A few days ago I was watching the final of the UK TV programme, The Apprentice, with Sir Alan Sugar. Over a

BBC The Apprentice

period of several months, competitors, in teams, have to carry out a series of business related tasks. Each week, Sir Alan fires one member of the losing team. What’s this got to do with office furniture?

Well, firstly Sir Alan has what appears to be a highly stylised boardroom in what is probably a standard TV set. In fact, the BBC’s website says “In order to make it possible to properly film the boardroom, where there are up to 19 people around a table, a lot of cameras are needed. In order to direct those cameras properly but not interrupt proceedings, the series director needs to work from a gallery. Therefore it is not possible to film the boardroom scenes from Sir Alan’s real boardroom. They are filmed in a studio.”

On one side of the boardroom table sits Sir Alan, with his ‘directors’ Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer. Sir

The Boardroom

Alan is not known for his tallness, but his executive leather office chair is obviously set higher than anyone else so that he dominates the boardroom. The white glass boardroom table in this series seems to have replaced the classic wood veneer boardroom table of earlier series. What is surprising is that there are only about half a dozen meeting room chairs on the other side of the table. Since there are 16 hopeful candidates, many of them have to stand up when being interrogated by Sir Alan, waiting for the fateful ‘your fired!’. These leather meeting room chairs seem very similar to our own pass-partout chairs.

In this years all-female final Yasmina and Kate were teamed up with some of the candidates fired in previous episodes to design and present competing boxes of chocolate. Kate chose ‘choc-d’amour’ to entice lovers to share the chocolates, but the selling price was too high for the supermarket buyers. Yasmina’s electrifying ‘Cocoa Electric’ with surprising flavours won the day and she was hired by Sir Alan as an apprentice in his business. She will be setting up a business to deal with digital signage and advertising in the health industry.

All this got me thinking about what an apprentice in the furniture business would do and what tasks you could set for a team of young apprentices. Just listening to some of our  furniture advisors on the phones could give you some ideas for an apprentice-style challenge. For example:

• How to get office desks for 20 people in an office designed for half that number.
• How to get a 3 metre boardroom table into a meeting room measuring 2.5 metres by 2.5 metres.
• How to furnish a 16 person wood and leather boardroom for less than £500.

I am looking forward to the next series of the apprentice and I hope Sir Alan takes up some of my ideas for an office furniture challenge.