We’re about halfway through this year’s Amstrad-sponsored ‘dole queue alleviation scheme’, and though it’s still not clear who’s going to feel the warm embrace of Lord Sugar’s wallet, it’s getting easier to tell who’s going to be left out in the cold without any cash.

With Duane Bryan (brother of Simon Webb from Blue – no, really!) the victim of last week’s fitness folly, the remaining candidates were ordered to come up with gourmet food to sell on the streets of Scotland’s culinary capital, Edinburgh. And it’d take more than Haggis, ‘neeps, and tatties to win over hungry highlanders.

Team Sterling, led by brassy Northerner Jenna, decided to make Scottish Hotpot, aka, ‘Scot Pot’, while Team Phoenix, dominated by greengrocer with a God complex Adam, clearly drew inspiration from the children’s menu at a Brewers Fayre and went for pasta and meatballs.

Unlike last week, it was all too easy to predict who was going to win and lose, as Phoenix crashed from one disastrous decision to another. Yet such predictability that didn’t stop it from being another week of textbook Apprentice cock-ups…

Wee Tim’rous Beastie o’ the Week

No one could have a problem understanding Jenna, as she has a voice so loud it could cut timber at twenty paces, but Jenna herself was worried about understanding her customers, clearly believing that everyone in Scotland spoke as if they were in a Robbie Burns poem or an episode of Rab C. Nesbitt.

Concerned about getting lost in translation, she turned to team mate and resident Scottish person Laura and asked “Do you think people like to speak, like, a Scottish language? Like, just a pure Scottish language?”

The look of incredulous confusion on Laura’s face could actually best be summed up with a bit of Scots colloquial: jings an’ crivvens Jenna, dinnae fash yersel’!

Creativity Deficit of the Week

On the whole, branding has not been a strong point for any contestant this series. We’ve had incorrectly spelled sauces, underwhelming names for home gadgets, and exercise regimes with cheesy titles. But the art of naming things took a real punch to the gut this week, as Phoenix arrived at the utterly bland, utterly forgettable ‘Utterly Delicious Meatballs’. In terms of stirring excitement, it was the branding equivalent of Seb Coe.

Not only was it a title lacking in any imagination or flair, but it was picked over a superior title that would have included the name, and therefore recommendation, of the chef whose recipe it was.

However, when you think about it it’s unlikely Chef Matteo would have put his name to Adam’s budget ball concoction of pig fat and freeze-dried rosemary. The man has a reputation to uphold.

Meal of the Week

When it came to creating a gourmet meal, Adam took the same attitude as that of The Simpsons’ Lunch Lady Doris by using the cheapest possible ingredients; trying to keep costs low and margins high using food that you’d store in the corner of your garage in case of a natural disaster. So while Team Sterling were using prime cuts of costly cow by the bucketload, Phoenix were making a cut-price copy of the meal Chef Matteo had taught them.

It was the opposite of what Shugsy had said they should do, but Adam was damned if he’d allow the sage advice of a successful millionaire get in his way. He’d probably have plundered the meerkat enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo if the margins had been rewarding enough.

And when it came time for the boardroom he was quick to lie his arse off defend his choice. “We weren’t going for poor quality,” he told Lord Sugar, despite the fact Phoenix only spent 90 quid on their food by buying in bulk from the value range at Morrisons. There mustn’t have been a Lidl around, or undoubtedly they would have stripped its shelves, fed all their punters for a fiver, and won the task.

“Pop Quiz, Hotshot” of the Week

For a second week Azhar faced the ignominy of being dressed like a child who’d lost a fight with the dressing-up box, as he was forced to don a costume to resemble that well-known meatball lover Julius Caesar.

He got off lightly though, as Katie slipped into a slice of pizza… to promote a foodstuff that wasn’t pizza. You could cut the cognitive dissonance with a knife and fork.
Taking the ‘Dennis Hopper in Speed‘ approach to getting noticed, they hijacked a tour bus to flog their balls, along with Stephen, who was only draped in an Italian flag and resembled like a Tuscan superhero halfway through a costume change.

Katie, still dressed as a slice of pizza, asked the passengers what foodstuff they thought she was selling. ‘Pizza?’ ventured one tourist in a moment off flawless Sherlockian logic. Oh madam, you see, your mistake there was in thinking like a rational person. This is The Apprentice. Rationality got its redundancy notice in Week One.

The CultBox Comedy Award

In between sitting in the House of Lords and antagonising Pierce Morgan on Twitter, Lord Sugar is clearly thinking up pun after pun to sling at the captive audience he lures into his ‘Boardroom O’ Bellylaughs’, and he was on fine wise-cracking form this week.

£5:99 for meatballs at the Hearts game? “They don’t pay that for a striker there!” quipped Shugsy. It certainly got a laugh from West Ham’s vice-chairman Karren Brady. He knows his audience does our Shugsy.

And when it came to describing Phoenix’s meatballs his wit was rapier-sharp, as he likened them to something seen on the floor of the elephant enclosure at the zoo. Oh snap! Expect to see his stand-up gig. ‘Lord Sugar: Live at Canary Wharf‘, on DVD come Christmas.

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 25th April 2012 on BBC One.

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