Sir Alan Sugar (19 page)

‘Thank you, Sir Alan,’ said Syed as he left the boardroom, a saved man. ‘Thank you for the opportunity.’

Sugar snapped, ‘Cheeky sod.’

A fellow contestant of Syed was quick to defend him. ‘It’s high-pressured,’ said contestant Tuan Lé. ‘You make all those decisions which people think are stupid – like Syed ordering 300 chickens – because you’re knackered.’

Indeed, some observers wondered whether Sugar secretly respected Syed’s cheek, and saw something of himself in the candidate. Certainly, Syed had a very noble streak in him, although the main evidence of this never made the final cut. In week eight, Syed was responsible for his team arriving late to the boardroom, but Sir Alan, so impressed by Syed’s selling prowess, offered him immunity. Syed turned down the chance for immunity, and bravely put himself forward for firing alongside his team-mates. For the final cut, the entire segment was edited out. The series editor, Dan Adamson, said there was no conspiracy behind this editing. ‘We weren’t deliberately making Syed look bad. The scene just didn’t fit,’ he said.

In Week 10, Syed was finally shown the door after his failure in the cruise-liner task.

After the traditional interviews round in Week 11, the grand finale saw an all-female affair with Michelle Dewberry coming head to head with Ruth Badger. The pair had to put on an event of their choice at London’s Tower Bridge. The series ended with Michelle crowned
winner, even though Ruth Badger’s sales ability had been phenomenal throughout the series. However, ‘the Badger’ – who went on to find fame and success off the back of her
Apprentice
run – was gracious in defeat. Dewberry, said Badger, made for a more likely apprentice. ‘She’s mouldable, whereas I’ve given up a golden career for the chance. For both of us it’s about learning.’

Again, there were suggestions that Sugar had chosen the more bland candidate as his winner, but Dewberry said, ‘They underplayed me on screen all the way through so it would be a real shock when I made it into a final. I’m not as dull and quiet as I’ve been edited to seem.’

Dan Adamson,
The Apprentice
’s editor, maintains that the editing is fair and that ‘Sir Alan especially’ would never let
The Apprentice
become a sexed-up reality show. However, one ousted contestant, Sharon McAllister, said, ‘It’s bullshit to describe it as a business programme. It’s entertainment. Everything is edited according to Sir Alan’s final decision. I was made out to be a whinger and I’m not.’

Badger was more amusing about her surprise on watching the edited programmes. ‘Watching it afterwards, there were loads of things I cringed about. Why I look like a bulldog chewing a wasp for the first three weeks I have no idea. And the stupid outfits they made you wear – my life!’

On screen, when a person is ‘fired’, they go through one door, their team-mates through another, supposedly
separated for ever. In fact, the door the fired competitor goes through leads nowhere in particular and all the contestants meet again in an anteroom where, according to McAllister, ‘they have a coffee and a natter’ before the fired candidate leaves.

As for Dewberry, the girl from Hull has had mixed fortunes since winning the show. Naturally, she became something of a celebrity and so the press were full of stories when it transpired that she was pregnant by fellow contestant Syed Ahmed (she later lost the baby). As more and more reports of her private life hit the press, it was claimed that Sugar was angered by this trend. ‘Sir Alan made it clear he’s not happy,’ a friend of Dewberry’s reportedly told the
Sun
. ‘It wasn’t working out, even before she got pregnant. ‘They agreed Michelle will take time off while they sort things out. Her future is in the balance. Sir Alan’s on his yacht and they’ll talk when he returns.’

Dewberry has since left Amstrad, written an autobiography and formed her own company. She has had cordial conversations with Sugar since and there appear to be no hard feelings. In 2008, she told reporters, ‘I’ve been chatting to Sir Alan and getting his advice about my new online project. He’s told me to do my homework and make sure I’m properly prepared before I launch. I’m securing funding at the moment. I speak to him a fair bit and called up to see how he was after his plane crash’ (see Chapter 9).

Series 3 of
The Apprentice
kicked off in March 2007 with a now familiar feel to it. The opening titles played out to the theme tune of Prokofiev’s ‘Dance of the Knight’, as the candidates were introduced one by one to the viewing public. Dru Masters, the musical director of the series, explains how they came by this choice. ‘We decided early on that, musically, the programme would have a slightly sixties-seventies caper-movie feel, sort of
The Italian Job
meets
Ocean’s Eleven
,’ he said. ‘We had no music for the opening titles. They were thinking of running some kind of M People-style “inspirational” pop song, which I thought would have been disastrous. So I played them the Prokofiev march out of desperation. And suddenly it was like it had always been there. It provides this suitably bombastic backdrop for Sir Alan to ham it up.’

It proved to have the most colourful and controversial line-up of candidates of any series to date, and top of this list from the start was feisty Katie Hopkins. She was to bring huge controversy to the series, with her bitchy remarks behind the backs of her fellow candidates, and her dramatic exit from the competition. Described as a ‘
power-dressing
villainess’ by the
Daily Mail
, she earned
£
90,000 as a brand consultant, and seemed determined to become a brand herself on the show. Among her memorable criticisms of her fellow contestants, she claimed that Adam Hosker’s best friends were ‘Mr Pinot and Mr Grigio’, and blasted Kristina Grimes’s ‘orange fake tan’. She also
expressed a wish that a fellow candidate would ‘run over’ or go back ‘to the North and his Northern chums, where I do feel he rather belongs’. All the while, she made headline-grabbing statements, including boasting that she was ‘ten out of ten’ in bed, and she was photographed in the newspapers, naked and making love in a cornfield with colleague Mark Cross.

Despite this controversy, she did very well in the tasks and was all set for a place in the final. However, at the end of the penultimate episode, she stepped down from the competition, citing childcare concerns. Watched by 6.2 million viewers, this became an iconic
Apprentice
episode. Soon after awarding her a place in the final, Sugar seemed perturbed and told her, ‘You don’t look like a lady who’s just been told you’ve entered the final. Everyone would appreciate it if you spoke up.’

Hopkins then shocked him by saying, ‘I’m making a decision without having the courtesy to speak to the people who care for my children. It’s a risk, it’s a discourtesy to my parents.’

Sir Alan angrily hit back, saying, ‘I haven’t got time to wait for you to make a phone call.’

Following a pause, Hopkins said, ‘I don’t want to make a fool of you or me. I think it’s more important to get the courtesy to have my plans in place, so I’ll have to stand down.’

There were suggestions in some quarters that Hopkins had stood down after being pressurised by Sugar about
her childcare plans. An
Apprentice
spokesman swatted these claims away. ‘As part of the interview process, Sir Alan and his colleagues interrogated all of the candidates about their commitment to the process and the job. He wanted to put them under pressure to be able to be fully confident that they were serious about the opportunity he was offering them. Sir Alan was intent on ensuring that he did not take on an Apprentice who later pulled out due to lack of commitment. Some of the candidates – including Simon Ambrose – were therefore asked about their living and family arrangements.’

Another theory was that Hopkins had never intended to win the show, but merely wanted to use it to gain fame for herself. She was, several fellow contestants claimed, aiming to become a Simon Cowell-esque figure, not Sir Alan’s Apprentice. As for Sugar himself, he had described Hopkins as ‘an alpha female’. Looking back at her performance, he shook his head and said, ‘She’s a clever woman, but she went for the short-term cash-in.’

Nick Hewer was similarly dismissive. ‘Silly girl,’ he said, shrugging. ‘She was kind of five degrees off normal, wasn’t she? Extraordinary.’

Despite awarding Hopkins a place in the final, Sugar is insistent that she was not, contrary to the assumptions of some observers, about to win the competition. ‘She was never ever, ever going to win,’ he insisted forcefully. ‘Never in a million years. It sounds contradictory and it takes someone with big balls to see through it, but she
was there for all the wrong reasons.’ Therefore, he says, he deliberately put her on the spot to see how she would react. ‘My answer was to lay it on thick. There was a lot of pressure on her in order to flush her out. I knew if I piled it on, she would throw in the towel. Then she started to back out, she realised she was not dealing with a mug. I suppose one does regret having her on the show. She did provide great entertainment to the public, but she was a disappointment.’

Hopkins became a hated public figure, who was booed wildly when she appeared on the aftermath show
You’re
Fired
on BBC2. She shrugged off the boos, saying, ‘The pantomime villain lives on!’ Speaking later, she said that she had no regrets at all about her behaviour. ‘I’d do it all again, and that includes the aftermath,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’d take all that again in a heartbeat.
The Apprentice
was a brilliant experience. I was very confident that I was a capable businesswoman and it was easy to see the people who would get picked off straightaway. A lot of my most memorable moments were times when things went brilliantly or badly wrong. Trying to sell sausages in France to a halal butcher during Ramadan – priceless in terms of how wrong you can get it.

‘I’ve learned how to let the bad stuff ride and enjoy the good stuff and that’s how I’ve got through this year. There’s only so many times you can read you are the biggest bitch in Britain and that you look like Miss Piggy before you let that stuff ride. It was a painful decision to
withdraw when I’d got to the last three but I think it was the right one. At the very last minute I had to make the right decision for my children. When I watched that scene on television I could remember the tension and my mother cried watching it because she saw her daughter suffering.’ Her final quip was typical of her wit. Speaking of how she pulled out of the show, the woman who has boasted of sleeping with married men said, ‘This is one of the first times in my life probably that I’ve ever said no to a man.’

It is no surprise that Hopkins cites the France task as her memorable moment of the series, as it was without doubt one of the highlights. Getting the tasks right, and keeping the concepts fresh was the major challenge for the programme makers. ‘It’s the aspect of the programme that we work hardest on, and the one that gets trickier to refresh with each series,’ said Kurland.

It is also the aspect of the programme in which Sugar has the most direct input. ‘I have to make sure they’re both doable and they’re not too complex for people to follow,’ he said. ‘I know there are some tasks you can’t do, because it would produce a boring film – like, we could get them winning and losing millions on the trading floor of a stock market, but what would you see? A bunch of people staring at screens and no viewer interest. So what we do is start off simple, and crank up the complexity as we go through.’

The France task came in Week 6 and produced hilarity
and disasters in equal measures. The task was simple: buy and sell British produce at a farmers’ market in France. The team with more profit would win. Ex-British Army lieutenant Paul Callaghan led the Stealth team through a chaotic performance. He chose to buy cheap processed cheese from a British cash-and-carry, and attempt to sell that to the French of all people. They also paid over the odds for an incorrectly translated banner for their stall, and Paul then tried to cook their sausages with a makeshift tin filled with lighter fuel instead of a camping stove. Unsurprisingly, it failed to work, and Stealth lost the task. Their rivals made
£
410 in the task, while Paul’s Stealth team lost
£
225. The outcome of this was inevitable: ‘Paul, you’re fired!’

It had been an imaginative task, and one that Sugar was proud of. He revealed that he was happy to take a bit of a lead when it came to tasks. ‘Because of my marketing background, that’s the one where I regard myself as a bit of an expert,’ he said. ‘I also like the one where they have to create a product from scratch, and we follow them as they get the components, manufacture and sell.’

Soon, it was time for Sugar to appear in the media to promote the series, although this is not likely to be a part of the job that he relishes. Never one to enjoy being interviewed at the best of times, Sugar must find the
air-kissing
, schmooze-fest that is the modern-day television chat show peculiarly distressing. However, he kept to his
promotional duties, and his appearance on
Friday Night
with Jonathan
Ross
duly attracted plenty of interest even before it had been broadcast. ‘Will Sir Alan Sugar fire the chat-show host?’ asked
The Times
. The
Mirror
, in previewing the show, was more to the point. ‘One famously hates schmoozers and the other one could schmooze for Britain, so expect Sir Alan Sugar to cut through Jonathan Ross’s usual waffle like a knife through butter when he joins him on the sofa tonight.’

On the night, Sugar was on fine anecdotal form. Speaking about the trappings of his
Apprentice
-fame, he rolled out a decent yarn about a visit to a restaurant toilet. ‘I was standing there trying to do my stuff and this bloke is next to me going, “Cor, that geezer was horrible in that last series.” Now what they don’t realise is I’m trying to get a bit of pressure up – because of my age it’s a bit tricky. Anyway, it wasn’t working so I zipped up. I then told my son-in-law we’re going to the loo again and you’re going to come and protect me.’