BB FANS

Waveguide

School of hard knocks for Sugar's Apprentices


The Apprentice: winner will get £100,000 to work with business maverick Sir Alan Sugar

"This is not a game - this is a 12-week job interview," is Sir Alan Sugar's typically no-nonsense welcome for the 14 contestants taking part in the UK version of business reality show The Apprentice.

"I don't like liars, I don't like cheats, I don't like bullshitters, I don't like schmoozers and I don't like arse-lickers," adds Sir Alan. The Amstrad founder takes the Donald Trump role in the BBC2 version of The Apprentice, as the business guru who dismisses a contestant at the end of each episode from his boardroom seat, with a contemptuous "you're fired!".

The original NBC version of the show, broadcast in the US last year, had Trump - with his "serial marriages and gold-plated Rolls-Royce" - and contestants with "very good teeth and very short skirts", according to Daisy Goodwin, the creative director at Talkback Thames, which is making the show for BBC2.

For the BBC2 version, seven men and seven women have been selected from thousands of applicants to compete for a £100,000, year-long job working for Sir Alan.

The contestants include a property developer, a charity fundraiser, a headhunter and a hotel manager. Some have MBAs, some left school with virtually no qualifications.

They share a swanky west London pad and in each episode must work as two teams - boys and girls - on a task set by Sir Alan.

Both sides selects a team leader for each task. But this is a double-edged sword: at the end of each episode the leader of the losing team, along with two other colleagues who they select, must go before Sir Alan and his two advisers and possibly face the bullet. The winning side gets a prize from Sir Alan.


In the first episode, the teams have £500 each to spend on flowers, which they must buy wholesale in the morning and sell by the end of the same day on the streets of London.

Differences immediately emerge between the male and female teams. On the first evening together in The Apprentice house, the men relatively quickly come up with a team name - Impact - and retire to swig beer and play snooker. The women take an hour and a half longer to come up with First Forte.

"I would've bet everything I had on the girls winning that - with it being flowers," Sir Alan says of the first task.

However, the women's team bickers over strategy and has a very slow start flower-selling in Portobello. Things improve later in the day, with a trip to Hampstead, and a final sales push at King's Cross during the evening rush hour.

The men seem to work better as a team at this early stage and hit on the strategy of selling door to door in Notting Hill. But later in the day they are forced to slash prices to get rid of their remaining stock outside Baker Street tube station.

Already in the first episode, characters are emerging - and tensions inside the team. Men's team leader Tim Campbell, a 26-year-old London Underground manager, does not like the attitude of Matthew Palmer. But the 39-year-old former stockbroker and Conservative parliamentary candidate freely admits that diplomacy is not his strongpoint.

Paul Torrisi, a 34-year-old property developer, expects his fellow contestants to be "sly, ruthless dogs" - and promises to be exactly the same. But Paul proves he has the gift of the gab when it comes to selling flowers on the street.

In the women's team, brassy 34-year-old sales manager Saira Khan has no hesitation in nominating herself as leader for the first week's task, but soon puts noses out of joint with her abrasive manner. However, she leads from the front when her First Forte team runs into difficulty with the flower-selling exercise.

Sir Alan said he soon recognised that some of the contestants thought it would be a shrewd move to keep their heads down and not step forward as team leaders - but promised that would only take them so far on The Apprentice.

"The clever ones hid in the bushes. There are ways that people don't put themselves forward. People exist and survive without doing anything in real life," he added.

"There are characters who just do that [on The Apprentice], who think they are being drop-dead shrewd, but as it comes down to fewer and fewer people [they get found out," Sir Alan said.guardian

Feb 10 2005
Sir Alan Sugar

SIR Alan Sugar puts 14 ambitious wannabes through a series of tasks to land one job and a six-figure salary when his series, The Apprentice, hits screens next Wednesday.

The book to accompany the show, The Apprentice, arrives in shops today, packed with advice on how to reach the top in business.

Here are some of the Mirror columnist millionaire's tips:

How hungry are you? Initially I wasn't interested in making a million, I wanted a car and I wanted independence.

I had seen my father work hard all his life playing safe and I knew I'd rather go it alone.

I withdrew £100 of savings and spent £50 on wheels (distribution), £8 on insurance (liability) and £42 in stock (investment).

I knew my market (market research) and the main players (purchasing and sales). Then I set a target of £60 per week (business planning) and worked hard to establish myself as an effective middleman and deal-maker (negotiation).

Vision: Think differently and focus on what you want.

If you can't see yourself living differently and can't envisage a world where your product or your service is necessary, then you don't know where you are headed.

Desire: The desire to succeed comes from deep within. Know yourself and what you are trying to escape as well as where you want to go.

Drive: To succeed you need drive, determination and discipline.

When the rest clock off at 5pm you'll still be working.Capacity for hard work:If you think a a hard day starts at 11am with a cappuccino and finishes at 3pm, after a long lunch, then you won't be a successful entrepreneur.


Mirror

Lots of information on the Candidates the panel and a preview clip of the first the first episode.
BBC

The Daily Star says the wannabe moguls don't know what they have let themselves in for.
Sugar even bosses the shows producers around, his take no prisoners style has evry quaking in their boots.

Alan Sugar gives his views on footballers.
Sun

Thing is though it's not going to teach us anything that we don't already know, that you have to be a t*** to get to the top. Most of them all seem like that anyway, and if Alan Sugars already one, it's a forgone concusion that he'll pick another corporate bore. Richard Branson would have been more like how you get to the top be being nice, or nicer, or so it would seem. I'd like to see him give someone the sack

Great tv I loved the show. Sugar is an arrogant tw@, but he is a very rich tw@ so he has to be given credit for making ot to the top.
I was disappointed to see the men win but I'm sure the ladies will do it next week.
Saria is the new Narinda and will end up out on her heels if she does not allow others to get a word in edgeways.
What made me laugh was when at the end of the first day each group discussed how the day had gone, Timothy rendered tory-boy Matthew speachless when he told him he had held them up. The vacant look on Matthew's face was priceless. ::lol::





Read the verdict on the first night from the ones who should know better.


The reality show, in which a bunch of wannabe millionaires competed to impress Donald Trump, was a huge hit in the US. Sir Alan Sugar has taken over the Trump role in the UK version of the show, which began on BBC2 last night. Fourteen contestants were divided into male and female teams and given their first task - to sell £500 worth of flowers to unsuspecting commuters on the streets of London. But will the show repeat its Stateside success?


The Apprentice: 'Stomach churning, nail biting, hide behind the sofa stuff'



Gerard O'Donovan, Daily Telegraph
Verdict: The most instantly addictive show in years
"Programme ideas don't come much better than the Apprentice.... From the minute Sir Alan slid into his boardroom chair and the wannabe apprentices filed in to be addressed by him, things were on a knife-edge... Stomach churning, nail biting, hide behind the sofa stuff."

Thomas Sutcliffe, The Independent
Verdict: Gripping
"The Apprentice is half a satire of the crude melodrama of the business world, half a celebration of its energies, but I've signed up for the full subscription."

Nancy Banks-Smith, the Guardian
Verdict: A bloodbath in the making
"The Apprentice has 14 young entrepreneurs who think they are God's gift, and Sir Alan Sugar, who thinks he is God. The hopefuls arrived at Sugar's Amstrad headquarters in beautiful downtown Brentford like lambs to the slaughter, trundling their suitcases behind them. It will be a 12-week series with one firing a week and, presumably, a bloodbath on the 12th."

Joe Joseph, the Times
Verdict: Unenlightening
"The Apprentice is not really a business programme; it's essentially a glossy game show... Instructive? Up to a point, but we don't learn how to play better football by watching Sunday Leaguers in the local park, but by watching top Premiership teams."

Simon Hoggart, the Spectator
Verdict: Dull
"The thing lacks glamour. The contestants, meant to be the finest potential entrepreneurs in the land, resemble the kind of people that discourage most of us from ever going into a branch of All Bar one... It's all rather naff, a bit too small, too drizzly, not exciting enough - too British."


Charlie Catchpole, Daily Express
Verdict: Men on top
"The first round ended with the men on top and women decidedly unhappy about it." mediagaurdian

Sugar got it wrong about the way the men and women would approach the tasks: timesonline

Euan Ferguson


The Apprentice BBC2


The cameras made London look like Manhattan. The contestants made the more ominous verses of Revelations read like Miffy the Bunny Finds a Hat.

Arrogance, mendacity, hypocrisy and gall, along with petulant cruelty, galloping ignorance, glib self-deception and lashings of cant - a word which those who work for Alan Sugar must now be weary of mishearing - loomed splendid in the opening of The Apprentice. This programme offers much hope for those whose need to chew on cathartic loathing might otherwise have remained strangely unsated over the coming 12 weeks despite an election, spoilt royals and the continued existence of BT.

This was better - ie worse - than we had had a right to expect. The hit American version, which saw contestants trade and scheme weekly to win a lucrative job with a self-made multi-millionaire, featured Donald Trump, skyscrapers and go-getting New Yorkers. Would we have call centres, laddered tights and, dear God, Branson, or the self-winding vacuum-cleaner bloke?

No. Alan Sugar made a more than good stab at the steely, gravelly, be-limoed God figure, even though someone should tell him that his little beard makes him rather look more like a whelk-eyed man-rabbit than the image he obviously prefers publicly to project (that of foul-mouthed, pocket-stuffing huckster).

The production made our capital look thrilling, all green-glassed Gherkin in the sunset and busy red car-rivers below. The real joy, however, came with the 14 contestants, seven from each gender, a slender majority from identifiable planets.

It wasn't the greed which surprised: the greed we expected. Nor the machinations; nor, even, the desire to work with Sugar, inexplicable yet undeniable. The revelation was the extraordinary way in which the language used by the contestants, supposedly some of the country's sharpest entrepreneurs, was so completely belied by their actions.

Apparently, in today's business environment, it is no longer necessary actually to think, or lead, or have an idea: all that is needed is for someone to say repeatedly that they are a thinker, or a leader, or an ideas person, and then heroically fail to understand any aspect of a traditional causal link, in English, between spoken claim and actual prowess. Words mean precisely how loud you shout them.

Scant minutes had passed of course before 'I like to lead from the front' popped out. As opposed to what? From round the corner, hiding in a wheelie bin, dressed as Ptolemy?

'I like to think outside the box,' said Fat Matthew, before proving that he didn't by falling into every British lackey's trap of talking all the time about 'Sir' Alan rather than simply ignoring this spurious bought title or, even better, referring to him as old stoat-chops.

But the gulf was best exposed by the supremely tiresome Saira, self-appointed 'project leader' of the women's group.

'It's most important that we work as a team,' she shouted, constantly undermining their attempts to do so. 'Let's be positive,' she yelled, a matter of seconds after being sneakily negative. 'We are not the enemy within, so can I just stop you there?' she interrupted, when someone came up with a good idea which would have helped the team in their first task, to sell flowers on the streets of London. 'I'm getting, why are we doing this?' she berated her colleagues at one point, when asked whether their first sales idea, a table in Portobello market, was in any way working. 'It's, like, guys, I'm telling you, I'm giving you directions, let's get this done. And let's be positive!' After two hours they had sold three bunches. Surely I can't have been the only person in Britain wondering whether it wouldn't have been a brighter business idea to stop screaming about positivity and teamwork and instead listen for three seconds to her team and then go somewhere where they would sell flowers. Those who care about this stuff must have been rending their pinstripes. Observer

just watched this, was really good

Not so good if you are a female Hippo.

Yes, I like this programme as well.

oh I missed the start is it every wednesday?

Yes, every Wednesday. There have been two episodes so far.