Week 6 Meatballsed up.

Meatballsed Up               

Week 6

Only a short blog this week as I’m away from my desk. With the teams the same as last week, with the exception of Duane, obviously, Lord Sugar sent the candidates to Edinburgh to try their hand at selling gourmet food. What this entailed was tarting up a burger van and selling food that has a little more to it than your usual street food. Lord Sugar handpicked the PM this week, selecting Jenna to run Team Sterling and Adam to ruin, sorry run, Team Phoenix. Jenna has put herself forward a couple of times for PM over the process but is often overlooked, possibly due to her slightly meek nature, but north of the Border the meek inherited the reins and decided that their focus would be on high quality, traditional Scottish food, opting for Aberdeen Angus beef casserole and haggis and mash after consulting with one of Scotland’s top Michelin starred chefs. She decided to fork out a little more on the produced, selecting premium beef and good ingredients, perhaps a slight gamble as profit margins would take a considerable hit. So up popped the Gourmet Scot Pot on Parliament Square, and along with the help of a piper seconded to Team Sterling on the promise of some free scran, they started to sell.

Adam took Phoenix over to a top Italian restaurant to get a recipe for their meatballs and pasta idea, but simply couldn’t grasp the concept of quality food, looking to cut cost and corners in every way possible, cue Nick Hewer’s disparaging look down his nose as Adam asks the top chef if dried rosemary worked as well as fresh. He even thought that sourced locally meant went to the local Morrisons to get all of their store brand cheapest ingredients. This cheap food was coupled with Katie’s marvellous idea of selling meatballs and pasta to Rangers and Hearts fans on their way to Tynecastle, looking at one point to price them at £7.99, these are the kind of ideas that have ensured Rangers’ sound financial state. In keeping with the earlier Italian expertise that brought us Bellisimo tomato sauce the ‘branding department’ went for the catchy name Utterly Delicious Meatballs (sigh).

At 6 quid a tray of parsimoniously assembled, cheap ingredients at a football match it is fair to say that Phoenix struggled to make sales, yet as they did their best the ‘marketing department’ headed out to research other places to sell from. Should have just done what Nick did for Sterling and find this out on the train on the way up. Stephen struck up a deal with a tour bus company to hock their phony Italian wares to poor tourists trying to learn about Edinburgh. Instead of viewing landmarks and historical sites they were forced to listen to Katie dressed as a pizza selling them meatballs. So pleased was Stephen of his captive audience tour bus takeover idea, in fact declaring it a task winning suggestion whilst looking as proud of himself as he always does, that he demanded his pink faced puppet move from the ground to re-situate near to the tour busses. They did and it was a bad idea. They had missed the lunch time trade moving from the football crowd and everyone on the busses had already eaten, the subliminal messages coming from the ‘advertising department’ telling them that if they did indeed fancy some more food they should look for someone selling pizza.

Parliament Square wasn’t working too well for Sterling with not a huge amount of people to sell to, so Rob Roy and William Wallace, AKA Ricky and Laura dressed in ‘comical’ borderline racist ‘Scottish attire’, headed off to find some customers. They did, so Jenna stopped panicking and doom mongering long enough to re-locate. After the move they found a decent trade and people seemed genuinely impressed by the quality of their food. Trade roared.

Back in the boardroom Jenna looked nervous, but her gamble paid off and she and Sterling won the task by around 20 pounds. Off they went to see Nick crashing a segway scooter at a decent speed, all good fun. Sterling did well though and hats off to Jenna. She won me over this week, making decisions and leading well in her own gentle style. There is a certain sweet innocence to her, a fine example being when she asked Laura if people spoke ‘purely Scottish’ to her would she be able to understand. She isn’t going to win the process though.

So Adam lost and with his horrid face sandwiched between the white of his shirt and the white of his hair he stumbled through the process of deciding who to take with him to take the flack. A process that required a lot of umming and ahhing, punctuated with hollow expressions of how he is the perfect candidate and your perfect business partner Loooord Shuga, with a handful of sexist sprinklings on top. He eventually decided on Katie who had been the main reason for going to the football match and deserved her place in the firing line and Azhar who had done little but look sulky all week, well all process.

I was looking forward to this, having seen my two favourites sacked in quick succession, and still sore about the loss of Bilyana, the sacking of this deluded prick Adam with his worm-like pink face and his stupid childish grin and the utter and constant nonsense that he speaks would be enjoyable. But it wasn’t to be. You see as I have established all of the members of Phoenix need sacking, they are equally as useless as each other, the exception is possibly Tom, who does say sound things and understands business, but is far far far too miserable to back. So Katie took the bullet. Lord Sugar highlighted that it was her third boardroom and that she makes errors, she was lucky week 1 when she should have walked and her luck had finally run out. She followed it and the two lads went back to the house.

Right that is week 6 done, I’m off to watch you’re fired, sorry that this blog wasn’t as detailed or as interesting as earlier ones, as I said I’m away at the mo and I’m a little annoyed Adam is still in the process.

Ricky to win from now on I think.

Take it easy,

Andrew D. Clark