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Winning contestant, Lee McQueen, was due to start work yesterday for the tycoon but was a no-show.

A source at the show said: “This will make Sir Alan really cross because he hates being let down. Lee was really keen to start work but he felt he wasn’t up for it and had to stay at home.”

For his first day, he was supposed to help develop digital display advertising screen at Sugar’s holding company, Amshold which is located in Essex.

A company spokesman said: “Lee is at home with a virus. He’ll be starting work as soon as he is feeling better.”

This will leave Lee in a new job nightmare by already being on a bad footing with the boss.

Except in this case his boss is the notoriously short-tempered and extremely rich Alan Sugar.

Lee beat 15 other contestants in the popular BBC show to land the €130,000-a-year dream job with tycoon, Alan Sugar.

In an interview with the BBC website McQueen even broached the subject of his first day.

When asked if he was nervous about his first day working for the intimidating entrepreneur he said: “I’m not nervous, I’m confident. I’m really pleased that the job I will be doing is testing the skills that I learnt on The Apprentice, and teaching me new skills based around how to set up a business and how to run an organisation, so I’m more excited than nervous.”

The show ran over 12 weeks and received over 20,000 applications so Lee has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.

He was most notable in the show for having lied on his CV saying that he attended college for two years, when in reality he had left after only attending for just over four months.

This led to calls for Sugar to fire him but the boss stuck to his guns and hired the fellow Tottenham Hotspurs fan.

Lee used to work as recruitment sales manager making the choice of lying on his CV even more unfortunate.

Apparently, even British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was shocked by the choice of Lee as ‘The Apprentice’ and urged people not to lie on their CV as the truth “always comes out anyway.”

Sugar may now be wishing he chose Dublin entrepreneur Jennifer Maguire (27) who was eliminated near the end.

In a recent interview she said that Sugar couldn’t handle fiery Irish women and she believed that may have contributed to her being fired from the hit television show.

The entrepreneur and self-made multi-millionaire has become known as the boardroom chairman in BBC reality TV show The Apprentice.

Amstrad was sold to BSkyB in 2007 and the 61-year-old will now continue to be involved with his numerous other business interests.

Sir Alan said it was now the “right time” for him to step down.

His other businesses include Amshold, Amsprop, Amsair and Viglen computers.

Property tycoon

“The past 40 years have seen Amstrad grow from a start-up business to the success story that it is today, which is credit to the talented and loyal team here.”

“This is a move that has been planned for a while and it’s the right time for me to step down from my role at Amstrad,” he said.

Sir Alan has achieved a net worth of £830m, but most of his wealth now comes from his property portfolio, rather than business ventures.

He left school at the age of 16 and founded Amstrad at the age of 21.

The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1980, then sold to BSkyB in July, in a deal worth £125m that earned him a £34.5m windfall.

If you applied to take part in The Apprentice Ireland, we want to hear your views (good or bad) on how the whole process was managed.

If you made it through to the 2nd stage auditions, let us know what questions you were asked and what practical things you had to do.

We’re hoping this site will generate topical and humorous discussion about the new series of The Apprentice show and we’re relying on all our visitors to join in the chat and make it a success.

This extraordinary format has the power to pull in viewers like few others can manage, but it relies on one key factor – a ruthless character like Alan Sugar to call the shots.

In this respect, TV3 can hardly have found Sugar’s match in man-of-the-people Bill Cullen.

He has already been quoted as saying he thinks Sugar is a grumpy old man and he’s right. Of the three people who have won a job with him in the last three years (not counting the recruit who joined last week), only one is still working with him.

Here’s a classic Sugar quote from the BBC website: ‘‘If you survive here, I promise you this: as sure as I’ve got a hole in my bloody arse, when it’s down to two of you, people who are nice about you now, will not be.” That’s the attitude, Mr Sugar.

He almost makes my worst boss ever – a middle-aged American newsman who banned reporters from speaking to one another in the office, on the grounds that we were all too friendly – look like a pussycat.

The cruelty of it all is the whole point. At the BBC, The Apprentice is over-the-top, hard-to-imagine, bordering-on-offensive absurdity. It’s theatre. The candidates are terrified of Sugar, terrified of making a mess of things, and terrified of one another.

The viewing experience is not a million miles off watching a person being thrown to the lions.

With Cullen in the Sugar role,TV3 could end up with a show that’s firm, quirky, but basically humane. If so, I suspect nobody will watch.

Cullen clearly struggles to sound horrible. His best effort so far was: ‘‘The Apprentice brings an exciting opportunity to budding Irish achievers. As a hands-on operate with various business activities, I will give the winner an exceptional grinding in how to win in the tough environment of our current economic situation and our morning meetings start at 6.30am.That’s a fact.”

If TV3 and producers Screentime Shinawil get it right, of course, they will have a hit on their hands. Despite all the talk about the demise of the reality TV format after ten years of dominance, the format shows no sign of wavering.

The latest season of The Apprentice gave BBC 1 a peak audience in the final episode of 9.7 million, three million more than the last year’s finale. That’s only two million fewer people than watched the final of last year’s X-Factor, which is the biggest show right now – across the tabloid media as well as TV – in this whole genre.

Even the spin-off shows did well: BBC 2’s You’re Fired! attracted 4.6 million in its last week and You’re Hired on BBC 1 brought in five million.

The Apprentice has been commissioned here by TV3’s programme director Ben Frow. A heavy-hitting import from London, Frow is used to making good calls on populist programming: his own past credits include How Clean is Your House and Location, Location, Location.

According to Frow, the Irish Apprentice will be ‘‘addictive viewing’’. We will just have to wait and see.

Article taken from The Sunday Business Post
Sunday, June 22, 2008 – By Catherine O’Mahony