I was determIned not to be fIred!
The Countdown host tells JANE WARREN about the abrupt career change at the age of 60 that took him from behind-the-scenes spin doctor to household name
IF THINGS had gone to plan, Nick Hewer would be a retired solicitor in Swindon now. “Thank God it didn’t work out,” he chuckles. “I wouldn’t have had half as much fun.” Instead, at the age of 60, the failed law student and former PR man got the job of Alan Sugar’s sidekick on The Apprentice before becoming the genial host of Countdown, the longest-running game show in television history.
His switch to Channel 4’s fivedays-a-week daytime hit came after he had tired of a decade of intense shooting schedules on the BBC reality show. Surprisingly perhaps, Hewer had never seen Countdown before the call came to audition six years ago.
“It was Alan [Sugar] who said, ‘What is it?’ ‘How much is it paying?’ followed by ‘Do it’,” recalls the sprightly 74-year-old . “Remarkably he then said he’d arrange the fee for me. Bearing in mind he’d never given me a pay rise in all the years I worked for him that was ironic. But he’s a very loyal bloke.”
Their connection goes back to the earliest days of Amstrad when the now Lord Sugar was coming up with cheap computing products and Hewer was the PR consultant he hired to launch them into a market hungry for affordable new technology. “He always made life interesting as a client,” he says. “If you like the smell of cordite and the sound of gunfire that is. Alan’s very combative, electrifying really, and I spent a lot of time promoting his businesses, rather at the expense of my other clients I suspect. I owe him a lot in terms of creating a career for me, particularly in TV.”
They remain firm friends to this day. Indeed, next Thursday Lord Sugar and his wife will set off from their Chigwell mansion to have dinner with Hewer and his partner of 20 years Catherine, whom he admired from afar as a student before they both married other people. After she was widowed and Hewer divorced, they finally got it together.
In his entertaining memoirs, published this month, Hewer affectionately credits Catherine with steering him “into safer and kinder waters”. “The little dinner party is really to say thank you to Alan and Ann for our recent two-week trip to Croatia,” he says. “We are guests on his yacht most years.”
HEWER admits he still finds The Apprentice compulsive viewing. “Some of the winners and indeed some of those who don’t quite make it are pretty smart people,” he points out. “Ricky Martin started a recruitment company and made a million. Susie Ma is turning over £20million with Tropic Skincare. But if you don’t have the entertainment value from the over-confident ‘dumdums’, then you don’t have a show. Who wants to hear a bright economics graduate prattling on?”
Although he remains proud of The Apprentice, Hewer thinks it spawned a worrying trend in microcelebrity. “What’s on TV these days HIRED: Nick, Margaret Mountford and Lord Sugar other than elimination reality shows?” he asks, before admitting that he does have time for The Great British Bake Off – in which he made a star turn in March for Stand Up To Cancer and proved that you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
“One of the key mistakes I made was failing to spot the decimal point on the scales,” he says. “I mistook four ounces of butter for 0.4,” he admits. “If you go into the kitchen for the first time at the age of 74, you cannot expect to come PARTNER: Catherine out with a gold cup.” Or with soft profiteroles.
But he is properly concerned about the example some reality shows are setting. “Celebrity is a terrible bloody thing, yet most children want to be famous. It’s awful. Contributors to Love Island all have personal trainers, stylists and agents before they start.
“Then these five-minute wonders fire their PR agent, take their clothes off and invent an affair. They break that off, buy a puppy, and no one cares, so they have to shoot somebody… Seriously, what sort of world are we living in?”
To counteract any accusations of vanity, he takes pains to sign autographs and submit to selfies but even he feels fame’s lure. “After a while it becomes a bit of a drug so you must be self-disciplined.”
For this reason, he continues to travel on the Underground and bus and turns down plenty of work saying he’ll stop completely when the time is right.
“To keep wanting it in the face of people not really wanting you, that must be think?”
Beneath his affable exterior is a man who admits he is fuelled by the knowledge that he is slightly flying by the seat of his pants and might be about to be found out.
Having twice failed his law exams as a young man he was always focused on finding real job security. “I wanted to have a stake in something by the age of 30 because I was determined not to be in a position where I could be fired,” he says. “I’m not a confident sort of person. For the first five years on Countdown I didn’t know if I was any good at it. I don’t think I’m the world’s best at any damn thing.
“I certainly don’t think I was a very good person in PR but I was a very hard worker. We were very straitlaced – no leather trousers – and wouldn’t have known what to do if we’d been appointed by Robbie Williams. But I was quite creative. When we were asked to launch products, I would take big chances in a dramatic way in order to get attention. I was good at that side because I do like a risk.”
tthe worst. Don’t you HIS unexpected side has certainly seen him do some bizarre things. During his PR years he once scaled the walls of his office block in London’s Covent Garden, hauling himself up to the third storey using a window cleaner’s rope in order to retrieve his keys after locking himself out. (Not for him calling a locksmith.)
And he routinely worked so late he had to leave through a sash window and lower himself on to the roof of the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square after the doors were locked. A desire for risk also explains why he keeps saying yes to “frankly terrifying” things – including his first appearance on Question Time in 2014.
“Thank God for Vladimir Putin,” sighs Hewer. “He’d just invaded Ukraine and as I’d just driven through the country I could talk with huge authority. It’s all about getting away with it.”
For a long time he was frustrated that his father, the somewhat dour owner of a successful veterinary practice in Swindon, refused to fund him through university.
“I was sad that I hadn’t achieved what my parents would have expected but disappointed I was denied the chance by my father after my brother had left Dublin University under a cloud. I was by no means less intelligent than my friends, who are all now members of the professional classes.
“So there I was, floundering around in London trying to cobble together a career, but I can get on with anybody really and that has always been helpful.”
To order My Alphabet: A Life From A To Z by Nick Hewer (Simon & Schuster, £20) with free UK delivery, call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or send a cheque made payable to Express Bookshop to: Nick Hewer Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ. Buy online at expressbookshop.co.uk