If anyone had told me 10 years ago that I would become a huge TV star, I’d have told them they were having a laugh. That little bit of wit came out instinctively. I can be a bit witty at times, I’m told, and I was later informed that was precisely why the BBC approached me. I still remember the first phonecall I had with a woman called Ruth from the BBC. “We’re looking for a successful British businessman to front a new reality game show,” she said. “But unfortunately we can’t find one. We did have Sir Philip Green interested for a moment, but when he realised the filming would make him overrun his non-resident allowance and he would have to pay more tax, he turned it down. So we’re at a bit of a loose end in the hunt for the talent.”
My initial response was to turn it down. I had had a fulfilling career making amplifiers and computers that didn’t work very well and was now on to a nice earner knocking out satellite dishes for Sky. But my sidekick Nick Hewer was down on his luck and needed the work, so I thought why not? “You’re on, love,” I growled. “But don’t call me the talent. I’m a businessman.”
You wouldn’t believe the amount of work that goes into the making of a TV series, and I really wouldn’t want to bore you with the details, but since there’s really nothing else to write about and I’ve got loads of pages to fill, I’ve got no choice. For each scene, there were at least eight cameras and the amount of time I spent sitting around doing nothing while some bloke fiddled with a sound switch was literally unbelievable. It really opened my eyes to how useless most people in telly really are. Apart from all those at Sky. I love watching Sky and I would always try to ensure my sequences didn’t interfere with a Sky football match I wanted to watch on Sky. The Sky engineers always said that reception through an Amstrad receiver was like actually being at the Sky game.
Anyway, I was on my yacht in the south of France when I was sent the list of candidates for the first series of The Apprentice. I picked up the phone and immediately got on to the director-general of the BBC to complain that having read their CVs, all the candidates looked like real numpties who would be lucky to get a job with even a third-rate operation like Amstrad. “That’s the whole point,” he said before rudely hanging up. I’ve always found that Sky have much better customer relations than the BBC.
The atmosphere was electric when we gathered the contestants in the boardroom for the first day of shooting. The BBC had written out a script for me, but I told them where to get off sharpish. I wanted it to be more like Sky where you could shoot from the hip. “Here are the ground rules,” I said. “I’m a needy, insecure man with delusional tendencies so I want you to call me Sir Alan at all times. Second, the show is about me, not you. Third, the winner will get given a £100,000 job doing something I haven’t thought of yet and will almost inevitably leave well within a year. And lastly, I am going to send you out on some meaningless errands. Your task this week is to buy some flowers and try to sell them to someone else. Is that clear?”
As expected, most of the contestants were fairly dim, but after the first show was aired it was evident we had a hit on our hands. By the end, in which some bloke called Tom had been declared the winner, we had already picked up a Bafta nomination. I literally fell off my seat when The Apprentice was declared the winner, but when I stood up to collect it, I was told to fuck off out of it as the award was for the people who made it. “You’d be nothing without me,” I snarled. Not that I hold grudges, but I would have liked a Bafta.
The second, third and fourth series were almost identical to the first and, though most of the winners went on to achieve very little, I was immensely proud of Katie Hopkins for going on to become even more dislikable than me. Success did bring its problems, though. People would come up to me in the street and say: “You’re fired.” Well, I can tell you that’s not very funny. Even that idiot Piers Morgan tried it on me. When he got sacked from CNN, I sent him a tweet that read: “You’re fired.” As I’ve previously mentioned, I do have witty side.
For the fifth series we decided to shake things up. Margaret Mountford decided she had had enough, so I brought in Karren Brady. It was the proudest moment of my life when I was able to introduce her to the House of Lords when she became Baroness Brady in recognition of her career in sex toys and porno publishing. I was also by now a Lord in recognition of my services to I’m not quite sure what, and I had to remind contestants to call me Lord Sugar. We also changed the prize but apart from that everything else has been kept pretty much the same. To be honest, I can’t believe I’m still getting away with it, but hopefully one day soon I will get the Bafta I deserve. And it will serve the BBC right if Sky have bought the rights to screen the ceremony.
Digested read, digested: You’re retired.
