The Apprentice (UK) 2012

I couldn't get my head around the wine investment proposal. Was he asking for 250k in order to raise 25mil on which he would invest purely in wine? The question for me would be who is ready to invest now? 250k could be done in a couple of months of client entertainment with £0 at the end of it.

I still think this shift to business partners rather than actual apprentices is a disaster. It doesn't matter how well you do over 12 weeks of tasks - it all comes down to the one idea you had before you started, so it's basically become the world's longest episode of Dragon's Den. Although in this case (unlike inventor Tom) Ricky would have won the old format too - imo he's clearly the most impressive individual in terms of working with others, keeping his cool, learning from his mistakes, etc. But it still feels like an illogical process and I miss the old format of interviews in the penultimate episode then the big get-the-old-gang-back-together finale.

The wine investment thing works pretty much the same as how people invest in gold: you don't actually get to have any, but you 'sort of' own some until you sell it.

So, basically there were two excellent ideas, one fair to middling one, and one that the contestant had pretty much admitted she wouldn't propose if she'd had the time to re-submit "sweet things", etc.

And that AlSug was 'too old' to do the wine investment thing and all the learning involved. Maybe Branson would?