The apprentice

For the people watching the BBC version, here's another behind-the-scenes tip-off. Whenever someone gets fired, they have to walk to a cab that's waiting for them outside. If you watch closely, you will see that they are always wearing the same long dark coat that pretty much hides all their own clothes. Reason is that this is all taped in advance during the first days of the production. Everybody has to do the "walk-of-shame" to the (same) cab. And since there is no way of knowing what you will be wearing on the actual day that you get fired, everyone has to wear the dark coat.

I remember doing this while we were living in the Antwerp loft. The taping of the "getting into the taxi" had to be done when it was dark outside, because a boardroom would (on tv) always be made to look like it ended late in the evening. (Trust me, this was not always the case; the final boardroom e.g. was at 7am on a Sunday morning). So on the second night of the production, we were all ushered to the office in Antwerp to do the shooting. We were there until the middle of the night.
Luckily for me, they never had to air my "walk-of-shame" :-).

Comments

[Anneke]

De magie van tv weer doorbroken :)

[Anneke]

De magie van tv weer doorbroken :)

[Robin Wauters]

I didn't watch De Topmanager, is there still footage available online?

[Claudia]

@ Robin: God, I hope not!!

[Benny]

En hoe we daar die zondagochtend (zaterdagnacht) met kleine oogjes stonden om die boardroom op te nemen...

[Fabiaan]

Yeah, I noticed that too.
Another strange error: this week, the candidates were picked up at 7am to go to the boardroom, but when Sir Alan entered the room he said "good afternoon".
How long did you have to stay in the boardroom?

[Claudia]

The boardroom is a film set. You have to realize that everything is fake. They have camera's everywhere to be able to film everyone's face. In Belgium it was in a TV studio in Mechelen. Boardrooms took pretty long. There is the arriving that's filmed for quite some time, the make-up, the waiting in between takes. The boardroom discussion itself could easily take up to 1.5 hours. I'll try to do a post on how the boardroom schedule worked soon.