Apprentice contestants spared

When the contestants enter the Apprentice board room, they'd better be ready to impress.

That's the word from Apprentice judge John Mitchell who last night oversaw the first boardroom elimination where no one was fired on the TVNZ reality show.

Team Athena beat team Number 8 in a "landslide" victory in a challenge to design and sell a new Subway sandwich, leaving team leader Rich Henry, David Wyatt and Paul Antac to face the furnace in the boardroom.

Mitchell, who has not held back when critiquing the contestants, said if they ended up in the boardroom, they needed to be ready for a grilling.

"It took us a little while to understand that the boardroom was our place. They're coming into our fortress so you're really in a situation where you're taking control.

"They're there to try and impress you and you're there to call them out on things they may have done wrong."

However, he praised the efforts of the contestants, saying a lot of what they achieved in the challenges was "really quite impressive."

Mitchell, a former journalist and now media and communications manager for the Wellington Phoenix, said contestants had told him he was pretty rough.

"I guess it's part of my personality that I can be rather acerbic at times," he said, adding producers hadn't used some of the lines he was more proud of.

The decision not to fire anyone had not been made prior to the board room but Terry Serepisos had decided no one deserved to be fired that week.

Mitchell said Henry had also made a poor choice to bring Natac back in to the boardroom, saying Natac had done nothing to deserve that and had become somewhat of a "fall back position".

While the girls had cleaned up, with their Chicken BBQ Blast making up 60 per cent of the store's sales that day, the blokes had also done well, with their Healthier Summer Roast making up 45 per cent of sales.

"The guy's sandwich I think just wasn't as good as the girl's... I definitely liked the girl's one."

He said not having a business background wasn't an impediment to his ability to critique the contestants, saying it was simply common sense.

"You don't necessarily need to be a high profile businessman to have an opinion on how people go about things. That's the nature of the show."

Mitchell said it had been a perfect storm of publicity for host Terry Serepisos, whose Wellington Phoenix team had captured the hearts and minds of the public.

"His profile is sky high right now," he said.

Serepisos had pulled up losing project manager Henry for twice calling him Terry but Mitchell said that wasn't his usual style.

"I certainly don't [call him Sir]. I just call him mate or bro," he said.

"Terry's pretty easy going the bulk of the time. We all call him Terry in the office."

However, the boardroom was a formal situation and the formal term of address was appropriate, he said.

Four weeks in, with the guys until now appearing pretty cohesive as a team, Mitchell said that strong personalities would soon start coming to the fore.

"I think we are starting to see that the guys are realising, just like the girls have that there's a bit of dog

"I think that they're starting to realise now that there's more at stake and I think you'll certainly start seeing a lot more personality clashes amongst the boy's team."

Mitchell said they were pleased with how the show as going and felt it avoided the "cringe factor" of Kiwi shows in the past.

"And obviously for Terry, Nathan and I, I'm extremely proud of how it's going."

- © Fairfax NZ News