The Apprentice UK 2023

Yes plenty of criticisms equally for everyone in the losing team tonight.

If the tables were turned and it was 4 guys and 1 woman left I doubt she would have been fired.

The rot has already started, none of them were great but i think Sugar was a little quick to fire some of them.

How Resting Bitch Face has made it to the final is beyond me. Useless from start to finish and the typical complainer who does nothing but ensures she's either nowhere near the binfire or when she does get near, piles on others.

Long gone are the years where teams genuinely competed to be the better team. The last two or three years have been teams competing to be the less worse team. I mean how many times this year have there been zero sales by a team or literally one measly order. Its a bit embarassing.

And whilst I certainly wouldn't say the BBC are trying to be woke, there is no way that two of them should be anywhere near the final. Joe and Simba (and maybe Kevin) are way way stronger than Rochelle and Dani.

Doesn't matter whether you are a man or woman in this show imo.

Sugar obviously sees all of the business proposals ahead of time and plans his firings to get rid of the worst ones before the final. That's why there are so many odd firings, doesn't matter how you perform in a task anymore if your business plan is pants. Just keep the 5 'least bad' business plans in until the interviews, make sure there are a couple of car crash CVs amongst them so the interviewers can do their big reveal, put through the 2 you have been considering since the start and bobs yer uncle - you have The Apprentice 2023.

The business plans are awful because most of the contestants are awful. As far as I can see the business plans are generally extensions of the candidates current job or business. 'I work on recruitment so I'll use the £250k to start my own recruitment business' or 'I bake and sell cakes so I'll use the £250k to expand my current business and bake more cakes', that type of thing. None of them seem to be original in any way.

I much preferred the show when the prize was a job at the end.

£250K for a 50% share severely limits what the business can be though. Like it's not going to enable a contestant to buy new helicopters for their fledgling luxury executive commuting business, or purchase a 25-bed hotel in a region about to become the next big holiday location.

Almost by definition, the amount limits it to expanding a bakery, some niche online clothes retailing or a mild expansion of a recruitment business.

Make it £5M for a 50% share and you'd get a different class of contestant/plan.

I think the prize part is nearly an anchor on the formats neck. The assumption is that the business plan is the big driver may not be quite true but it has to play a part, I do think the show needs a proper shake up. Whether that’s changing the prize, Sugar, the tasks themselves or the process for picking the candidates I don’t know, maybe all 4 things but I just can’t get into it, I’ll watch this week for the interviews as that’s always top notch car crash stuff.

Those crappy tasks are made worse by the fact that the contestants who are largely useless as is, have zero experience in the product (e.g. apps for kids) and then get barrelled out of it when it's not the next Peppa Pig.

I love the interviews because it feels like the only time contestants are realistically treated.

It's a particularly left-field idea, so I think it was led by the production company.

The team seemed to be handed a folder with various options on it as we saw one of them flicking through it at the start. It's possible that insects was actually the best choice of what they were allowed do. Otherwise, on a task where pricing wasn't mentioned once, chucking 10oz of fillet steak in a tin would have been a no-brainer.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with any of that.

I just feel within these tasks there is something we aren't being told. Gourmet product with decent cheapish meat cuts was a no-brainer as you say but maybe when the other team chose that (first choice perhaps) then the second team was left with fruit, insects or vegetarian? It's noticeable to me on these tasks they always have the two teams doing slightly different things (e.g., recently one team picked the over 50s market for the beauty product, and we get told the other picked the 30something market). Law of averages would suggest they should occasionally land on the same idea, but they never do. So I suspect they have to choose from a limited set, and must choose differently. Would actually be fairer tasks if they were both doing identical things, but maybe it would make the episode repetitive.

It's some house in fairness, there was reports earlier in the season of 2 contestants caught getting stuck into each other in the gym, wonder who they were.

Thats a rumour they put out every year that a few of them start shagging, it probably has happened over the years but I doubt its as common as they say it is.

Are they dumbing down on purpose or really that thick.

They wouldn't pass an interview for Aldi let alone an investment for 250 k