HOWZAT

During Amstrad’s Eighties heyday Sugar was adept at spotting a successful product – a video, hi-fi, computer – copying it and flogging it cheaper than the market leader. His customer was the “truck driver and his wife”; his product was straightforward: “what the mass market customer wants, not a boffin’s ego trip”.

But cheap Chinese labour and components mean there is no margin today, he says, in making stuff for Dixons. Amstrad is now an industrial, not a consumer manufacturer. Sugar’s other business, Viglen, sells computers to universities and schools. So today Sugar is almost solely a trader, an intermediary between manufacturer and client. A trader is one kind of businessman, but it is not an innovator, or a cultural visionary, creating products to anticipate people’s future desires.

On Sir Alan’s desk, among a hideous lamp, two lumpen beige Amstrad computers and plastic photocubes containing pictures of his seven grandchildren is an E-m@iler. It looks forlorn and unused. Yet at its launch in 2000, Sugar declared this gizmo for sending e-mails from a home phone to be “the most important mass-market consumer product for 15 years”. The E-m@iler was for people who couldn’t afford or be bothered with a home computer. And Amstrad hoped to make extra money selling ads to the E-m@iler’s tiny screen: “a moving billboard in the home”.

It was a huge misreading of how people’s lives were changing, our demands for mobility and convenience. Now e-mails can be sent from BlackBerries or mobile phones and many young people don’t even have a landline. Meanwhile, the price of PCs was tumbling, rendering the poor old one-trick E-m@iler obsolete. “Er, that went very well,” says Sugar, but without conviction. “We had 500,000 in the market, 500,000 customers making e-mail calls every day. Er, every week.” But a fortnight after we spoke Amstrad off-loaded its remaining E-m@ilers and announced no more would be made.

Amstrad’s only other consumer product is the Integra Face Care System, a set of electrical pens which you rub on your wrinkles. Or should I say “ergonomically designed probes” which “use the regenerative effects of galvanic micro-currents”. Developing and marketing the Integra was the prize of Tim Campbell, the winner of the first series of The Apprentice. Does Lady Sugar have one? “Ah yes, my wife thought it was very good. People thought it was excellent, it’s just they couldn’t be bothered to use it. It was a direct-selling item, it’s being sold through Argos now. And in Harrods. It didn’t go too well.”

I wonder if his loss of a sure touch in electronics is partly a consequence of his age. Sugar, like many older people, curses high-faluting gadgets, resents the fact that phones now come with cameras and internet access. When his favourite no-frills model became obsolete he had Panasonic send him over six spare handsets. Yet the electronics market is fuelled by the young, who relish every new bell and whistle. He is furious when I suggest that companies such as Apple understand this better than him.

“You people have very short memories,” Sugar snarls. “Apple have been in the pits, they’ve nearly been bankrupt, they’ve had three CEOs… and then suddenly the iPod pulls them out of trouble again. As sure as I’ve got a hole in my bladdy arse, in three or four years’ time, it’ll be ‘Apple who?’ Because the price pressure on these iPods is moving in from the Chinese, the Japanese…”

But what Amstrad has never subscribed to is the need to build a brand image. Sugar, the honest trader, has always sold good, basic products. But an iPod or Nike trainers are made for buttons and marketed for billions to make them cool, sexy. Consumers will pay a premium price for what are perceived to be must-haves. Yet in Sugar’s eyes this branding malarkey goes with “jargon and spreadsheets and presentation packs”, to be filed under the category “total bollocks”.

Watching The Apprentice, it is obvious how much Sugar loathes the shiny, modern jargon-talking, flip-chart wielding graduate candidates. You just know Sir Alan, Mr University of Life himself, will fire them first. “I know what it looks like,” he says. “But I’ve nothing against academia really. There’s nothing wrong in it. It’s just some people confuse it with being superior. Which it’s not.”

None of his own three children went to university. His elder son Simon is Amstrad’s commercial director; Daniel runs Amsair, Sugar’s business jet charter firm; his daughter Louise, until she had children, was an administrator in his property company. I wonder how it is possible to impart his own hunger for success to kids who grew up with everything?

“Difficult for them, yes,” he says. “My elder son was sent out on Saturday to work in McDonald’s behind the counter frying burgers. He didn’t enjoy it but it was part of growing up, if you want some extra pocket money. My daughter went to a hairdressing salon in our parade of shops, just to give her a bit of the real world out there.”

Family and business: outside these two interlocking circles Sugar has few interests. He has been married to Lady Ann for 39 years: they have houses in Brentwood, Spain and Florida. His domestic arrangements are resolutely old-fashioned. “I’m not really a demanding type of person at home. In fact, please deal with the home. I don’t want anything to do with it.” He seems rather aghast at the nappy-changing expected of modern dads like his sons. So does he indulge his grandchildren? “Not really, no. We play around a little bit. I got a big house, so they like playing football sometimes. They drive around in little electric cars and all that type o’ stuff.”

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