The future of BBC’s The Apprentice and Amstrad have been thrown into doubt today as leaked documents from the computer company have revealed that Sir Alan Sugar is, in fact, a character in a made up ad campaign that ‘got off the rails somewhere in the early nineties’
The documents, leaked by a low-level Amstrad IT technician who happened on the secret files while performing routine maintenance on a company CEO’s computer, chronicle the genesis, design and implimentation of the persona of ‘Alan Sugar’- a fictional head for the company that was created as a ‘gruff cockney Ronald McDonald’
Inaginatorium Advertising has come forward, admitting to being behind the ad campaign that designed Alan Sugar. Creative Director Marcus Lancefoot told us: “We’re truly sorry. I guess we got caught up in the success of Sir Alan. We have created a monster.” Lancefoot admitted that the fabricated role of Sugar was filled by Essex-based actor Noddy Topple, who had just been turned down for the starring role in Only Fools and Horses, “He was perfect. He had the accent down, the unaccountably irritable demeanour and he looked like what would happen if Ray Winstone collided with an ornery badger.”
Explaining the PR strategy behind pretending that an irate old man was the head of an IT firm, Lancefoot explained: “The computer magnates in America had the market cornered. Bill Gates was a power-geek who looked like he smelled of loneliness and D&D boards, Steve Jobs with his turtle neck and his little round glasses seemed like a kind of techno messiah, with his artistic logos and ads. We needed something uniquely British: a market trader kind of figure, but rough and always annoyed and intolerant and suspicious of schooling and women. The kind of stodgy old bore who would go on and on about going to the University of Life while sipping warm bitter in a shit pub before going home to beat his sad-eyed wife. That’s the kind of person the British public could embrace and the success of The Apprentice bears that out”
“We needed to set him apart from the rest of the computing crowd, so we decided he should appear actively suspicious of technology and computing. This was great because Noddy’s a real technophobe in real life so, on the Apprentice when he’s talking about ‘wireless e-mail-machines’ and ‘bluetooth-ipod-thingees’ we didn’t even really have to write that. The public respects a man who can rise to the top of a field he doesn’t truly understand through sheer brutish unpleasantness”
Sugar’s star was on the rise with his role in The Apprentice- a show in which unpleasantly brash people in suits are put in teams, asked to set up competing lemonade stands and then shouted at by Sir Alan while an unnamed woman and an eerie ghostly figure wearing glasses looks on silently, judging something inside them all
Lancefoot continues: “We realized we had gone too far when he got the knighthood, but we just kind of rode that one out. When Gordon Brown offered him a peerage and started asking him questions about the economy we thought we were done for. As it turns out they largely did that for some press and to keep him around as a kind of pet- they just like to prod him every now and then into going on some ill-thought out rant about sexual discrimination laws or political correctness. Every so often he’d say something on camera so that the panel on Have I Got News For You could laugh at him. I guess we thought we could get away with it forever.”
As Amstrad stock tumbles, the company have made public apologies and have assured their stockholders that all traces of Lord Sugar are being expunged, though they claim that he never truly made any decisions for the company
FP
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