It turns out Lord Sugar’s watch reveals exactly how long The Apprentice boardroom takes

The Apprentice is back and is once again blessing us with some easy-viewing and good memes. Not all is how it looks however – some behind the scenes secrets reveal that the candidates work 18 hour days, starting at 5am.

Now some extremely keen-eyed viewers have picked up on how long the boardroom scenes actually take to film, based on a very small detail – Lord Sugar’s watch.

This week, Lord Sugar appeared on the show with a subtle gold Rolex on his wrist, no less. From this, viewers picked up just how long filming was going on for, by how the time jumped ahead on his watch.

When Lord Sugar and his aides Tim Campbell and Karren Brady brought the candidates back into the boardroom, his watch showed it was 1.20pm.

Lord Sugar’s watch showed 1.20pm when filming started

But by the time Lord Sugar had roasted them – and tried some particularly non pleasant non-alcoholic drinks – hours had passed.

By 5.30pm they were still going over what went wrong in the task

And finally, when Lord Sugar blessed our screens with the classic “you’re fired” line, his watch showed it was 6.45pm – more than five hours later.

6.45pm – firing time

After this, the fired candidate exits the boardroom – which is apparently just a set – and then walks out (which is also pre-filmed, by the way).

Lord Sugar has spoken about the brutally long filming times for the boardroom scenes in the past, explaining in 2019 that the scenes are heavily edited.

He said: “We’ve seen it all.What you get there [on TV] is an edited version of a 4 or 5-hour session in a boardroom.

“If you saw the rest of the 4 hour and 30 mins, you’ll see I don’t have much patience and we don’t have much tolerance and we do get a bit excited ourselves. Of course we’re quite used to it now.”

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