Seems to me SAS had decided he was going to get rid of Sara as soon as the losing team was announced.

He wouldn't allow her to defend herself and then said she'd done nothing but moan week after week. Well they must have edited a hell of a lot out then because from what I've seen she's been one of the least garrulous people in the show and hardly seemed to get a word in edgeways.

She was also outstanding when she was project manager, turning in a profit before they'd even sold a meal.

She didn't perform well last night but none of her team did much better, with perhaps the exception of Alex (unusual for him, he's usually just dead wood).

I think Michael should have gone because he's a snake-in-the-grass and incompetent to boot.

Good result all round for the winning team; solid performances from everyone except Raef. How he has managed to survive this far is beyond me. Surely he is only being kept in for the comedy value?

It was Raef's decision to go for the more expensive, high quality weddings dresses which ultimately led to them winning this task.

I thought it was a clever decision, although he may not have realised it. Shoppers need time to look around before returning to a product which most takes their fancy.

Sara's comments on Raef:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/apprentice/news...e/cid/153.html

So comedy value has nothing to do with it. He is an able candidate who always makes a contribution. This week, it was down to him that his team had the right dresses which lead to them winning the task.

Just watched TA and YF on iPlayer, (why do people keep calling it 'YBF'? Where's the 'B'? Every week I'm wondering how the fired candidate has ended up on You've Been Framed). It’s pretty obvious that the wrong person went, although probably none of the 3 had a shot at getting The Job.

Although she’s unmanageable (and no great shakes as PM either) I think Claire probably won the task. The designer dresses were a big gamble (as Nick indicated): if someone sold them well there was pretty much nothing the other team could do. If badly, the other team more or less just had to show up. Although Alex, despite being a t*sspot, seemed to be doing a good job, a few of those (god-awful) dresses were always going to be sold so long as Michael wasn’t selling them (‘Buy this dress, yer dumb b*tch. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it or people will see that you’re as stupid and ugly as you are. Do you want to be crying on your wedding day? Do you?! Buy it!’). I get the impression that Claire is best when selling stuff alone, and being a massive wedding enthuiast didn’t hurt. (Raef by comparison was a bit mediocre this week, probably for the converse reason, and would have been in trouble if they’d lost.) I strongly suspect if the teams had swapped dresses Alpha would still have won.

Helene made a really basic error in not ensuring someone could compare the dresses, (just as she made a really basic delegation error last time she was PM) but it isn’t clear what the right answer was. Aside from that, did she actually sell anything? Maybe swanning around in a dress wasn’t a bad idea, who knows, but she should have done something about the cake situation. If she wasn’t happy with the way Sara was selling, she could have moved her, maybe taking over herself. Did she even talk to her? And not just the camera .

Sara was rubbish at selling the cake. She was talking to people like they were £5-6 for tea with 100 of them to shift rather than £500-600 for a unique occasion. Michael was much worse of course. It wouldn’t surprise me if people he’d tried to sell to warned other people off talking to him. They didn’t need to sell many cakes to scotch Lee’s fongs, so selling cake was probably the better idea, they were just cr*p at it.

Sara didn’t help herself in the boardroom by sounding like the hectoring, interrupting person Helene and the customers were complaining about but she had a tricky problem. It looked bad that Helene blamed her despite being under attack from Michael, and Michael was absolutely fireproof.

My laptop more or less shut down last week after one post. I was going to say, amongst other things:
"Michael now has a Get Out of Jail Free card. Even if he screws up pretty badly again, no matter what he says in the boardroom, he will not go.”
because once SAS gets the mindset that someone is a 'rough diamond' like he was they get a huge amount of leeway. Last week Michael was really rubbish, party to dirty tricks and shown to have been very ‘creative’ with his CV. This week he was really rubbish and lied about fighting for the other dresses (thank you Margaret). And this is without taking into account that he suggested the way the pairs should view goods: by geography, not type. N & M’s opinions of him are obviously rock-bottom. When Paul Torresi got to the interviews in his series, was it Nick who said ‘I’m discounting Paul because I don’t think he should be here.’? Helene hasn't got herself to the boardroom much and Sara was good last week; Michael had to go.

Exactly. I think of all Apprentice contestants, Raef is the one that I was initially most wrong about. In Week 1, I felt he was just like Nicholas, a stuck-up useless idiot. Even when he led the winning team in Week 2, I thought he was a lazy prat, and put the success of the team down to Simon (I still think Simon was largely responsible for the team's success, actually).

But we've seen really good stuff from him since then. He made the right decision this week over the dresses, and was probably mainly responsible for the team's success down to that alone. Was it him, I wonder, who thought of going to the tannery to get the cow hide in Marrakesh, thus getting it so cheap? Certainly it was him who went there. He did the presentation in the cards task, and did it pretty well if I remember rightly.

OK, he does have some eccentric traits. He does seem to like to dress up; not only did he put in the quite pointless teddy bear outfit this week, but if the rest of his team hadn't stopped him he'd have been dressing up like Lawrence of Arabia in Marrakesh! But this just adds colour and entertainment value to a man who has turned out to be pretty shrewd under all the eccentricities.

More important, of course, is that he is a decent man. His standing up for Sara would make him a better man than any of the others even if he was the toffee-nosed plank he originally seemed to be.

Raef to win!

I think having a few eccentricity's is a good thing in away, because it shows him to be his own person, too often candidates in this show are very bland and uninteresting....see Alex and Michael for good examples. We know little more now about who they are than we did at the start (Other than that they are unpleasant people of course), where as with Raef you actually feel like you have a sense of who he is away from the show.

Re the teddy outfit: to be fair, we weren't actually shown who's idea that was, it might well have been Lucinda's idea.

Helene was also guilty of this in the photography task, making Lucinda do the technological bit, which she blatantly said she had no experience of and then saying 'well I can't do it either' when they were running out of time. There were about 8 people on the team then so why didn't she put someone else on it? and doesn't she work in IT?

Helene totally lost my respect from then on and she's not shown anything else since - rubbish

That's when Hell-ene started moving up to number one on my most hated list, by allowing Lucinda to tell her what she was worst at and then chosing her to do exactly that, so she had an instant scapegoat if things went wrong. Helene received the same training but refused to help as (to paraphrase Kevin) 'that's what nasty scheming hypocrites do'. Since then she has got worse and Lucinda has improved exponentially.

Better than Kevin did

It was his idea for the card as well. That came in for some criticism, but as ideas for breaking into a completely saturated market go I thought it was about as good as you could expect. It beats Alien Day, and all the other original suggestions I can remember. Meanwhile Michael, 'doing brilliantly', scampered round for 3 or 4 hours phoning people about an apostrophe despite Raef trying to give him an acceptable solution.

Raef might miss out on the top job because he's too upstanding. SAS may want someone more prepared to compromise their ethics.

And let's face it, he hardly needs the job, does he? His going to be inundated with offers regardless, let one of the nitwits have the job, I'm sure he'll have better things lined up anyways....

Yes that's the one. She assigned the technology role straight off when she should have asked if anyone was good at computers, never mind changing it if told that person can't work a mobile phone. The computer was the one task that if someone couldn't handle it that could scupper everything else, so it needed something of a specialist.

True

i read somewhere that kristina from last year got 140 job offers from various firms after apprentice

i hope raef gets double that

Well, to be fair, it wouldn't be hard to do better than poor old pea-brained Kevin!

God, yes, Michael and his apostrophe torment! What a pillock that man is! Poor Lindi; she may be a vacuous bimbo but she deserves better than him!