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Lord Sugar is close to choosing the winner of what has been a very controversial series of The Apprentice
The 15th run of the BBC 's long-running reality series was plagued with a race row drama, which led to the channel blocking a fired candidate from speaking to the press in conjunction with her elimination.
Rising above the controversy were finalists Scarlett Allen-Horton and Carina Lepore, who are hoping to win Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment for their recruitment and bakery businesses, respectively.
Ahead of the final, we spoke to both Allen-Horton and Lepore about their time on the show, why they stayed out of the drama and which candidates they felt posed the biggest competition.
Did you both think you had a good chance of making the final?
Carina : Well, I knew that Scarlett was my biggest competition. But I did also feel it was meant to be and that I was going to reach the final.
Scarlett : If I’m being really honest, I thought that I had a good chance of making it into the final five as we progressed through the weeks, but when I did those interviews, I thought there was a really strong possibility of me going home at that point. I think both of us were very consistent performers, but it depends on who Lord Sugar likes – that’s the only thing. When we were in the boardroom, I realised that actually it comes down to, not just your performance, but your personality and obviously your business plan, and you don’t know what his thoughts are going to be on that. So, it was a really difficult one to gauge.
Show all 16 1 /16The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Dean Ahmad, 20 Dean founded his sports management agency aged 15 and believes he is "the definition of an entrepreneur", with confidence and emotional intelligence that are "off the charts". He believes his "gift of the gab" could "persuade anyone to do anything".
FIRED WEEK 10
BBC
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Scarlett Allen-Horton, 32 Recruitment company owner Scarlett says that her upbeat personality means that people "will often buy into her as a person," but admits that she sometimes struggles to accept help from others. Could this cause fireworks in the show's infamous group tasks?
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Jemelin Artigas, 34 Network marketing consultant Jemelin claims she is "1000 percent committed" to winning every task but warns that she can be "next-level stubborn" when it comes to getting her own way.
FIRED WEEK SEVEN
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Souleyman Bath, 20 Para athlete and motivational speaker Souleyman trains with the Great Britain Paralympic team as a sprinter, having been diagnosed with Retina Pigmentosa aged six. "The less sight I have, the more imagination I gain, because what you see is what you see and what you don't see is when the magic begins," he says.
FIRED WEEK THREE
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Lewis Ellis, 28 Lewis is a digital marketing project manager and describes himself as a "maverick", who believes his competitiveness and determination will see him through the process. He adds: "I may not be the smartest guy in the room, but I’ll sure as hell work harder.”
FIRED WEEK 11 WITH LOTTIE AND PAMELA
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Lubna Farhan, 33 Finance manager Lubna says she believes she has the "whole package" after turning herself into her own role model. A bookworm, the contestant describes herself as a "dark horse", adding: "I came from a council estate… I have made myself into something good and I’m on my way to becoming something great”.
FIRED WEEK FOUR
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Riyonn Farsad, 30 Events manager Riyonn invented his own card game which is part of his "little black book full of multi-million-pound ideas”. He says his personality is his best asset, but won't let friends get in the way of coming out on top.
FIRED WEEK FIVE
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Shahin Hassan, 36 Chartered engineer Shahin credits Elon Musk as one of his role models because he “thinks outside the box”, a quality he prides himself in having and thinks that his imagination will make him stand out from the other candidates.
FIRED WEEK ONE
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Pamela Laird, 29 Beauty brand owner Pamela describes herself as "feisty and passionate" with a charismatic personality, which enables her to excel in sales. She says: “I love to be the under-estimated person in the room.”
FIRED WEEK 11 WITH LOTTIE AND LEWIS
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Carina Lepore, 30 Carina owns an artisan bakery. She says she is a natural leader and that people latch onto her to benefit from the influence she carries. She believes it’s “written in the stars” that she’ll be Lord Sugar’s next Apprentice, describing herself as a "pocket rocket" due to her height (5ft 1").
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Lottie Lion, 19 Lottie the librarian says she is “very cut throat” and insists that she is no push over. She believes her poise and her “powers of persuasion” are her greatest business qualities, noting that people with bad manners anger her and that she gets frustrated when things don’t adhere to her high standards.
FIRED WEEK 11 WITH LEWIS AND PAMELA
BBC
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Ryan-Mark Parsons, 19 Ryan-Mark is an award-winning public speaker who admires the Queen and describes himself as the "epitome of luxury". Despite believing his best asset to be his ability to “forge a connection with anyone” he adds: "I'm not afraid to be ruthless when it comes to the other candidates."
FIRED WEEK EIGHT
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Iasha Masood, 27 Iasha is an account manager who thinks her “crazy, controversial, eccentric personality” will help her go far as she believes her "natural persona" will help her win. But watch out for her enemies - Masood is not afraid of keeping her friends close but her enemies closer, and she says: "I can read people just by looking at their body language, they won’t realise it until it’s too late – and checkmate”.
FIRED WEEK SIX
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Kenna Ngoma, 24 Before creating his alcohol-infused ice cream company in 2018, Kenna played semi-professional football for Manchester City before that was cut short by injury in 2013. Kenna believes he is enthusiastic with an “infectious personality”, which he hopes will aid him to befriend the strongest candidates to help him build alliances.
FIRED WEEK TWO
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Marianne Rawlins, 36 Marianne owns a risk management consultancy and moved from the US to the UK in 2017. She admits that she doesn’t have a filter and may need to “dial down her American-ness” and take a step back, as she says she can be too direct.
FIRED WEEK NINE WITH THOMAS
The Apprentice 2019 – Meet the contestants Thomas Skinner, 28 Pillow company owner Thomas started out in business aged 12, with a paper round, and later worked on the markets when he was 16. Since then he has set up his own pillow company, attributing his business success to his “sharp”, “street wise” character.
FIRED WEEK NINE WITH MARIANNE
Which of your fellow contestants did you think were your toughest competitors throughout the process?
Carina : I think Pamela was a strong candidate, only because I feel like she had a really established business.
Scarlett : For me, I actually thought that Marianne was strong competition because she’s also got a very credible business. She’s very business-savvy.
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Try for free When you walked into the boardroom on day one, what was going through your head?
Carina : I couldn’t believe it.
Scarlett : You walk in – and you’ve been sort of trying to assess each other outside – and then, all of a sudden, you feel like you’re watching TV.
Carina : I was about to say that! Because I've watched every series in the past, I was like: “Hang on? Am I actually here with Lord Sugar?”
What was the hardest part of the process?
Scarlett : I think for me it was being criticised in those interviews. The boardroom after it was gruelling as well, to be honest with you. You’re being constantly ripped to pieces – everything that you have built and done is annihilated. The other thing that I was worried about was actually having a business and just worrying I’d lose clients off the back of [the show]. Thinking about those kind of things was hard.
There's no shying away from the fact that this year's series has found itself at the centre of a lot of controversy . What are your views on everything that went down?
Carina : We stayed out of it. Scarlett and I – it’s not us at all. Whatever all of the other candidates choose to do or say, it’s up to them, really.
Scarlett : I think that was reflected with me and Carina in the process – and even in the house. We wouldn’t get involved in anything like that. I think it’s fair to say we had our eye on the game. We kept focus.
Did you ever think that some of your fellow candidates might have applied to be on the show for non-business reasons?
Scarlett : I think that every person that was in there had credible business acumen.
Carina : I feel like they all went on there thinking: "We’re business people and we made it through to get on the show.’’ But yeah, as the weeks went on...
Scarlett : I think some of them had different game plans, which is understandable, I suppose.
Show all 20 1 /20The best UK TV shows of every year this century The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2000: Big Brother After endless tawdry seasons dominated by kitchen-sink bustups and diary-room rants, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Big Brother was when it arrived at the dawn of the new century. Adapted by Netherlands production company Endemol from its already notorious Dutch hit, Big Brother was a grand social experiment repurposed for prime time. Random individuals were plucked from obscurity and forced to share a glorified Portakabin for a month. Overnight, heroes and villains were created. And, when Celebrity Big Brother came along in 2001 (Jack Dee the first winner), the vaguely famous jumped at the opportunity to humiliate themselves too. After it moved to Channel 5 in 2011, the law of diminishing returns kicked in and it was announced that this year’s Big Brother was to be the last, leaving us with memories good, bad, hilarious and disturbing.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2001: The Office Alan Partridge had arguably beaten Ricky Gervais to the punch in exploring the tragicomedy of life as a middle-aged man labouring under delusions of cool. But as World’s Hippest Boss David Brent, Gervais (with co-writer Stephen Merchant) perfected the art of making us cringe and laugh in the same heartbeat. Using the fly-on-the-wall documentary style of the period, The Office was also the arguably the first workplace sitcom to capture the soul-shrivelling tedium of sitting at a desk all day, nothing but your fag break to look forward to. And there was a genuinely affecting romantic arc, as besotted colleagues Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) overcome impossible odds – ie Dawn’s idiot fiancé – to be together.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2002: Top Gear It would end in a punch-up over a cold-meat supper, but when Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman rebooted the BBC’s creaky motoring show as a lad mag in TV form, they were doing something genuinely revolutionary. Top Gear was TV for Blokes that wasn’t in the least apologetic about it. Cyclists were jeered at, expensive cars driven at speed, single-entendres dropped like breadcrumbs at a pigeon convention. Top Gear quickly became BBC’s global cash-cow. The audience spanned continents and, at its peak, the franchise was worth an estimated £50m annually to the corporation. Clarkson and co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May left under a cloud when Clarkson lamped one of his crew in 2015. Top Gear has since struggled to replace the dynamic trio. Cheeky duo Freddie Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness were recently unveiled as the latest strapping in for a test drive. We wish them well – perhaps in vain.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2003: Peep Show Step aside David Brent. If The Office made us glance away in embarrassment, David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s two-hander had audiences doubled over wincing. With the laconic comedians playing housemates and straight men to one another, Peep Show was embarrassment comedy at its finest and starkest – a buddy movie as scripted by Samuel Beckett.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century The X Factor (2004) We’ve long since stopped caring but there was a time The X Factor loomed large in the national conversation. At its peak, the talent show ran from the sublime to the ridiculous – or, to put it another way, from One Direction to Jedward. It minted genuine stars – the aforementioned 1D – and gave us a lifetime supply of sob stories. The greatest TV villain of the 2000s, moreover, was early-period Simon Cowell, who, merely by frowning, could crush the dreams of a 15-year-old ingenue.
ITV
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2005: The Apprentice Where the original New York-set Apprentice featured a pre-Apocalypse Donald Trump and legions of shiny-toothed Americans, the British version was something else entirely. With contestants’ patter drifting between conventional English and the glossary of self-help business manual, The Apprentice interwove comedy and drama like no other reality show. Whether the “candidates” were trying to buy a bucket of eels for a fiver off a recalcitrant fishmonger or shrinking before Alan Sugar’s stubby finger of doom, The Apprentice was – and largely remains – consistently amusing. Here was a reality show that reminded us nothing is quite so ridiculous as an ordinary person shoved unprepared before the cameras.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2006: Life on Mars It was always widely understood the Seventies were rubbish – a blur of Ford Capris, smoke-filled rooms and sexist “banter”. But Life on Mars, with John Simm as a Manchester policeman sent (or so it seemed) 30 years back in time, brought the era of a three-day week and Bovril for supper grippingly to life. It also gave us one of the great TV antiheroes in detective Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister).
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2007: Skins “Yoof” drama finally exorcised the ghost of Grange Hill. Chronicling the ups and downs of teenage friends in Bristol, Skins unflinchingly unpacked issues such as substance abuse, sexual identity, bullying and mental illness. By daring to show adolescence as it was lived – rather than as how adults wished to remember it – father-and-son writers Bryan Elsey and Jamie Brittain had sparked a low-key revolution. Skins also served as a star factory, with Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel among its cast.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2008: The Inbetweeners As if to countercheck Skins’ gritty portrayal of teendom, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s The Inbetweeners brought a charming bawdiness to its portrayal of pubescent derring-do. Will, Simon, Neil and Jay were virginal young men at a hard-knocks comprehensive, their lives an obstacle course of cruel teachers, aloof girls and oblivious parents. The Inbetweeners would never win awards for subtly, but for all its crudeness, the show’s heart was always in the right place, and in the end it was its sweetness that made it beloved.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2009: Red Riding Future Spider-Man Andrew Garfield became enmeshed in a web of murder and secrets in darkest Seventies Yorkshire in this riveting adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding quartet of novels. As with the source material, the feature-length miniseries portrayed Yorkshire’s West Riding as a baroque backwater, sustained by rumour and lies. And the paedophile plot at the heart of the story was horrifically fleshed out as we left behind Garfield’s cub reporter Eddie Dunford in 1974 and moved on to the Eighties. Here, Paddy Considine and Mark Addy, skirting the real-life story of the Yorkshire Ripper, played outsiders stumbling upon a skin-crawling conspiracy.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2010: Sherlock It was elementary the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman caper would make our shortlist. Despite the present-day setting, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock was almost definitive – his Baker Street detective at once aloof, amused (and amusing) and also faintly ridiculous. Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss sent Holmes and Watson on ever more convoluted adventures and in the end even the two stars would appear to be a bit fed up with the fandango. But early on, and with Conan Doyle’s source material to work from, Sherlock was sublime.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2011: Black Mirror What would happen if a prime minster were to be intimate with a pig? It’s an unlikely question with which to kick off what would eventually become a multimillion-pound Netflix franchise. But such was the scatalogical manner with which Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror announced itself. Initially operating on a modest Channel 4 budget, the anthology series portrayed the future and the present as dreary dystopias, in which technology ensured there were no secrets, except for the ones we kept from ourselves.
Channel 4
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2012: Line of Duty Jed Mercurio’s first proper blockbuster gave us cops investigating cops within the Met’s anti-corruption unit. Martin Compston’s DS Steve Arnott, Vicky McClure’s DC Kate Fleming and Adrian Dunbar’s Superintendent Ted Hastings were our entry into a world of lies, betrayal and paranoia. Lennie James, Keeley Hawes and Thandie Newton were among those playing friends and foe (occasionally both at once) across four absorbing series (with a fifth due in 2019).
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2013: Broadchurch David Tennant, Olivia Colman and future Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker headed the top-rank cast – but the true star was the haunting fictional town from which the series took its name. A child was killed amid the ghostly splendour of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and as detectives Hardy (Colman) and Miller (Tennant) investigated, they uncovered buried secrets and evil lurking behind the seaside bliss.
ITV
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2014: Happy Valley Proving there is life after Coronation Street, Sarah Lancashire put in a bravura turn as Sgt Catherine Cawood, a no-nonsense police officer with a tragic family history (daughter dead by suicide, sister a recovering drug addict). This was a jumping-off point for a exploration by series creator Sally Wainwright of the dark side of rural Britain. Week by week, the outwardly idyllic setting of Wainwright’s native West Yorkshire was revealed to be a viper’s den of deceit, murder and sexual violence.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2015: Poldark This luscious reboot of a largely forgotten Seventies costumed romp gained immediate acclaim for its spectacular views. But while audiences understandably swooned over Aidan Turner’s epic combination of pecs and three-cornered hat, the swooning Cornish backdrop didn’t do any harm either. Eleanor Tomlinson and Heida Reed filled out the cast. And if the suspicion lingered that many diehard fans were watching simply in the hope moody copper magnate Ross Poldark (Turner) would once more whip off his shirt, this tale of mercantile skulduggery and romantic rivalry was still neatly drawn and deftly acted.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2016: The Night Manager A turbo-charged le Carré adaptation fit for the Daniel Craig James Bond era. Tom Hiddleston charmed and swaggered as hotel concierge-turned-intelligence operative Jonathan Pine while Hugh Laurie devoured the scenery in huge chunks as amoral arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper. The Night Manager was in the end largely a triumph of surface sheen over deep storytelling – the plot was not un-stodgy – but how this small-screen blockbuster sparkled.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2017: Blue Planet II It took David Attenborough and the BBC Natural History Unit to wake us up to the devastating impact on the oceans of single-use plastics. But even aside from its stark environmental message, this breathtaking exploration of the aquatic teeming multitudes was compelling. The world beneath the waves revealed to be an alien realm as spectacular as any sci-fi epic.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2018: Bodyguard The plot had more holes than a Swiss cheese festival and Richard Madden wore the same clenched expression throughout. Still, Mercurio’s political thriller felt like a huge leap forward for British drama. It was cool and sexy – and that’s even taking into account the cringeful love scenes between Madden’s special protection officer David Budd and Keeley Hawes as the morally ambiguous government minister he was tasked with protecting.
BBC
The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2019: Fleabag Phoebe Waller-Bridge was toast of the 2019 Emmys, with series two of Fleabag bagging gongs for, among other things, best comedy series, outstanding lead actress and outstanding writing. Acclaimed both sides of the Atlantic it has catapulted her to the a-list of comedy talent (see her $50m deal with Amazon). But behind it all was the humane and hilarious return of the writer/actor’s titular heroine and the emotional whirlpool into which she is plunged after an encounter with Andrew Scott’s “hot Priest”.
BBC
A lot of candidates have been extremely vocal on social media, which in turn has landed some of them in hot water – but you two have remained very quiet on Twitter. Was that a conscious decision?
Carina : I can’t even use Twitter! Most people are savvy when it comes to social media, but I’m not. I'm too busy. I work everyday – Scarlett’s probably the same – so scrolling through all the comments on social media isn’t my priority.
Scarlett : I actually had no social media before I came on the show, so the world of Instagram and Twitter has been quite eye-opening. I didn’t even understand what Twitter was. I guess it’s bit of a conscious decision, but like Carina said, more so than anything else, we are here for real business reasons and investment purposes, so you’re just conscious of that.
The Apprentice final will be broadcast on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC One
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