Your standard Apprentice firing usually involves A) Lord Sugar’s brutal summary of the team’s failures, B) a quick show of the firing finger, and C) a prompt thank you from the beaten candidate who’s just been embarrassed on national TV.
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However, Lubna Farhan forgot about that last step. After the 33-year-old became the latest candidate to be fired from the BBC One business show, Lubna instead appeared to be smiling and on the verge on laughter. And it turns out the finance manager was actually chuckling during unused boardroom footage of her firing.
“I was laughing my head off, saying 'Thank God it's over!'” Lubna tells RadioTimes.com. “They obviously can't show everything and a lot [of the boardroom] gets edited out, but I was laughing my head off and I kept on being told 'You've got to be serious'. I couldn't be serious!”
Why exactly? Lubna says she was just so relieved to get out of the process – “I'm glad I went when I did because my kids are more important than fame and money – I was missing them!”
Lubna was the fourth candidate to be fired from the 2019 show
However, her giggling fit wasn’t the only moment cut from the boardroom scene viewers saw. Apprentice viewers may have noticed a particularly jarring moment when Lord Sugar asked Lubna what she contributed in this week’s electric bike task, only for her to reply: “I thought being myself would be enough.”
"That's not the answer I gave!” Lubna told us. “But I look like a t**t now because that's the answer that they showed. It looks weird!”
“I did actually list the things that I did and it was a big list. [But] had they actually shown that, they would not have justified him firing me."
She added: “[The producers] know who gets fired when and they have to justify, in a way, Lord Sugar's decision so you're editing the story in a certain way.”
Lubna also says there were several important moments in the task that were cut from the final episode. “When we were selling the lycra outfits Scarlett was given three opportunities and she didn't make a sale, either. But that wasn't highlighted in the episode. It was thrown under the carpet!”
“[In the boardroom] they kept talking about how I didn't make a sale, but I was only given one opportunity and I got quite close to making a sale. But Thomas sabotaged that and it wasn't shown.”
However, despite viewers only being shown a select narrative of her time on The Apprentice, Lubna still appears happy she took part. Well, sort of.
“I was proud of the way that I behaved, regardless of how I've been edited,” she says. “I'm grateful to be on the show and it's sad that the journey ended when it did. But in a way, I'm happy because in later weeks I would have looked more like a t**t!”
Thomas is Digital editor at BBC Science Focus. Writing about everything from cosmology to anthropology, he specialises in the latest psychology, health and neuroscience discoveries. Thomas has a Masters degree (distinction) in Magazine Journalism from the University of Sheffield and has written for Men’s Health, Vice and Radio Times. He has been shortlisted as the New Digital Talent of the Year at the national magazine Professional Publishers Association (PPA) awards. Also working in academia, Thomas has lectured on the topic of journalism to undergraduate and postgraduate students at The University of Sheffield.
