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So, nice guys sometimes can indeed beat those who are full of bull, and walk away with the glittering prizes - even on The Apprentice. In last night's final, mad but loveable inventor Tom Pellereau came right from behind; during the first half of the series, he was never even on the winning team. Now he has scooped Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment in his mysterious business plan, which seems to involve the use of special chairs which can magically anticipate which of a company's employees will in future go down with back pain - then even more magically help to cure them.

Tom spins out so many ideas that Lord Sugar was shrewd enough to see that this might be a person worth backing - even though lots of them were mad, like the famous 'emergency biscuit' during the cookie-baking task. Even if 90 per cent of the inventions were useless there could be gold in the rest. Indeed by the end of the two-hour special, which included a marathon You're Hired section, it became clear that in the months since the series was filmed, the magic chair had already been dumped in favour of developing an existing idea of Tom's, a sort of bendy nail file which fits the shape of the hands (I think). Again, not the most obvious basis for making a fortune but Tom's trump card is that he had already managed to sell this to Wal-mart in the US - a heck of an achievement in anyone's books, showing the sort of enterprise and chutzpah that the good Lord really admires. Tom's winning communication style was his ability to keep smiling, get on well with the team, and recognise when it was time to drop the losers with good grace and move on to the next idea.

The switch in this year's The Apprentice, with Lord Sugar looking for a business angel relationship with someone rather than an employee, seems to have made a real difference in the quality of the people coming through to the final. Too often in the past, sales-ey wide-boy types who seemed to have a high bull quotient but little real substance seemed to make the cut. This time there were some really smart people. Helen is the sort of individual anybody would be pleased to employ - smart, hard-working and very organised. She fell only at the very last hurdle, in the shape of an unconvincing business plan for a nationwide concierge business which you could never imagine the former Amstrad boss backing in a million years.

Susan Ma, at only 21, has made good money selling home-made natural skincare products and is clearly going places - but had been naïve in underestimating the costs of scaling up into a proper business. She was hampered all along by a youthful lack of authority in her style, which meant she failed to communicate sufficient seriousness when she was making a point, tending to sound whiny instead. Susan's most fascinating communications failing was her tendency to 'think out loud' in the planning stages of tasks, by challenging her own ideas with a stream of questions to see how well they stood up. This made her the subject of ridicule as the questions could sound naïve and stupid, most famously on the 'selling to the French' task (do the French like children, do the French like to travel by car?) Actually though, Susan was being really smart. As she pointed out last night, it was going through this process that helped her to be a lot more on-target with many of her ideas than the others, who tended just to blunder into things without thinking - something many of us could learn from. The lesson for Susan though - do it in private, not when the others can eavesdrop on you going through the process.

Those peddling bull gradually got found out as the series progressed. Last night's interview process with dreaded hard-man Claude Littner, the blessed Margaret Mountford and others, finally saw the end for Jedi Jim Eastwood, the super salesman who could charm the socks off people but with a scary dark side. He could talk for England (or rather, Ireland), but most of it was in cliché and hyperbole. His e-learning business plan was under-researched and looked as if it had been put together to please Lord Sugar's charitable instincts, rather than as a real standalone business. The lesson here was to back what you really believe in, rather than trying always to second-guess the boss. As for all that bull - well, The Apprentice really would be no fun without it, would it?

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