Sugar admitted that he had looked forward to the moment in the series when, instead of saying the negative ‘You’re fired!’, he could instead utter ‘You’re hired.’ He had known from the off that there would be occasions where it would be ‘heartbreaking’ to have to tell a contestant they were fired. ‘You’d be an iron-cold person if you said it doesn’t matter,’ he admitted. Indeed, he has revealed, one of the few non-negotiable aspects of his part on the show is that he has to utter the line exactly the same way every week. ‘Personally, I’d have liked the flexibility to be able to vary it, to say, “You’re sacked!” or “Get out!” or possibly even “Clear off!”’ He shrugs. ‘But they tell me “You’re fired!” is great TV.’ However, lest we conclude he was turning soft, he added, ‘On the other hand, there are certain types of people I have no trouble firing: the lazy, the incompetent, the disloyal.’ He also enjoyed telling Tim that he was the winner, and therefore hired.
However, all involved in the series were winners, as it proved to be extremely successful. The viewer ratings were impressive, at first averaging around 2.5 million, with this figure climbing to around 4 million viewers by the end of the series. The critical reception was also pleasing for all involved. The Sun said dubbed it ‘the thinking man’s reality show’, and the Mirror described it as ‘jaw-dropping viewing’. Broadsheet newspapers seemed head-over-heels for the programme, too, with the Daily Telegraph calling it ‘the most addictive show in years’, and the Guardian saying that it provided ‘a salutary lesson in aggressive buying and selling, hiring and firing’. The Sunday Times said that it was ‘not just a game show: it’s a business school’. The Evening Standard also praised it, describing the programme as ‘terribly compelling’.
Journalist James Brown was also suitably impressed. Writing in the Independent, he gushed, ‘There is a feeling among reality-TV experts that The Apprentice may be the best programme of its genre ever shown on British television. It has all the trappings of core reality programming: a group of ordinary people who want something and are tested on television to get it.’ Given the glut of reality-television shows, this was high praise indeed.
Brown then turned his pen to the star of the show: ‘Then it has its honey-trap character, a magnetic personality who emerges during the series and stealthily gets you obsessed. This person, naturally, is Sugar: a rough-and-ready, straight-talking, self-made East End trader, manufacturer and landlord who has honed his instinct for a deal into a billion-dollar business. On top of this the programme-makers have shot London from the air in the style of Hollywood legends Michael Mann and David Fincher, and added a soundtrack that ratchets up the tension.’
The first series won a host of awards including the Most Popular Reality Show at the 2005 National Television Awards. Sugar has since said that he had foreseen all this popularity. He explained that, on starting work on it, he quickly realised just how exciting and successful the show was going to be. Asked if he expected it to become a hit, he said, ‘Yes, I did actually. Not when they first asked me, but when I could see how it was going from the slices I was shown by the production crew. What you see is me, there’s no acting, and the same goes for the apprentices. It has been an amazing experience, in that I’ve learned about the world of television and how to make a TV programme. Hats off to the production team, because for every one of those episodes, there must have been 35 hours of film. They’ve had to watch it all and edit it down. The BBC have spent money on quality; then again, they’ll be able to use those opening shots again in a second series. Would I do a second series? Yes.’
However, on the question of scheduling, he was somewhat more critical of the Beeb. ‘If I have any criticism of the BBC, it is only that they picked a poor night by scheduling it on Wednesday, because it clashes with the Champions League. The first few weeks they were ecstatic, because they were attracting the elusive audience of 29- to 35-year-old boyos, the yuppies, the upwardly mobile aspiring boyos. But then these guys also have Sky Plus, so I think we’re losing a lot of the audience figures to people who are watching it an hour later, after the football.’ He then moved closer to home to underline his point. ‘I can give you no better example than my own two sons. Last week they watched Chelsea–Arsenal first on Sky, and then their dad afterwards on Sky Plus.’ He added with a grin, ‘That’s loyalty for you.’
He was also critical when he discovered that journalists who were interviewing him ahead of the screening of the final had not been allowed to know who won as they did those interviews. ‘Wha-aa-at?’ he stormed on discovering this. ‘Bloody comedians, they are! What is the point of your seeing the bloody thing? I mean, the whole action’s at the end. You’re supposed to come here with an understanding of the programme and they’ve only given you a quarter of the story.’ He asked after the PR who had made this decision: ‘Who is this fool? I’ll get him on the phone!’
However, overall he was very much enjoying the show and happy with how it turned out. ‘It’s 80 per cent business and 20 per cent fun,’ he told one interviewer. ‘If you saw the American one – which I thought was crap – and then you see with ours that there’s less glitz and showbiz here. You can follow what’s going on. The American one – the business side – was very hard to follow.’
What had been easy to follow was the form of the eventual winner, Tim Campbell, who had been mild-mannered and professional throughout. When others became melodramatic, insulting or wild, Campbell kept his head down and got on with the job in hand. Some therefore argued that he did not deserve to win, because they felt he kept his head far too down, to the extent that he was trying to keep himself out of the firing line. Campbell faced these allegations head on. He told the press, ‘The criticism thrown at me is that I kind of disappear. But a big part of business is to observe. There’s no point shouting very loudly when there are 13 other people shouting very loudly themselves.’
Fiery candidate Paul Torrisi put the boot in, too, when he suggested that the final pairing were selected to satisfy a politically correct manifesto. ‘It still hurts I didn’t get to the last two,’ he said, frowning. ‘Saira and Tim – Asian girl against black kid from east London – it just smacked of the BBC a bit; it annoys me. There were people I bloody hated. Saira was the obvious one I didn’t get on with; it got to the stage where we were bickering at every opportunity.’
But Tim’s story was in fact inspirational stuff. He revealed that his motivation came from very close to home, in a drive to make his mother proud of him. ‘There are lots of statistics about single-parent families, and my mother, Una, was determined we wouldn’t be statistics,’ he declared. ‘I’m the eldest of three and my mum took on three jobs to make sure we had everything we needed. One of my driving forces is to make her proud. To see her face when I appeared on TV was priceless. I can never repay her for what she did, but just to be able to give her some peace of mind and show people that she was a good mother has made me one of the happiest people in the world.’
Of course, he was also happy to have won, and took the opportunity to look back over the filming of the series and give an insight into what went on behind the scenes during his Apprentice experience. ‘When I sent off the application, I didn’t think that much of it,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I didn’t realise the beast I was unleashing in terms of being part of the Apprentice machine. I remember being picked up from my east London home in a black Mercedes and being dropped off outside the boardroom. Then we were introduced to Sir Alan with his famous opening line, “I don’t like liars, I don’t like bullshitters.” It will always stick in my head.
‘There were no snobs in the house,’ adds the man that became Sir Alan’s first Apprentice. ‘I think the producers anticipated it being like the American show, with lots of bitchiness, but it really wasn’t like that.’ That said, there was plenty of direct talk among the candidates, as is surely befitting a show with straight-talking Sir Alan at the helm. Campbell agreed. ‘I come from a world where everything is politically correct. Be
ing in a situation where things are actually expressed was quite refreshing. It may seem brutal, but for me it was always fair.’
He was asked whether he believed that Sugar ever make a wrong decision. ‘When he got rid of Ben,’ Tim replied. ‘Yes, Ben made a mistake in not setting a budget [in the farmers’ market task], but I think there was more of him to be seen. As a potential employee, Ben wasn’t a bad choice.’
And, given that she made the final, the same could presumably be said of Saira, and no one could have criticised her work rate, which was tireless. Her personality, however, had regularly bubbled over and become too intense and in your face. So, looking back, was she shocked when she witnessed on the small screen how she had behaved? ‘When I first saw it, I did think, “Oh, my word!”’ Saira admitted. ‘I was a bit taken aback. But I’ve learned a lot from seeing myself. I understand now what people mean when they say, “Your energy really annoys me” – because I don’t shut up.’
Turning to where she got her own drive from, it was a less happy story than Campbell’s. ‘My father was a very strong figure,’ Saira recalled. ‘He never, ever praised us. If I got a B at school, he would ask why I didn’t get an A. I was never good enough, and that’s what drove me. I wanted to prove something to him, I suppose.’
Although she had not won the series, she had proved a strong point by running the winner so close.
The two finalists are still in touch to this day. ‘I still keep up with Saira [Khan],’ Tim said in 2008. ‘She’s doing brilliant stuff and I love her to death. We share this thing – it was almost like being kidnapped together. I still get approached a fair bit, it’s part and parcel of it. But I still shop at my local supermarket and I don’t have a butler.’
Some argued that it was society at large that was the true winner. Leo McKinstry wrote a moving and rousing tribute to the show in the Daily Mail. ‘Indeed, The Apprentice runs against the fashionable values, not just of the BBC, but of our entire society. In our culture of grievance, with its shrill emphasis on employee rights, it is wonderfully refreshing to have a programme that does not treat its participants as victims and does not regard pressure as a dirty word. In a world of compensation and industrial tribunals, where it is virtually impossible to sack any public employee, no matter how incompetent, it is a pleasant shock to hear failure met with the phrase: “You’re fired!” Those words contain a beautiful, unemotional purity. At least in The Apprentice, if not in Labour’s Britain – or more specifically, in Tony Blair’s government – individuals are held to account for their performances.’
Producer Michele Kurland said, ‘I think the reason The Apprentice is so popular is that, unlike shows like Big Brother, it’s not designed to be egg-on-face TV. It’s about humanising business so that viewers can empathise with the candidates’ plight when things go wrong, as they invariably do. You really start to root for these people as the series progresses.
‘A lot of thought has gone into the programme’s look and feel. The feeling was, if you’re talking about business to a UK audience, who sometimes perceive it as grey, then you should glam it up, make it big and glossy. It’s aspirational, so it should look amazing. We have a huge team working on the show, and to me it’s like a massive orchestra giving this amazing performance.’
They certainly did, not least by Alan Sugar in the boardroom scenes of The Apprentice. Thankfully, there was to be plenty more where that came from.
Sugar’s television appearances are almost invariably entertaining, but they are always met with varying responses from TV critics. In 2005, he appeared on BBC’s comedy show Room 101, where guests are allowed to consign things they dislike to that infamous room. Among the items Sugar chose were men who wear wigs, and, when host Paul Merton showed Sugar a photograph of Donald Trump, who, as we know, fronted the American version of the series, his guest rolled out a smooth anecdote. He explained how, while filming an episode of The Apprentice, he had been filmed on a speedboat. ‘I said to [the crew], “Trump couldn’t do this,” and they said, “Why not?” and I said, “’Cos his bloody hair would be back there at Tower Bridge.”’
Graham Young, TV editor of the Birmingham Mail, wrote, ‘Sir Alan Sugar makes an interesting choice for Room 101. Never short of an opinion or two, he tells Merton that his pet hates include professional schmoozers and men with wigs.’ The Scottish Daily Record made Sir Alan’s edition their pick of the day, as did London’s Evening Standard, saying, ‘Host Paul Merton spars wittily with the grumpy businessman.’ The Glasgow Evening Times also made it their choice of the day, saying, ‘The prospect of Sir Alan sitting across from Paul Merton on a show about pet hates is a tantalising prospect indeed.’ The Sun picked it out as ‘What to watch tonight’, although their description of it was not entirely flattering: ‘Sir Alan Sugar shot to TV fame as the Nookie Bear/Sid James lookalike in top reality show The Apprentice, uttering those immortal words: You’re fired! He always did look grumpy and, tonight, as he joins Paul Merton to discuss his pet hates, he proves he really is.’
But The Times was definitely not complimentary. David Chater roared, ‘Prickly, glum and egotistical, Sir Alan Sugar is like Sid James without the laughs, and he makes Paul Merton struggle to generate any lightness or humour.’ Thomas Sutcliffe, writing in the Independent also put the boot in: ‘I know they’d never allow Room 101 itself to be consigned to the chute but occasionally you get a guest who makes things a bit uncomfortable for a while, and Sir Alan Sugar was one of them. You get the feeling that people don’t interrupt Sir Alan’s anecdotes often, so he has, to put it tactfully, evolved a notion of comic rhythm different than most people’s. Listening to him dawdle through an underpowered story, the punchline of which was designed to show Sir Alan in a flattering light, Merton twitched with frustration, like a man in a Ferrari blocked in behind a steam-roller.’
The critics may not have all enjoyed the performance, but, as ever, Sugar had reached out to the people who mattered – the ordinary viewers. In the Edinburgh Evening News’s ‘Have your say’ section, Sarah Howell of Trinity, said, ‘I liked seeing the Room 101 with Sir Alan Sugar again. He’s a very sharp guy with a wicked sense of humour and I was in stitches by the end. I hope they bring back the show soon because it’s one of the best programmes over the past few years.’ (Indeed, Sugar is both a popular and terrifying television figure, if a 2006 Radio Times poll is to be believed, where he was voted the seventh scariest celebrity on television, beaten by Gordon Ramsay and Anne Robinson.)
Ever since the end of the first series of The Apprentice, fans had been eagerly awaiting the second instalment, and, in February 2006, their wait was finally over, as the second series hit our screens. The candidates’ accommodation was a 7,000-square-foot converted glass factory in Battersea. There was also a new boardroom, described as ‘aqueous’ in the Daily Telegraph. In time, Sugar would be a little bit more dynamic and abrasive in Series 2. But the strengths of the show established in Series 1 were all still very much in evidence. It was immediately clear that, once again, the house was to be chock-full of characters. Two contestants who quickly stood out as such were 31-year-old Syed Ahmed (as one online blogger put it, ‘Syed could start a fight in an empty house’) and the lively Jo Cameron, who had set her own business up in 2004 after being made redundant and, from the off, looked set to be the second series’ eccentric.
By now, behind-the-scenes details of the show were forthcoming, and being lapped up by Apprentice addicts. For instance, it was revealed that the fired candidates’ ‘walk of shame’ from the office to taxi was not actually filmed after they have been fired. Instead, all 14 contestants were filmed walking into the cab on the first day of filming, then footage of each ‘walk’ was added into individual episodes. More significantly, despite the show suggesting that the hiring and firing was done in an office in Canary Wharf, Sir Alan’s office was in reality based in the somewhat less glamorous surroundings of Brentwood in Essex.
Not that any of this detracted from the sheer e
njoyment of the show. This series quickly produced one of the most memorable episodes to date. In Episode 2, the two teams competed to raise money for Sugar’s chosen cause, the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Each team were ordered to design a calendar, price it and then sell it wholesale to real buyers from three of Britain’s leading retailers. It turned into a hilarious episode, particularly when it came to the appalling pitches the teams made to the buyers. Nargis was chosen to make the presentation for the girls’ team, and it is hard to imagine how she could have made a worse, or more hilariously bad, job of it.
Sugar himself was stunned by her performance. ‘I couldn’t believe the arrogant way she alienated the buyers,’ he said. ‘She clearly had no idea that buyers for the big chains and stores should be shown some respect. They get hundreds of people trying to sell them stuff every day. You have to convince them they need to buy your product, that it will fly off the shelves.’
Sugar felt Mani’s pitch was better, but not ideal, as he had focused too much on the charity aspect. A memorable moment came when one of the buyers gave Mani the figure of how many calendars they sold each year, and Mani interrupted, as flatteringly as it is possible to imagine, saying, ‘Sorry, just a moment: wow!’ It was one of those cringe-making but totally unmissable television moments.
The boys’ team won and were given a caviar tasting as a treat, while Nargis was justly fired for her terrible presentation.
Another memorable moment came the following week, when Sugar told Jo that he was not sure that she wasn’t ‘just a bloody nutter’. Jo took this in her stride. ‘I am loud, annoying and emotional,’ she admitted, during the boardroom showdown, when she came within an inch of being fired herself that week, but impressed Sir Alan with her vigorous self-defence.
Week 4 saw a major cock-up from Syed in a food-stall task. They were making 90 chicken tikka pizzas, and Syed vastly overordered, bringing in a total of 300 chickens. Sugar’s dryly witty adviser Nick Hewer asked Syed whether he felt he had perhaps ordered a few too many. The task produced a spectacular boardroom showdown, in which Sugar said that, if the rules had allowed him, he would have sacked not just Syed, but all three of the bottom three candidates. Syed put up a spectacular defence and managed to survive to fight another week, despite Sugar holding him ‘100 per cent responsible’ for his team’s failure in the task.
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