Following favourable ratings, the BBC moved the programme onto its mainstream channel and thus to a much wider audience, with its companion discussion show The Apprentice: You're Fired!

[1] For this series, Alan Sugar commented that its production would include "tougher tasks and better people" as a means of making the programme stand out from other shows like Big Brother.

With viewing figures proving favourable since the programme's debut in 2005, the BBC decided that The Apprentice needed to be more accessible to a "mainstream" audience.

With the show attracting a far greater number of applications for participation, resulting in staff conducting interviews, auditions and assessments on over 10,000 applicants, the decision was made to increase the number of candidates that formed up the final line-up while still maintaining the use of twelve episodes for the series, thus allowing Sugar to fire more than one candidate at any time before the Interviews stage.

[23][24][25] However, Sugar denied the allegations of sexism due to his knowledge of the government act,[26][27] a point that was strongly supported by facts that had not been taken into consideration before the accusation was made.