. The skeleton they bought was not built, therefore it wasn't anatomical. Skeletons are only anatomical if the pieces fit together in the way that they would in an actual human body. That team brought back the materials, but it was just a box of paper. Therefore, it didn't fit the specification.

Yeah, probably. And if they were calculating fines based on the average price of that sort of cheap dinghy, the fine would have been completely insignificant next to the loss margin, so there was even less reason for Sugar to press the issue.

Thanks spkx . Where did you get those specifications ?

Hmmmm, maybe series 1, series 2,gave us Syed and the chickens.

The paper skeleton was wrong and I am not a fanboy of Lord Sugar, I actually don't really like the man. In my mind a paper skeleton is not a skeleton.

Well yes, but it also gave us Ruth Badger. And Ansell. And Paul, one of only two candidates in history to never be in the boardroom after a task.

Oh, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of good people come through the Apprentice, but the parameters of tasks and Shugg's firing decisions make it hard to take seriously.

I can't believe that child's toy dinghy passed muster , it's ridiculous . People have been eliminated for lesser things .Yes I know there were no specifications eliminating a child's toy , but come on ! that in itself is highly suspicious when generally he specifies to the max . Not saying it's fixed (although it smells off) but for sure some goal post tweaking is going on . It felt like the toy boat situation was an intervention because the girls looked like winning and that couldn't be allowed .I'm not ra-raing for the girls by the way. I'd be the same if the sexes were reversed and the girls got that toy boat advantage .
I have to say that I'm baffled by this season .
Something has changed . Sugar seems different and I can't put my finger on it .
The show seems more choreographed , very much like TOWIE and I don't like the way it has diverted into that kind of territory . Sugar's honesty was the one thing you could depend on, agree with him or not . He was infuriating at times but that was part of the ride watching the show . Now ? Nope, I'm not feeling it this season at all . It feels rehearsed and manipulated to the nth . Looks to me like Sugar did intense brainstorming of the candidates CVs and business plans , cherry picked the best one (or two) to suit HIS wants , and then told a group of spotty faced little youthful trainee producers to build the series around that as long as Mis/Mr X was in the final .
I'll be honest , if I miss an episode this season I won't be bothered . I never thought I'd say that .

They'd have lost regardless. The women paid £250 for their boat, the victory margin was £316. It was failing to purchase two items and purchasing an incorrect item (on top of the boat snafu) that really killed the women.

he has also fined people for not measuring string/yarn to the correct length before, but didn't bother checking how much shite they had purchased.

so they were at working ports, and didn't go down to the harbour fish shops to try and buy mussels. They didn't go to the cite Europe in Calais to get the glasses/cheese/snails/toy boat and anything else they might have needed.

9 items in the whole day????


a toy boat will say on the box something like "a toy - not be used as a boat", or something like that. depends on what the spec said.. Sugar ought to give a guide price, so they know what the penalty will be.

The programme is just average light entertainment now. 20 potential top businessman and none can speak decent French?

The winning prizes are just total garbage.

Final thought. One of the things the Donald does/did is gave his winning PM immunity for the next task. Now that was a good idea. And the Donald picked some really good apprentices out of his early series.

I don't think that this task makes a lot of sense; you can't compare values and good deals on products that may have very different quality or specifications, in this sense, they should have to source exactly branded products and then you can compare. The girls team are so catty this year and Lord sugars point about lack of planning was very critical. They had a lot of time to plan and source which they didn't use. I don't think Jenny was the worst as she did advise on the lace, made effort to source products and wasn't really nasty to her colleagues. Selina is awful; I thought she was quite pleasant in first task and that changed drastically in next episodes.

In fairness to Selina, I thought she was right about the mirror. Being fined for that is worse than being fined for the mussels.

I am really shocked that neither of the teams sent to France headed straight to the nearest large supermarket - Carrefour or Prisunic for example.

Once there, in the frozen food aisle they would have found escargots, already packed with snail butter and frozen in plastic strips, the fish counter would had had nets of mussels for sale and the cheese counter would have sold them the cheese they wanted. Three items sourced at a really cheap price.

I found it staggering that nobody from either team even thought of that.

But that is the whole point of this task. It is seeing if the teams can follow specifications and buy exactly what is asked for without embellishments! It is about the teams using their knowledge of the products and the best places to buy them from. The case of the boat proves this perfectly - although the girls boat met the spec they didn't think out of the box at all about where would be the best place to get a great price. The boys did just that, and although they bought the boat from a toy shop it met what lord sugar asked for. That kind of thinking can be the difference between winning and losing contacts.

They may have been unable to get permission to film there.

That's a good point actually .
So just how much would the penalty price have been for the boat not being purchased ?
Or is it just more moving goal posts to fit the desired result ?

Both farmers were shown giving permission to both teams to take the manure, so nothing was stolen. It's happened before I believe, one team were given an item for free, I think it was rope.

Assuming they got fined the base price for the women's boat plus £50, the total fine would have been £305. Meaning the men would have still won by £11.

And that's really the absolute worst case scenario for the men, seeing how £255 was indicated to be a high price even for the type of boat that the women ended up buying.

Not really. Alan was in the right, a box of pieces of paper couldn't be described as, as it was in the specification, an "anatomical skeleton", even if assembled.

The specification for tonight's show was "Inflatable boat. Minimum length: 1.5m", which was met by both teams.

Well, they got a toy boat. Ask anyone who works with boats and they'll say that's a toy, not a boat. Not a boat for use in any capacity beyond a swimming pool anyhow.

It could be a boat that's only fit to hold a feather without sinking, if it was inflatable and over 150cm in length, then that fit the specification they were given. Felipe's skeleton didn't fit the given specification, so was disallowed.

Elle herself said at one point that they should ignore the £255 boat, and buy one in terrible condition.

Just watchd it back, the girls said in their chat with the lady the boat needed to be a minimum of 1.5m. The boys' boat box says it's 66" so 1.7m.

The specification stated it needed to be only 1.5 metres. From that it should've been clear to anyone that Lord Sugar was only after something for a paddling pool and not something to start a cross channel ferry service.