Bet he's moved on to another 'brilliant' idea by next month.

It's a shame 'cos you have to love his enthusiasm, but he needs to work for somebody else who can reign him in and channel it.

And now I'm quoting myself!

I'm scared. I've never been on my own in a thread before, not knowingly anyway.

I might just sneak out quietly, before I'm noticed.

Lol Popty Ping Instant meal with soft toy!

Sorry, Holly - I think a lot of us moved over to the BB thread.

Heh, I wondered why it went so quiet!

....So true......kida wanting leah to go through and win now.......and I'm clutching at straws here as the rest I'm not keen on!!!

Luisa/Neil for the interviews.....bring that classic episode on RIGHT NOW!!:sleep:

Luisa clearly fancies Neil, she clung to him throughout the whole episode like a little girl would on her first crush.

She also saw an opportunity to leave Francesca on her own and lump her with the blame. Shame it backfired.

I have no words for Francesca not tasting the food - did she not think it might be a factor in getting orders placed?

Super-weak contestant.

Idiotic by Francesca not to taste the food, but she did get royally screwed over by Luisa's Can't Cook Won't Cook Act.

I still can't quite believe Asda were persuaded by Neil's throwaway promise to improve the recipe. (Because, obviously, in real life, you'd accept a new product on a promise like that ...) Still, it was Asda who were won over by the promise of Jedi Jim's multimillion pound ad campaign for his crappy biscuit brand.

Myles was lucky, but Alex's business idea was so clearly crap that he had to go. Time to weed out the weak ideas now we're getting close to the final.

Also, was I the only one who, when they mentioned Alex's legal umbrella idea, thought immediately of the old Legal & General logo? No? Just me?

My usual weekly random thoughts ...
http://slouchingtowardstv.com/2013/0...a-dogs-dinner/

She should've tasted it and add more msg or whatever they had. This is what happens when you fire Jason. Cooking tasks turn a disaster.

Sugar's advice was nonsense. Alex doesn't have to be a legal expert to run such a business. Any more than Sugar needed to be a computer expert to run Amstrad.

I agree, not impressed by their judgement at all, but it's more evidence that Neil is someone that people really believe when he speaks.

He has a sort of appearance of sincerity/trustworthiness that works for him.

True, but I didn't take that as the main point Sugar was trying to make. It's more that Alex has flitted from one idea to another seemingly at random, which tied in with Karren's comment about Alex struggling to focus on an end result.

Also, moving into a completely new business didn't really help his credibility. It felt like a weak idea all around (accepting that we weren't shown any of the details) - and any legally-related undertaking is fraught with complexity for someone who is new to the field, even if he did bring in experts from outside to help.

I accept there's an element of Asda buyers playing along with the fact it's not a real business situation, but it seems a bit unfair when (a) they were by far the largest customer and so were crucial to the overall result and (b) the other retailers seemingly played it straighter and weren't convinced by his throwaway line.

Kudos to Neil for tackling it head on, though - doing so where Endeavour didn't was key to winning the task. Both teams had clear enough feedback from their research to anticipate what the problems would be in their pitches, but only Evolve did something with that info.

In fact, if Mr. Sugar didn't buy Sinclair, we'd probably be writting this from our Spectrums XXI, that would be like the pc's we have now with the difference they'd use 2000kb instead of zillions of Mb to move a cursor through the screen.

But Sugar's main argument against Alex following up on his legal idea for a business was that he knew nothing about law. Being an entrepreneur is all about finding a product or service which will make money. If it doesn't make money, or it stops making money, then it's time to try something else.

As someone acting as a go-between for lawyers he doesn't need to get involved in anything related to the law (and its complexity) himself. As he'll be working directly with lawyers they'll put him right if he's looks like making any mistakes which could cause them problems.

Not sure where to begin with the wrongness of your post but let's start in a point of agreement. Luisa wants to win the competition, we are agreed there, yes? Lets start from there:

If Luisa appeared in the firing line again, she was out. She was in Karen's sights, and Suralan had warned her, She needed to stay out of the boardroom.

She was in a team of three. To stay out of the boardroom, her team HAD to win.

If her team lost and she was team leader, she h guaranteed her firing, so she had to back off.

Neil tried to out her on manufacturing with Francesca. She knows that Neil is ruthless and Francesca is talentless, negative and not a team player. To go along with this, as a food business person would have guaranteed her firing, had the team lost.

As her priority was a team win, she worked well with Neil to make sure the concept and marketing were on the money. She contributed ideas and Neil listened.

She doesn't give a flying fig about Neil! Her priority was a team win. Much as I have criticised her in the past, all of her excesses have been to the purpose of a team win.

Her team won, despite Francesca's negative attitude and near sabotage of the task. Francesca is the luckiest woman in England right now and if I'd been Suralan, i would have wanted to change the rules to sack one of the winning team.

It backfired? Luisa's team won, which was largely down to her efforts and was all she wanted or needed to do this week. If they had lost, I would hope that Surlan would have sacked Francesca, as she deserves.

I don't think Francesca was to blame. She was upfront that she couldn't cook. Luisa clearly had far more cooking ability - she actually dictated the recipe to Francesca on the phone - and should have been in the kitchen. Francesca follwed the recipe and it didn't turn out well.

I'm not sure Francesca tasting the food would have been the magic bullet they suggested; we don't know if she likes that kind of food or not, and if she doesn't how would she know if it was good or not?

Moving on to the losing team; given that the concept was the problem, I can only say Myles should have gone. I thought he was rude as anything this week, the way he interrupted Leah when she was pitching (she wasn't that good, but she wasn't so bad that Myles interruptions made it any better).

Oh and Leah's rant in the boardroom? It doesn't get more sexy than that. That passion and that accent!

No but if you are offering a site that connects people to appropriate legal advice I would hope there's a responsibility to give accurate advice, to evaluate your linked professionals, and a requirement to be big enough to offer more than a tiny choice of specialist advice. I would be very careful using any such site if liberty or money depended on it. Would I trust someone who has run a tombstone site to do that for me? .

Same with insurance, i would hope that he big comparison sites would give me a range of competitive options. I wouldn't be at all convinced by anything on a lesser scale.

Its more important, probably but not always, getting the idea and amrketing right. Luisa doesn't trust Neil to do that , so staying with him is her best bet to get to a win?

Francesca's problem isn't the recipe - its the chef with her. He ought to be able to tell her how to cook Louisa's recipe. He ought to have been able to explain the vaguer parts about adding spices - where quantitites are never specified. He ought to have told her that she needed to taste there to get the taste right by adding more if needed. He didn't seem to tell her any of that. If he had, she would have just had the basic problem that anyone doing the cooking would have needed to know what the original tasted lke, and what their version should taste like.

Odds are the chef was there only to ensure the candidates didn't produce anything utterly horrendous or dangerous, and that the task rules dictated that it was up to candidates to do the actual cooking.

Not necessarily. The vast majority of entrepreneurs set up businesses which they are knowledgeable and/or passionate about . Why should Sugar believe that Alex - who knows nothing about law - should have spotted an opportunity that an enterprising lawyer would not have done? It's possible, yes, but not entirely credible. It would be like me, a 20+ year marketer, suddenly deciding I'm going to run, I dunno, a football academy even though I have two left feet. I know the basics of how to set up the infrastructure, but I just wouldn't be credible.

This.

Our Home Economics teacher at school didn't do our work for us either.

Tom wasn't one of the worst candidates - and Helen wasn't one of the best! She happened to be on the winning team most weeks, he was unlucky to be on the losing team..... Neither of them were personally responsible for the wins or the losses - it was merely the luck of the draw.

Helen flew under the radar most weeks, and was lucky to be on the winning team and escape the losers boardroom. Tom may have been on the losing team, but he was only in the bfinal boardroom twice - once when he was PM, and once when the teams were down to 3 and there was no other option.... None of the losing PMs felt that his performance caused the team failure, and in fact, in most episodes he was shown to be the one doing the figure work, and keeping costs on track. Most weeks, Helen would have been hard pushed to say what she had actually done in the tasks if she HAD been on the losing team,

Tom won because he had the idea that LS wanted to run with, even if he didnt like the actual chair design..... Helen's glorified concierge service was a complete non starter. She wasn't robbed by Tom - if anyone was it was Susan, and LS has gone into partnership with her after the show anyway.

I don't think that's true or fair. I don't think that Helen flew under the radar - whenever I saw her, she was working flat out. She was my favourite to win from Week 2, and Lord Sugar said that if the prize had still been a job, she undoubtedly would still have won. Compare her with Myles, who up until this week had only lost one task - his performance hadn't been praised a huge amount, whereas Helen's was. She is also one of only two people so far (the other being Yasmina) who has been Project Manager three times, and won all of them.