Being Sir Alan Sugar’s right hand man takes much more than pulling faces behind the backs of hopeless apprenticies. Much more.
When I meet Nick Hewer at his country home, he shows me reams and reams of notes on Apprentice hopefuls; whole notebooks are filled up on just one task. Who said what to whom is all painstakingly recorded, right down to the minute it was said and the reactions of other team members. “Sugar needs to know everything because he doesn’t see an inch of footage,” Hewer explains; “His ability to be completely in control is down to the input Margaret and I give him.”
Hewer is about to embark on the sixth series of The Apprentice, the BBC show that searches for Britain’s brightest business mind to serve as Sir Alan’s protégée. The show has been massively successful, with the last series watched by 8.1 million people. Hewer was at first only reluctantly involved with the show. He had been retired from PR for only a few months and was set to “sail off into the sunset” when he got a call from his former boss asking for advice. Sir Alan had seen The American Apprentice and had become determined to front the British version. The trouble was that Sugar was a bit passé, and the producers were much more interested in names such as Phillip Green, Richard Branson and Stelios. “Sugar was something of a has-been,” explains Hewer “He was an 80s business man, he’d sunk from view so he wasn’t really the one they wanted.” The producers were going to need a lot of persuading if Sugar was to get the gig so, on Hewer’s advice, Sir Alan whisked them off in a private jet for a weekend of luxury at his villa. In Marbella.
Evidently the producers were impressed, as just days later Sir Alan was asking Hewer to join the show with him. Hewer was adamant that he wasn’t going to be involved in the show, despite Sir Alan’s insistence he was. It took several days of being on the receiving end of the rage of ‘Britain’s Most Belligerent Boss’ for Hewer to give in, he says on the grounds of “how amusing it would be for Sugar to have to fight for my fee from the BBC, when for years I’d been having a nightmare of a business getting a fee out of him.”
Of course it is difficult now to imagine The Apprentice without Nick’s presence; the dream team of Hewer and Margaret Mountford as Sir Alan’s advisors has been part of what has made the show so popular. Their withering put-downs and disgusted faces as they witness the depths of the candidates’ idiocy are often the best bits. The news that Mountford will not be returning for the next series (she wants to focus on finishing her PhD in papyrology) has saddened Hewer almost as much as Apprentice fans. “Both us old, grey haired, establishment; it just kind of worked,” says Hewer.
Since I talked to Hewer it has been announced that Margaret’s successor is to be Karen Brady, the Managing Director of Birmingham City Football Club, who has made several appearances on The Apprentice before.
But Brady may be in for a tough time in her new position. According to Hewer, the workload is demanding; when
filming, the team work 12 hour days, 7 days a week with a crew of 60 filming about 100 hours of footage for each one hour episode. And when watching those agonising fifteen minute boardroom scenes next series, spare a thought for the candidates – Hewer tells me that they can take up to 5 hours to film. “It’s very hard, it’s tough,” he freely admits, “You’ve got to take it very seriously because the contestants deserve to be represented accurately.”
Although Hewer is Sir Alan’s eyes and ears during the process, when it comes down to who gets fired, The Boss makes the decision on his own. “He doesn’t tell us what he’s going to do, so for hours and hours we just sit there not knowing who he is going to fire,” says Hewer, “But when he’s got the final three in front of him, his skill is such that he can sort of tee them all 
up to the same degree of culpability, so when he comes to fire one, quite often even if it’s not who we wanted to go, we are quite happy about it.” Hewer certainly has a great deal of admiration for his boss, who is also a good friend.
The week after I interviewed Nick he was due to fly to Sugar’s private yacht in the south of France for a holiday. “He is formidable, he’s very quick, hardworking, fast thinking, straight forward, don’t mess with me, sort of character,” says Hewer, “He doesn’t suck up to anybody, doesn’t suffer fools gladly… he is thoughtful, generous but not ostentatious.” In other words, what you see is what you get; the ‘Sir Alan’ of The Apprentice is no on-screen persona, but the real thing.
Although Sir Alan may not suffer fools gladly, when the next series airs, we can be certain it will supply us with glorious moments of stupidity from cocky candidates. Hewer’s lip curls as he recalls the infamous ‘sandalwood’ moment from the last series, when a team of contestants made a monumental error on pricing, after mixing up two fragrances they were using for a soap, which put them well over budget. It fell to Hewer to drop the bombshell on the open-mouthed candidates that they had spent over £700 on fragrance, and it was with obvious relish that after breaking the unwelcome news, he delivered the immortal line “I’ll leave it with you”.
Although he acknowledges that this was one of the biggest mistakes ever made on the programme, Hewer’s greatest scorn is saved for the hapless team from series 3 who thought it might be a good idea to take cheap processed cheese to France and try to flog it to the French. “Taking bloody breezeblocks of cheese, from Costco, awful cheese, to France… it’s not possible! You do not do it!” exclaims Hewer.
He spends a lot of time himself in France, where he says “no-one knows me from a hole in the road”. Hewer also travels a lot; last year he raised £12,000 for charity driving the Mongol rally in an old Renault 4, across 16 countries in 50 days (“not bad for an old bloke like me”). He’s just come back from visiting Rwanda for Hope and Homes for Children, the charity he supports, and this summer completed a trek across central Asia, with ex-Apprentice candidate Saira Khan for a BBC documentary. He’s a big fan of vintage tractors (“Massey-Ferguson everytime”) and I’m shown a few he owns before I leave.
Hewer cites his grand-children as what makes him happiest in life. He loves the Cassetteboy YouTube clip that splices together clips to make Sir Alan say ridiculous things. The night before our interview he’d had a boozy night with the crew from the Asia documentary, and had to recover with copious amounts of coffee. During the course of our interview, I notice that he wears bright orange socks. By the end of the afternoon, it’s apparent that Nick Hewer is really not as icy and stern as he seems on the telly; infact he’s witty, personable and, dare I say it, an all-round nice guy. But would you really want to be on the receiving end of one of his chilly stares? I’ll leave it with you.