The dinghy was fine. It wasn't a toy dinghy, it was a real dinghy bought from a toy shop.

The skeleton from last year was different as it was meant to be anatomically correct - and that would require it to be 3 dimensional. I don't know how a 2D skeleton can be anatomically correct - unless it belongs to a cartoon character.

It would've only been anatomically correct once assembled, not as a flat pack

Not to mention I'm not entirely sure how a 2d Paper skeleton could ever be truly anatomically correct, regardless of the package's claims.

I'm going to have to dig out that episode and check!

I don't actually think it did, Felipe was too savvy and trained to read the small print to have made an error like that. If it has specifically said fully assembled, that is what he would have done.

I'm fairly sure it didn't say fully assembled just as it didn't say that it couldn't be made of paper. From memory, it was 'life size, anatomically correct' on the specification so within the 'letter of the law' (which after all was his background) Felipe did nothing wrong but i think Sugar's argument was that it was so obvious, it shouldn't have had to be specifically stated so it was against the 'spirit' of the task.

A loophole, in other words, which he was angry about somebody having spotted when he hadn't.

In other circumstances, depending on all sorts of things possibly including his mood and whether the candidate was somebody he really rated and wanted to work with, he might have applauded the ingenuity of it.

The actual wording on the skeleton requirement was "Human Skeleton. Specifications: Full-Sized Anatomical Skeleton. Minimum 150cm tall". They should have assembled their 2D version to fulfil the height requirement. As it was, it didn't.

I somehow managed to miss this before i'd posted my comments where i tried to say similar but didn't explain it as well.

Them not having assembled it really was crucial and as i mentioned in my post, i did assume there were going to. In fact, when watching it, my comment was "clever but are they going to be able to get it made in the time they've got left?". It didn't occur to me they would take it in without attempting to assemble it.

So, basically, Felipe saw a loophole within what had and hadn'( been specified in the brief and Sugar was so pissed of with them about it that he, as you say, found a loophole of his own (that nowhere did it say it didn't have to be assembled) to fight back with.

Thanks for that.

So basically, both Felipe and Sugar took advantage of what wasn't included on the specifications to justify what they bought/wanted. There was nothing to say it couldn't be made of paper, there was nothing to say it was okay not to be assembled.

And at the end of the day, it is Sugar's show so his 'loophole' won out.

Anyway, it is different to the dinghy as I assume the girls one wasn't delivered inflated either so provided it could be, it floated and was the right size, there was little room for them to be accused ot 'cheating'.

As somebody else said, if it had said 'sea worthy' or similar, they probably wouldn't have got away with it.

I'm quite surprised that they sell dinghys that large in toy shops but there you go, clearly they do.

Well, of course, if they wanted to be completely pedantic about it, Felipe could have said, 'There's a skeleton inside each one of us'. It wouldn't have worked, but you really could drag it to that level, couldn't you?

To which sugar would have replied "well let's strip you of all your flesh so we can take your skeleton apart and reassemble it shall we".

There is pedantry and pedantry.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like what Sugar did with Felipe did last year. I honestly think it was a case of sour grapes that somebody had out-thought him and seen a loophole that he, himself, had not and he basically threw his toys out of his pram.

But, the point is, that the production team, and specifically Sugar, do have the right to be pedantic about tasks which they have set up.

To be honest, I completely agree with you, I think the ruling was entirely reasonable. I just thought it was quite amusing.

In all seriousness, there have been times when he has considered disqualifying winning teams and hasn't. In Series 2, the girls won the fruit-selling task by collecting mostly free rejects and selling them very cheap - ethically shaky grounds, as you could have argued that the merchandise was sub-standard. He seriously considered disqualifying them, but they were allowed to argue their case and eventually persuaded him to let them win. (Although I think that definitely marked their team leader's card - she was fired two weeks later, in one of the more controversial firings of the early series. Personally I didn't have much of a problem with that one.)

The problem is what is a dingy. If you look online, £250 is common for anything intended to go on open water. You can get something for £50, for use in a stream - but the reviews suggested they didn't work, and collapse when you get in. . £10 gives you something to use in your swimming pool- you would be mad to use it in the sea or a river. He didn't specify what he wanted, but he's now opened up the options for toy versions of anything - but skeletons.

Given he's taken them to Kent seaside towns, the logical assumption might be that the dingy neds to be safe to use there. They might also expect that encouraging people to send their kids to sea in the channel , in a, flimsy, toy boat, wouldn't be the sort of thing the BBC would want to encourage.

The whole thng looks odd to anyone who doesn't think like Lord Sugar. This team knew they were making a dubious purchase, and doubted the choice would be accepted, The skeleton team accepted Felipe's legal opinion, that his choice met the laid down requirements. Lord Sugar has ended up approving one wheeze, because he thought it was acceptable Private Walker behaviour, and rejecting the other - because it was made by a smart-ass lawyer.

I don't think it should have been accepted; however even if it hadn't been, the men's team would probably still have won as the girls lost by about £320; I can't imagine the fine would have been anywhere near that. It would have made the loss even more embarrassing for the girls actually.

I do completely agree, there was really as much room for reading between the lines in both tasks. Just because it didn't specify it needed to be sea worthy doesn't mean Sugar couldn't have turned round and said it was obvious what he meant given they were dealing with a Cross Channel task. Equally, it's the right size and it floats in a swimming pool could be deemed criteria enough.

I imagine there are loads of differences such as how the tings inflate. I imagine the one bought in a toy shop is a 'pump it up' job - basically an inflatable pool toy whereas the one bought in the Sailing shop will have one of those strings you pull to inflate it within seconds as ultimately, it will need to act as a life boat in emergencies.

Really, they either need to start providing very, very precise criteria - which will take away the ambiguity of the 'what the hell is it' items and whether candidates can work it out or they need to accept that these things will keep happening and they need to decide that they are prepared to accept them.

I really do believe that last night was acceptable because Sugar had thought of it as soon as he saw (or devised) the list whereas the skeleton wasn't because he hadn't thought of it - bit both were equally plausible as 'thinking outside of the box' solutions.

Oh, I thought there was a size specification, didn't one of the girls ask the size of the one in the shop?

I don't think it did meet the specification of anatomically correct. The bones were the wrong shape.


I don't think that bones that are flat paper represent bones in a 'physiologically accurate manner.'

There was a size specification - i think it was 1.3metres long by something metres wide and Claude confirmed on 'YF' that it just met the criteria. The Girls boat was considerably bigger, well over 2 metres long.

They weren't asked to buy a dinghy - the wording was 'inflatable boat' (with a minimum length of 1.5m), which is what the boys' team bought.

That's still missing the point.

The specifications for the skeleton required that it be "anatomically correct".
A box filled with pieces of laser-cut card DEFINITELY isn't an anatomically correct skeleton until you make the effort to get them out of the box and build them into a skeleton.

I don't know how seriously AS takes this show with regard to deciding who to invest money in but I suspect that he'd probably be impressed by anybody who could "think outside the box" as long as they can successfully justify what they've done - regardless of whether they're buying paper skeletons, toy boats or rotten fruit.

Felipe's skeleton was (in my opinion at least) the basis of a terrific idea but then he left himself open to criticism by not getting it built.

Finding it hard to understand why people can't get the difference between the two situations? If a candidate had brought Lord Sugar a packet of cardboard which could be assembled into a model of a dinghy this year, that wouldn't have been allowed either.

The inflatable boat was an inflatable boat, easy. If anything the girls' boat was less fitting to the specifications as the base was made of wood - so it's wasn't an entirely inflatable boat!

Another ethically questonable one I can think of - didn't the girls' team win a task one year by basically selling themselves to blokes in pubs, £5 for a kiss or something like that? I think in the task Sugar gave them something like £100 to get as much profit as possible from and the girls' team manager got them to sell themselves to make some quick extra cash near the end of the day.

Nope - they lost that task badly. You might be thinking of the first task of Series 2, where the women's team went full force on the "sex sells" strategy when selling (and even buying) fruit, absolutely thumped the men's team, and Sugar nearly disqualified them for their strategy, only holding off on actually doing so because the men had performed so poorly that they would have lost anyway.

Yes. I didn't have a problem with the whole 'sex sells' thing, but I did have an issue with the fact that they were selling fruit to the public which was possibly sub-standard, apparently without making that clear to their customers. I think Lord Sugar handled it fairly, but that was a really controversial one.