Her job is to be Sir Allan's eyes & ears?.He doesn't like people that BS so when she quotes somebody she is setting the record straight for Sir Allan.She's only doing her job.

That was Nick. And arguably both teams got it wrong, in that neither went for main-stream dresses. Helene picked mid-priced ones that were weird, eg black. Who buys a black wedding dress? Lucinda's team picked traditional but expensive ones. As a result, both teams had low sales. If either had picked mid-range, main-stream dresses they could have sold a lot and made a lot of money.

Were they given an option of mid-range, main-stream dresses? If you mean the BHS dresses, they needed to sell at least 50 dresses (one dress= £95) on the day to match their sales of the designer dresses. Add to that, BHS is available in almost every high street: What is the motivation for a bride to go for a BHS dress at the NEC?

I don't mean the BHS dresses. The edit focused on 3 designers but I think they were shown more.

They were shown 4 designers:

1- The midrange dresses (Helene's choice).

2- Dresses for brides size 16-32.

3- Ian Stuart dresses.

4- BHS dresses.

I got the impression that the Ian Stuart dresses were included as a trap, much like the teeth pictures in last year's photo task - an expensive niche-appeal product that might wow the candidates but wouldn't sell in large enough numbers to justify selecting them. Nick's comments at the NEC seemed to reflect that, but then Alpha went on to steamroller over Renaissance anyway. In the boardroom, Sir Alan seemed unduly impressed with them and/or disappointed that he couldn't bawl them out for making the wrong choice.

Margaret and Nick are rapidly becoming the best thing about the show - they remind me of scary ofsted inspectors, but with better comic timing!

This was a very bad design feature of the task.

Each of the choices was one that would appeal to a niche market and thus it was pot luck exactly which team would win.

The tasks should be designed so the either team could win based on how they maximise their opportunities and inherent strengths.

With most of the tasks who wins is entirely a matter of chance. The ice cream task was the most noticable example of those that I've seen. The losing team seemed far better organised but lost simply because the less well organised team were fortunate enough to get one very large order.

But he is a waste of space. Anyhow I don't know what you're going on about there. He's still there stinking up our screens.

Yes. The production was over-seen by the farm, who would eventually had to full fill the order and who therefore paid a lot more attention to it than, eg, the making of sweets for the previous series' zoo task. The focus group was irrelevant as anyone can taste ice-cream. So the task came down to sales.

(And there I disagree with you. Claire's team had the better sales people, and they didn't become complacent because they thought they'd won but kept trying to the end. And the last order was no more luck than any of the other orders.)

Nick and Margaret are ace! Their facial expressions and their seriousness just make me laugh

I don't think Nick and Margaret are as great as everyone thinks (although they do make good TV viewing - I love Margaret's expressions). They are Sir Alan's eyes and ears during the tasks but Sir Alan has made some very poor decisions. So either he is ignoring them because he doesn't value their opinions or they are not reflecting back a true picture of what has happened. Neither possibility reflects well on them.

Margaret & Nick should do the vetting rather than BBC. Then we might get fewer talentless no-hopers...

I would argue that we only get to see 30 minutes of a 2 day task so how can we know more than Margaret & Nick what goes on. So maybe they are reporting back accuretly and it is the EDITING of the show that is at fault

I think they report what they see accurately. However, I certainly believe that they are not there all the time. The teams are usually split into 4 subteams so they can't practically be there all the time. For example, when Jenny C and Michael cheated Margaret wasn't there. When Shazia returned back to bring the irons, Margaret wasn't there. When Raef and Helene bought their items, Nick wasn't there. So there are many examples and I think when SAS makes errors it is likely that they have missed something because they were with the other subteam or it was very late at night.

Do we know exactly when the boardroom takes place vis a vis the task and exactly what SAS does have in the way of information? Thinking about it, he won't have the program we see (not put together yet). So all he has, it seems to me, are the results themselves and the reports from Nick and Margaret, which, as apprentice_fan has pointed it, are limited to what those two have witnessed and not everything.

If that's the case, there's only one other thing for SAS to rely on - performance in the boardroom.

If one doesn't like Margaret's input (or Nick's), what alternative way of doing it is possible?

I thought they are two trusted people who work for Sugar and are meant to report back to him - the show is edited to make it entertaining so the boring reporting bits are left out but surely for the show to resemble some kind of real world logic then they have quite a lot of input into relaying back to Sugar what actually went on else what is their role apart from raised eyebrows and funny faces?

. If someone is lying in the boardroom and they were present when it happened isnt it Margaret and Nick's role to speak out as they are neutralish.

Im still looking for the little earphone in Sugar's ear that is the producer telling him not to fire certain people as they can be entertaining for another week.

He also gets reports from others on the production team. For example, I don't think either N or M witnessed Jenny C's disciplining of Lucinda in the car after the laundry task, but some of the production crew did and went on to get a piece to camera from Lucinda before she want to bed. So I'm confident Sir Alan knew it had happened. However, I'm not confident he would have grasped the tone of that conversation. It may have come across as, "Lucinda was wrong to fold the clothes. Jenny told her off. Lucinda cried."

I am pretty sure he sees the programmes as they air, before he makes his final decision as to the winner, and I suspect some of the bits he does on You're Fired are also done after seeing the footage (but I could be wrong about that).

While I take your point that they do not see both sides of the team (when it is split in 2 sub teams) all the time, they still see a hell of a lot more than we do, all we get is 30 minutes if we are lucky of edited scenes. I am sure the production team working on the other sub team must report back to someone. if not why bother filming it. That is why we see some strange decisions by SAS because he gets a report we do not have access to.

SAS said many times that he gets his input from Nick and Margaret only. He certainly can't listen to the production team unless something major happened like the bribery accident, the problem with Lucinda, the problem between Tre and Jadine last year. The brief from Nick and Margaret takes hours. Therefore he can certainly miss some of the details.

I think SAS generally does an excellent job because he only depends on Maragaret, Nick, and his interaction with the candidates in the boardroom and he usually arrives to the right conclusion. However, we can't deny that, in a few occasions, made mistakes and fired the wrong candidate.

Of course they get lots of input from production. It's a tv show.

I've heard him say "Nick and Margaret" lots of times; I don't think I've ever heard him say "only."


N&M are only two people so he can't possibly rely on them when the teams have split into four groups; he'd miss half of what was going on.

Listening to what goes on in the BR it's very obvious that he hasn't got a clue about a lot of what goes on.

Why do you think it is that so many lies go unquestioned?

It's because Margert or Nick were not with that sub team and so he can only question the people involved and come to his own decision which, as we have seen, is often oddy out of kilter with the facts as we have seen them in the edited programme.

We don't see facts ... we see edited highlights and would hate to use these edited bits to prove an argument. We get snapshots of things but we dont see what happens before or after that particular bit.

I am sure SAS gets a summary of what happens in each subteam and together with his feedback from Nick & Margaret makes his choice

I read recently somewhere that Nick said that they sit with SAS for a few hours before the boadroom to report about the task and then SAS grasps all the information and make a decision based on their reports.

I don't think that the production team report directly to SAS. Perhaps they report to Nick and Margare. I have the impression thattheir report is not a very detailed one - just an account of what happened rather than an assessment of the candidates. It is just a speculation and I can be wrong.