OUTSIDE THE BOARDROOM
Favourite band: Pink Floyd Favourite book: Primo Levi’s Car: Willys Jeep – for pure functionality Dream holiday: Winter in the Caribbean. Nothing better than escaping January in the UK. When I’m filming
I get picked up from my Manchester hotel at 9.30am and taken to Media City in Salford, where we film 15 shows over three days, five a day. It’s quite a relentless schedule.
The first thing every day is a very loose-knit conflab in the make-up area where we drink coffee and get painted. We have a briefing because each day there’s a different guest and so we get their biographies and discuss anecdotes and areas of discussion. But the show is filmed almost “as live” and without an autocue.
After each show, I have to change my shirt and tie but I don’t take clothes with me – there’s a wardrobe master who looks after us. When I am not recording I’m either at my desk at home in a Northamptonshire farmhouse or working for Bark or one of my charities in London, where I base myself at the Reform Club.
Later this month, I’m going to Sierra Leone with Street Child to support a marathon being staged to raise money for its Ebola Orphans Appeal. transformed the public’s view of business. “They have spun business into a different way of people’s thinking. Business now is fun, acceptable, exciting.”
Mr Hewer notices this when he visits schools as an advocate for business on behalf of the Merchant Taylors’ Company or the National Literacy Trust. He finds children of eight years and older acting out versions of The Apprentice to raise funds for their schools.
He has long been passionate about business education and for four years at the start of the century ran a scheme for Amstrad and Lloyds Bank called You Can Do it Too, visiting schools and colleges.
The project was superseded when Sir Alan saw Donald Trump on the American version of The Apprentice and persuaded the BBC to let him host the UK version. “He said, ‘Then I don’t have to go ploughing around the country once a week at my own expense, I can talk about business on television,’” Mr Hewer recalls.
TheApprentice returns next week but, for the first time, Mr Hewer will not be there, having ceded his place to Viglen chairman Claude Littner who previously appeared as the most aggressive of Sir Alan’s interviewers.
Mr Hewer compares Littner’s interviewing style to using a “claymore” when others preferred a stiletto. “His ferocity in the interview programme, I would hope that he doesn’t carry that into the observer role. I’m sure he’s very smart and wouldn’t do that, because he’s got to stand back and report.”
Mr Hewer defends The Apprentice against claims of superficiality – “all the business lessons are submerged in the soup of entertainment and without the bloody entertainment you won’t get anybody to watch it” – and that sales people dominate the contestants. “You have got to have people with resilience and sales people do have that by and large.”
The demands of a show that shoots 130 hours of footage for each hour of television eventually became too much. He held a dinner for the show’s senior staff. “I actually apologised if I had been rude or had hurt anybody’s feelings because at the end it was becoming a bit too much physically.”
Mr Hewer, 71, hosts Channel 4’s staple show Countdown and is in discussions to form a television presenting team with the theatrical agent and producer Michael Whitehall (father of comedian Jack Whitehall).
He is also an ambassador for Bark.com, a website that allows users to “bark” out a job requirement and then anonymously assess the local traders who respond. The service reflects his “absolute passion for the small business market”, providing a new media alternative to the leaflet drop.
Despite quitting The Apprentice he remains close friends with Sir Alan – they are due to have dinner the evening after we meet – and praises him for never having surrendered control to its producers.
“He’s all over it like a big spider. It’s absolutely his show. TV people are not business people.”