The urge to be Sir Alan’s apprentice

When Sir Alan Sugar set up Amstrad selling car aerials nearly 40 years ago there was no television programme to encourage budding entrepreneurs. Britain was locked in an era of corporatism in which the conventional aspiration was to work for a multinational such as Shell or to be a civil servant.

In fact, the two were much the same, offering the anonymity, security and shared responsibility of the large organisation with its annual pay review and pensions scheme. It was by joining the Ministry of Education as a statistician when he left school at 17 that Sugar realised working for himself had to be better.

It has taken a long time for the country to share that view. But after decades when business was regarded as vulgar, entrepreneurship has become respectable again. That doesn’t always mean wanting to build a huge empire like a Branson or Hanson; small business is beautiful too. The 1980s gave us the Loadsamoney generation for whom greed was good, but we now have an environment in which making things is again regarded as highly as making money and in which fortunes can be based on innovation rather than investment.

Television shows like The Apprentice or Dragon’s Den attract big audiences wanting to watch entrepreneurs in action. Sugar’s latest series, which ended this week with Kristina and Simon being summonsed to the boardroom for the dubious honour of working for the tough taskmaster, has been promoted from BBC2 to BBC1 because of its popularity.

And while Sugar’s mix of Big Brother, Pop Idol and The Generation Game turns off as many viewers as turn on, a sound commercial thread runs through it. The tasks he sets have to do with knowing your market, sourcing materials, pricing to sell and assessing risk.