The Apprentice is an American reality-television show in which Donald Trump selects an employee by subjecting young aspirants to a series of tests, then sacking them one by one until he finds a winner. It has been appallingly successful, so now it is to come here, with Alan Sugar, creator and boss of Amstrad, and quondam chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, as our local Trump. There are three reasons why, on the face of it, this is a stupendously bad idea:
1) Sugar hated the American show. I could quote him on this, but I won’t, because this is a family newspaper and Trump probably has lawyers.
2) Sugar hates reality television, considering it more or less uniformly “bollocks”. “I only watch The X Factor because of the singing. The other stuff — Big Brother and all that — is painful. And Gordon Ramsay, with his swearing, was just outrageous. Nah, I don’t watch any of them.”
3) Sugar is out of date. “Well, you know, I don’t think I was the first choice. I think the BBC woke up one morning and said, ‘Ah, Branson! No, he’s doing something else.’ Then Stelios, then Philip Green ... I might have been third on the pecking list. From a public point of view, the others are more modern entre-preneurs. I’m a bit of a 1985-86 kind of entrepreneur. But the truth of the matter is, they realised they had to have someone who can talk on camera. In my days at Tottenham, I must have done 500 TV interviews. Some of these other people really can’t do it — Richard can’t do it.”
In spite of all of which, Sugar has done it, and done it very well, which is why I have reluctantly agreed to go to Brentwood, in Essex, to talk to him about it. (This is well above and beyond the call, as something terrible once happened to me in Brentwood.) His head office occupies a muddy brown block too horrible to describe, opposite the station. The only touch of joy in this visual wasteland is Sugar’s Roller — AMS1 — parked outside.
Grim it may be, but it is from here that Sugar directs Amstrad, which, for a while in the 1980s, was Europe’s biggest computer-maker. Now it just makes weird-looking telephones that also send e-mails. Sugar has two on his desk, as well as two PCs and a Blackberry — five sources of e-mail. His holding company also owns the IT firm Viglen and substantial business properties, and runs an air-charter service. He’s doing well, worth a good few hundred million, but Amstrad is not Sony, which is what it should have become. Was this the fault of the British business climate? “We could have been Sony, we could have been IBM. That wasn’t the fault of the country, it was my fault. I blame myself for not having a wider vision, a longer-term view. I’m more of a short-term trader; I want to have it now, that kind of thing.”
He has a face like a ball of chewing gum — round, flexible, creased and bulbous — a grizzled beard and swept-back hair of a style last seen in black-and-white photographs in barbers’ windows. We agree that, whatever else may be said about his hair, it looks more plausible than Trump’s. He has a pinstripe suit, a pink shirt and a green striped tie. He could have gone into Topman and said: “Kit me out as an Essex businessman.” I note that he is uneasy with my corduroy suit; he can’t stop himself looking me up and down, as if assessing me for a job. This is a man who likes things to look, you know, right.
He’s a trader down to his last pinstripe, but, in spite of the wide-boy cockney accent, he is no Del Boy. He’s too smart. He has never, for example, dealt directly with the public; from the beginning, he sold only to retailers. “Never sold to the public in my life. I’d be coming out of my third life sentence now if I had. I’m too aggressive. They get on my nerves, they drive you mad. They ask too many questions. I leave it to the retailer to sort that lot out. Why should I waste my time talking to Mr Smith, selling him one item, when I could be using the same energy selling 1,000 items to the boss of Dixons?”
He also has a ruthlessly no-nonsense business philosophy. “Making money — what else is it about? I mean, you get all those companies with all those wonderful catch phrases — we love you, the customer is king. It’s all a lot of bollocks: all they want is their money. I mean, that’s all right for the RSPCA or the Red Cross, that’s fair enough. But business is business. They want your money. That’s what Marks & Spencer want, that’s what BT want. They want your money.”
Politically, he calls himself “new Conservative”, which means he votes for Blair and goes round the country with Gordon Brown, encouraging young entrepreneurs. “New Labour’s the real Conservative party. They’re interested in business. They just got stuffed with their name — Labour — really, didn’t they? They’ve tried to camouflage it by calling themselves ‘new’, but it’s the Conservatives, really. It’s not like a Labour government from 30 or 40 years ago.”
Anyway, last March, the BBC approached him about The Apprentice. Then, in April, TalkBack Thames, an independent producer, also approached him. It was, he says, “a total f***-up”. The BBC hummed and hawed while TalkBack bought the rights. Now the corporation has to buy the show from TalkBack.
In spite of his loathing for reality television, he liked the format because, just as The X Factor has songs, so The Apprentice has a business message. In the first show, for example, he takes the 14 contestants to a newspaper plant. The point is that daily newspapers are written, produced and distributed within a day. By 4pm, they’re worthless. Flowers are the same; they have to be distributed and sold within a day. So the aspirant Amstraders are sent out to buy flowers wholesale and sell them on the streets. It was Sugar’s idea, as were most of the tasks. “I did genuinely know exactly what was going on in the tasks. I’m right down to the details, I catch people out.”
The chosen 14 gave up their jobs for the chance to win the show and work with Sugar — I’m baffled by this last bit, as it involves going to Brentwood, but never mind. They were chosen from thousands and Sugar is impressed with the results. “I would say they’re very bright: they’re not mugs, this lot, not Big Brother types. Definitely, I’d think of employing any one of them. Well, not all: some of them are just unemployable.”
