Fired Apprentice Brett speculates: "Neither team got any sales - is that really the case?"
Brett has his suspicions that tonight's nil-nil result was just for good TV, but then it’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly what the self-confessed waffler is saying…
Fired Apprentice candidate Brett Butler-Smythe admits he “waffles crap at the best of times”, holds his hands up to using the word "specification" too often and thinks he probably should come with an “encryption code” – but somewhere during our long and meandering post-firing chat he suggested that all wasn’t exactly as it seemed on this week’s Apprentice...
Oh yes, Mr ‘Generally As It Stands’ thinks tonight’s result, which saw both teams fail to sell a single unit of their new health products, might not have been quite as black and white as the nil-nil that was reported in the boardroom.
“I think that that was played out quite well. If it had been a standard generic episode where the losing team had to go to a crap café and pick someone to come back in, then it wouldn’t have made it look much cop,” Brett told RadioTimes.com, after his team supposedly shifted not one of their dehydrated veggie crisps after pitching to Tesco, Asda and Virgin Active.
“But to keep it an open playing field – to basically get rid of anybody Lord Sugar wanted to to get it down to the final five – I thought it was good for the process of the TV and TV ratings really.”
So no sales was just good TV?
More like this
“You don’t know how it’s worked,” Brett continued. “You could be somebody that always thinks there’s a catch or thinks things are done in a particular way to make it look the way it does. The fact that neither team got any sales – is that really the case? Was there something or was there not? You can speculate as much as you want. It looked really good for TV to all be sat there instead of just your bottom three when any single one of you could have gone.”
Does this mean he's suggesting sales were made but not reported in the boardroom?
“I can’t confirm or deny whether I reckon that that’s the case.” An answer about as clear as that frosted door Sugar walks through.
“But again, you do speculate quite a lot when you think, out of all the products that we’ve gone through and the presentations and this, that and the other, was there really not one company that wanted to take a punt on a potentially good product? Both teams did get recognition that they could be onto something, but unfortunately it just wasn’t enough. But again, it’s just one of those things that you could look at in a different light if you are that way inclined.”
Attempting to call on my inner Lord cut-the-crap Sugar to find out if Brett was indeed ‘that way inclined’, and thus suggesting the show was fixed, proved to be about as easy as opening one of those bags of oil-covered crisps.
“No, I don’t think it’s been fixed for TV at all," he began, before seemingly changing his mind: "I could in my own opinion think it might have been… "
Before changing it back again once more: "But I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that everybody goes through a fair event and the result of that is identified at the end.”
A spokesperson for The Apprentice told us: “They didn’t sell anything. Neither team.”
Simple and to the point. Thank goodness.
The Apprentice continues Wednesday at 9:00pm on BBC1
