Legend has it that the inaugural tailgate happened in 1869, at the college football game between Rutgers and Princeton. Fans travelled to the game by carriage, and then cooked up a pre-game meal at the ‘tail-end’ of the horse. A Health and Safety nightmare. But the idea caught on. And nowadays, although the common tailgate set-up involves a small grill and a cool box, die-hard tailgaters put up shanty towns of gazebos and generators. 

There are a few rules to tailgating. First, boil your chicken at home – grill in the lot. It’s basic food safety. And second, no mayo – to keep the salmonella away. Finally, get there early to snag a metal garbage can to use as a tailgate fireplace. If you’re not lucky enough to grab one, just start a fire on the tarmac. This is real wild frontier stuff. With squeezy cheese and waterproof paper-towel holders.

Tailgating is the last great American neighbourhood: no-one locks their door. Fans of opposing teams mingle, swapping details of their marinades and their rubs. It’s the only arena of testosterone-filled sport where the apron is truly respected. It could never happen in Britain. Celtic v Rangers? Sitting down together for beer and sandwiches? Arsenal v Chelsea? Over tea and biscuits? Not in my lifetime.

I saw the Superbowl in Florida a couple of years back, when I was making an episode of the Food Programme on Miami food culture. Along the way I met a rowdy bunch of New Orleans Saints fans who tailgated a lot longer than the game lasted. “We got here way before the game” one told me, “and we stay three hours after it’s over. Longer if we win.” Which they did. Sport was the winner. And the tailgaters are probably still there…..

Pitt Cue Co. chef and co-owner Tom Adams is a very modest man. But he doesn’t have much cause to be. He’s just opened his first restaurant, hot off the back of a victorious spell on the Southbank, where his own take on American-style barbecue classics did much to improve tourist-Londoner relations — some of them even shared tables.

 It seems fantastical that, until May last year, Tom had no experience running his own outfit. He had worked in kitchens since he was 16 and before taking Pitt Cue Co. on the road he had been a chef de partie at the esteemed Blueprint Cafe on Butlers Wharf, ”I was fairly low down in the pecking order”, he laughs. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be opening a restaurant.” 

 2011 was the year that put British street food on the map, and nothing summed it up better than the pop-up stalls that lined the riverside between the Waterloo and Hungerford bridges. They all but overshadowed the neighbouring Festival of Britain. But Tom seemed very modest about the role that he played in it all.

“We just winged it really” he says. “I never thought of us as part of a street food ‘revolution’. I didn’t think anything would come of it. I expected to go back to work at the Blueprint Café with Jeremy [Lee, now head chef at Quo Vadis] at the end of the summer. It surprised us completely.”

It wasn’t easy. The smoker that Tom and his business partners ordered from the US arrived just the day before they were due to take up their coveted spot on the Southbank. They had to do all the prep in a friend’s domestic kitchen in Vauxhall and the car they used to haul the stuff less than three miles up the road frequently broke down. “But we got away with it” he says.

In fact they more than got away with it. They had a prime spot to ensnare the passing pedestrians — and an ideal place to get the London food bloggers interested. Even the critic Jay Rayner risked it for a brisket, braving the Big Ben snappers and meandering backpackers for bit of good honest barbecued grub.

Then things went pork-belly up. Still suffering periodically from a back operation a few years ago, Tom collapsed mid-service. He couldn’t get up, and had to rest for two-and-a-half weeks, meaning partner Jamie Berger had to work 18 hour shifts to keep Pitt Cue Co turning over. Tom has now fully recovered. But — for a while — the dreams turned into a nightmare.

Now Pitt Cue Co. has opened in Soho. And it’s doing a roaring trade. But the street is still at the heart of what they do. Unfortunately for the punters, so are the queues. ”Queues really help to build hype” says Tom, “but hype also means stress. When they do get served, punters expect an other-worldly experience, which can make staff nervous, particularly when what you’re really serving is home cooking.”

That’s Tom’s modesty kicking in again. The new venture is a pig-out joint in the fine American tradition, which has been overlooked for too long by the London restaurant scene. Substantial meat dishes–you might recognise the Longhorn beef ribs from the opening credits of The Flintstones — need a robust setting. With decent crockery. Pitt Cue Co. Soho ticks all the boxes.

Pitt Cue Co. is open at 1 Newburgh St, Soho, (30 seconds from Carnaby Street) from 12pm, seven days a week. And fear not, claustrophobes – the original van is in currently in cold storage but will be back on the streets this summer.

In Kolkata, the city that never sleeps, a lot of the economy still exists on barter. When I approached the enterprising street food seller, and convinced him to share his secret recipe for a tummy tickling Egg Roll, I had to hand over the sports section of my newspaper (along with an explanation of why footballers are paid stupid amounts of money back in England) in exchange. Not a bad deal. As I munched happily through every bite of the egg roll, remembering the past, I was unaware of ketchup trickling down my chin. But what did I care? I was having the best meal of my life.

Growing up on limited resources – as a student in Kolkata – I had an excellent platform to savour the joys of street food. Economic necessity! But the thought of it still makes my mouth water. Variety is definitely the spice of Kolkata street food. Taste Jhal Muri (an ingenious spiced mixture of salt and sugar, crisp and soft, fresh and cooked in a mouthful). Simple as it may seem, this one dish is made of puffed rice, a drizzle of pungent mustard oil, along with chilli, tomatoes, potatoes, coconut, fresh coriander and monkey nuts. Savoured out of a paper bag called a thonga (not to be confused with anything lacy) this is a taste that thrives in its simplicity.

Everyone who is Indian at heart grew up on the joy of chai – or tea. Thanks to the Raj, and it’s effort to break the Chinese monopoly, tea gardens were planted in Darjeeling and the foot hills of South India and the drink became affordable. Chai was the drink of the masses. And there’s nothing better for washing down street food. Street food can adapt to its location. From the unpaved cobbled steps of a village by the sea, to an upmarket mall in the heart of Kolkata’s financial district, you’re bound to find punters enjoying a plate of Chola Tikki (chickpeas and potato cakes) and Pao Bhajis with fervour and zeal. Globalization and the meteoric rise of the middle classes won’t effect the market for street food in India. It has a tradition, strongly rooted in its simplicity.

Kolkata Egg (Kathi) Roll:
Feeds the imagination of one hungry taste adventurer. Ready in minutes.

Ingredients:
One Flour Tortilla
One Egg
One Red Onion Sliced Thinly
Half A Cucumber Sliced Thinly
One Green Chilli Chopped Finely
A Drizzle Of Vegetable Oil
Ketchup And Chilli Sauce
One Lime

Drizzle some vegetable oil on a pre heated non stick pan. Place the flour tortilla in it, and fry for 10 seconds on both sides. Crack open the egg, on top of the tortilla, and scramble it. Cook the egg, for a few minutes, and flip over the tortilla, in order to cook
the egg firmly. Remove the tortilla from the pan, and place on a dinner plate. Sprinkle the raw salad of sliced red onions, chopped chillies and cucumber on one edge of the tortilla. Top with a proper squirt of ketchup, chilli sauce and a few drops of lime juice. Roll the tortilla, from one end to another in the shape of a cigar. Wrap three quarters of the egg roll in a newspaper, and serve hot, with a chilled bottle of Thums Up [Indian cola]! Taste the thunder of life!

It’s the latest victory in the ongoing democratisation of French food. Two centuries after Antonin Carême introduced grande cuisine, France is (again) in revolt. And it’s right that it should take place on the streets of Paris. It’s being led by Le Fooding, a new movement that’s ranged against the old-fashioned restaurants and their outdated approach to food. In the brave new world of Le Fooding, the Michelin guide will be ripped up, and the restaurants of France, once again, will be reclaimed by the people. Allons, enfants de la patrie.

Le Fooding was founded 10 years ago by Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin, two food journalists who were exasperated by the conformity and conservatism of French food culture. Every year it publishes, from its dusty offices on the Right Bank, a good-looking guide to the best restaurants of France. With no grades, or stars, it’s very different from the Michelin guide. “Michelin inspectors look at the rugs in a restaurant” says Cammas, “and they measure the chandeliers. Two stars? Three stars? Who really cares? It should all be about the food.” They’re getting there……..

Her accuracy rate is 95%. Most trend forecasters aren’t in business long enough to even have an accuracy rate. That’s why IBM, American Express and McDonalds fall over themselves to employ her. In America, Popcorn is chat-show famous. Even Oprah wanted to meet the 60-year-old woman who predicted the success of four-wheel drive vehicles and the failure of New Coke. Popcorn was the first to identify the stay-at-home syndrome (which she called ‘cocooning’) and the growth in home delivery, home business and home shopping. Back in 1981 she told companies that, because we were ‘cocooning’, we would buy more Haagen-Dazs and babygros. She was right.

Popcorn’s methods are suitably futuristic. To research ideas she conducts ‘Hypnotrend Probes’, which regress volunteers under hypnosis. After they have signed a release form, of course. She has even employed psychics. “I’m not like Nancy Reagan. I don’t interview psychics, and then predict what’s going to happen. I’m more interested in how people in general feel about psychics”. So it’s no surprise to discover she has a Third Eye – although you wouldn’t know it to look at her. It exists in only a ‘spiritual’ way. “Every culture talks about an extra sense. Having a Third Eye is like being in the present, but seeing from the future”. Let’s just say that Popcorn is open to whatever is out there.

When I predict rends, it’s hardly “buckle up – we’re on our way to tomorrowland.” I mean, I’ve got a reasonable success rate. I can show you the press cuttings. But I can’t get too excited about this new branch of what’s now being called social anthropology. I need a mission statement that will appeal to the American self-improvement tradition. The same tradition that underpinned Chicken Soup For The Soul, and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And a new name. Richard Johnson is just too dull. “We sell okay in Britain” says Popcorn. “But in Britain you don’t think you need to look forward. Even to tomorrow.”

Popcorn has become a multimillionaire by painstakingly identifying the societal trends of the future, and then giving them cutesy little names. There’s ‘99 Lives’ (we’ll all be busy), ‘Egonomics’ (we’ll all be selfish) and ‘Fantasy Adventure’ (we’ll all be wearing hiking boots). “The 17 trends we have right now seem to be pretty stable” says Popcorn. “If I see something that I cannot fit into the 17 trends, I hang on to it. That will kick me into another trend.” Critics say she is merely selling the blindingly obvious. “Well” she says, “Fortune 500 Chairmen don’t think it’s so obvious” says Popcorn. “Otherwise why would they pay me so much money?”

Here are some of my best guesses for next year. Olive Magazine’s 2012 Food Predictions. If they’re correct, I’ll remind you about them in 12 months time……

We can see it in her television series. At the close of a show, after the credits have rolled, we see Nigella sneaking down to the fridge to wolf down the leftovers. It’s not just put on for the cameras. “To tell the truth,” she says, “I’m happy to eat them standing, leaning on the still-open refrigerator door, for my finger-picked breakfast. But I also love the culinary fiddling to which they can lend themselves with great satisfaction.”

If there aren’t any leftovers after dinner, Lawson actually gets a bit miffed. “From my point of view” she says “it wouldn’t mean that lunch had been so delicious that not a morsel remained but, rather, that you hadn’t provided enough to start with. Plenty is the very minimum you can think of producing, I think, though, this is a tempremental thing: some people fear extravagance, others meanness; in my own case, I just have a neurotic need for too much, too much everything.”

Bowls of leftover creamy mashed potatoes? Tomorrow’s fishcakes. Or a pan of bubble and squeak. “This dish” she says, “which consists of fried mashed potatoes and cabbage, has an unexpected buttery and nutty resonance when made with Brussels sprouts.” And to add a touch of elegance to it, if “elegance” is the right word for bubble and squeak, try topping it with a fried or poached egg. “And maybe some crumbled crispy bacon.”

Nigella is a big fan of the nursery food canon – toad-in-the-hole, for instance. “Toad-in-the-hole started off life, as many of these sorts of dishes do, as a kind of British version of cucina povera,” she says. “A way of making meat go farther. Scrapings of meat, the odd scrawny cutlet or anything left over from the Sunday roast would be tossed in batter to provide sustenance and energy.” For a woman of money, Lawson is very firmly grounded.

But then Nigella used leftover trampoline parts for her greenhouse – make-do and mend is clearly in her genetic make-up. She knows how to get the most out of every ingredient; coming up with ingenious ways to serve leftovers, and finding new recipes to use up a glut of fruit or veg. Could those carrots be pureed with almonds to make soup? Or could that loaf be turned into crutons? ‘Waste not, want not’ isn’t some dreary, outdated mantra. It’s a principle that can help all of us eat wisely and well.

And it’s very timely. The fact is that one third of the food we buy in this country ends up in the bin. That includes old tea bags and dirty vegetable peelings – but 15% of it includes perfectly edible food. Work out the sums. It’s quite possible we throw away £30 every time we do a supermarket shop. That’s £120 a month, or £1,440 a year – a lot of money. It’s also a lot of food: as a nation, we throw away 6.7m tons per year. Talk about a throwaway society. And, right now, we just can’t afford it.

Nigella will use leftover chicken in a pie – or goose in a cassoulet. As with bouillabaisse, there is no general rule as to exactly what goes into a cassoulet. It’s just a catch-all for anything edible that a chef decides to toss into a pan. In the olden days, when kitchen fire was kept constantly stoked, cassoulets would claim a twenty-year life span. Just don’t ask for the recipe. As any self-respecting chef will tell you, there IS no recipe. It just accumulates!”

It was Nigella that got us all saving carcasses. Every time you roast a chicken, simply pop the leftover carcass into a plastic bag and throw it into the freezer. When you’ve got three or four carcasses, put them into a stock pot with enough cold water to cover, and simmer for three hours. Maybe throw in some herbs, and a whole onion for the last hour. The broth – once it’s been skimmed and sieved – will be the backbone for many a dish.

Leftovers are obviously better put away in the freezer if the alternative destination is several days lingering in the fridge and then in the bin. “On the other hand,” says Nigella, “beware against using the freezer as a less guilt-inducing way of binning food you know you don’t want. If no one, including you, liked the soup the first time round (and that’s why you’ve got so much left over) there is no point in freezing it for some hopeful future date when, miraculously, it will taste delicious.”

But bagging leftovers – say stews – in single portions can be useful for those evenings when you’re eating alone. “Take the little packet out of the deep freeze before you go to work in the morning and heat it up for supper when you get back at night” says Nigella. “Immensely cheering.” Or knock up a really big batch and freeze the surplus for days when you can’t face cooking. Don’t be prissy about it. Pretty much anything can be used to make soup.

One of Lawson’s favourites is ochazuke – a simple rice soup. Put your leftover rice with a few flavour additions such as spinach, a bit of courgette, fish (tinned or otherwise), bean sprouts, tofu, broccoli, Japanese pickles, whatever’s around. Leftover stirfry would be nice. Make green tea or open an ochazuke sachet (which seems to contain seaweed, vegetable flakes and sesame seeds as well as the green tea), and pour it over the rice. Season, if you like, with soya sauce and sesame oil. Eat.

It’s all about understanding food, and the way it works. It’s about picking food up – and interacting with it. Licking it off the end of your finger while you look at camera two. Like all chefs, Lawson understands food. She won’t abuse a ‘use by’ date, but will treat a ‘best before’ and a ‘sell by’ date as little more than a guideline. The supermarkets only put them on packaging because they’re catering for a public that are very poorly educated about food – and prone to sue at the drop of a hat.

The message from the government is, when you get in the kitchen, exercise some basic portion control. According to WRAP, the government department behind the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign, getting the portions wrong is one of the main reasons we end up wasting food. So www.lovefoodhatewaste.com has a portion planner. But Nigella won’t be interested. Like she says, “I don’t feel a house is a home until there are leftovers in the fridge.”

I ordered two steamed king scallops (£3.50 each) on a salad of coriander, spring onion and crispy garlic. When the scallops arrived, the fopstick became an issue. Not just its shape – its size. It was big. I felt like a character in a nursery rhyme – when was the giant due back? And it looked even bigger because the table was so small, with a lamp slap-bang in the middle. I couldn’t even reach my gai lan (£4).

The result? I spilt the Riesling. Chinese and Thai food work well with light fruity reds such as Beaujolais. But I prefer a slightly acidic white, such as Riesling, served cold – in a glass, that is, rather than over my trousers. The red thai curry (£11) with chilli would have overpowered the Riesling, so we ordered a yellow curry instead. With nothing to distinguish it from the food I get at my local take-away.

In fairness, the gai lan – or Chinese broccoli – was perfect (once I moved the lamp out the way). The vegetable’s natural bitterness offset the sweetness of the yellow curry beautifully. It also made up for the morning glory. Chinese morning glory is best stir fried. Thai morning glory is best eaten raw in a salad. This stringy mess of green was best left in a bin out the back.

Thai food is known for being difficult, but it’s among the most popular cuisines in the World. There is now a Thai-style restaurant in almost every major city on the planet. And David Thompson, the brilliant Australian chef, has even had the audacity to open one in Bangkok. So why is Thai food still so notably absent on Britain’s streets? Is there anyone out there? Let us know at www.facebook.com/britishstreetfood.

I do like that Armagnac’s robust, assertive character doesn’t mix easily in the fruit-and-vegetable world of cocktails. I do like that it has a distinct air of the old-fashioned. And I do like that it’s linked, atavistically, to a decent cigar. But when I wake up tomorrow, it will – of course – be a different story. Armagnac is the brandy of Gascony. With its gently undulating fields, interspersed with orderly hilltop villages ranged round immaculate squares, the south-west of France is like the Hornby railway set I still keep boxed in my attic. It’s where Tony Blair loves to relax. He used to urge the locals to “m’appellez Tony”. But when the Gascons presented him with a spirited pony called Justin, Blair got confused. As he later confessed to Des O’Connor “I didn’t know whether to ride it or eat it”. Eat it. In these parts of France, you won’t offend anyone by eating anything. But in Britain, we still get fidgety around our food. Take offal. When I tried Tongue ‘n’ Cheek, the best street food I’ve had this summer, I remembered how good it was to eat those underrated meat cuts. And I liked that Cristiano, the gaffer, was all about the sustainability and the provenance. His ox cheeks, cooked in Meantime stout served with corn mill polenta, were something special. But when Cristiano tried to slip me his tongue (cooked at low temperature served in a sourdough roll with salsa verde or/and horseradish) I wasn’t happy. There’s something unedifying about the texture of a tongue — it needs to be sliced paper thin. Sorry Cristiano! But make sure you try it for yourself…..

It’s not easy, being a man of the people – not when you’re sat behind the wheel of a vintage Rolls Royce. But Sir Alan Sugar (“you can call me Sir Alan”) is trying his best. “Here” he says, easing the car to a graceful halt. “Elton John stitched me up with this Roller. I bought it at auction – on the phone. Bid against myself, I reckon. Done up like a kipper I was.” He won’t tell me how much he paid. After all, he doesn’t want to appear gauche. “But let’s just say it was three times what it’s worth. Just because it belonged to Elton. And I’m a shrewd businessman? You reckon?”

Sugar isn’t the only one to ask that question: analysts in the City want to know if this shrewd businessman is quite as shrewd as he used to be. After all, Amstrad – a conflation of ‘ams’ (Alan Michael Sugar) and ‘trad’ing – was once worth £1.2 billion. Now it’s worth £180 million. In 2004, Sugar couldn’t even drag himself along to the AGM. Pensions Investment Research Consultants, an organisation which advises on matters of corporate governance, recommended that Amstrad shareholders get rid of him – and fast.

It shouldn’t bother Sugar – according to the 2004 Sunday Times Rich List, he’s worth an estimated £703million. But it does. In fact, he is bloody indignant. “The shareholders are looked after by me” he says. “And they should be very thankful. I run Amstrad as if it was my own. They get their accounts every year, they get their profits and their dividends. And if they don’t like it – if they don’t like it – they should sell their shares. But I will run my – the – company the way I want to. Not the way some twat in the City wants me to.”

The old-school bluster fits perfectly with the Rolls Royce. And its smell of stale cigar smoke. But Sugar actually prefers the Bentley – with the personalised number plate AMS 1. “The number plate was just a bit of fun” he says. “It’s 40 years old. I had it on my bloody Mini van.” He knows it’s a little bit, well, wide. Wide or not, it didn’t stop him buying AS1 for his wife Ann. As Sugar walks towards his front door, he looks like a man totally at ease with himself. A man who doesn’t give a monkey’s. A man with nothing to prove.

His house isn’t a marble monument to excess. Not a bit of it. Apart from the private lounge-bar with premium optics. The grounds are modest, and from the living-room sofa you can see the top of the drive and the bottom of the garden. It’s a six- or seven-bedroomed (“depends whether you’re buying or selling” says Sugar) executive home, with two tennis courts, a swimming pool and video entryphone facility. When you consider that the owner is three times richer than Madonna, it doesn’t seem excessive at all.

Sugar bought the house, in the definitively Essex town of Chigwell, 26 years ago. Admittedly, he has got two others – one in Spain, and one in America – but why on earth would he choose to set up home in Chigwell? “I was born in Hackney” says Sugar. “When you’re born in Hackney, and you do well in life, you move to Chigwell.” It’s also handy for the M11 and the M25, with easy rail links into central London and, well, Brentwood. And Brentwood is the home to Amstrad’s headquarters.

Sugar walks into the living-room, and perches on the edge of the sofa. He adjusts the cufflinks on his shirt, and sighs. In his book, The Apprentice – How To Get Hired Not Fired, it says “Learn to read body language”. And if I’m reading it right, I feel like I’m looking at what Sugar calls ‘the silent close’. “It is usually used after the point when you have proffered your best deal and you’re implying: ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going now – this is your last chance’.” It’s a little early for ‘the silent close’, but Sugar is hoping to keep the interview brief.

The room is full of family photographs. And by the French windows, leading onto the garden, is a pile of over-sized books by La Rochefoucauld. The 17th-century French writer had a cynical, misanthropic view of the world. And an ability to keep his cynicism and misanthropy brief. “True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary,” he wrote, “and nothing but what is necessary”. Sugar is famous for saying nothing but what is necessary. His favourite e-mails read “yes” and “no” . Like Rochefoucauld, he’s no fan of smalltalk.

Sugar’s friend and PR man, Nick Hewer, remembers the time that Sugar sent a fax to a video recorder manufacturer in China. “Brilliantly funny” says Hewer. “Brilliantly funny. They had the office rolling around. ‘Dear Mr Ching Chang Chong, we received your video. It is shit’. All spelt out in bold. In capital letters. Every sentence was four words long. There was absolutely no fear of Mr Ching Chang Chong misunderstanding exactly what he was saying. His use of language is very explicit, but he has this real ability to communicate.”

If he wants to. After all, he is the man who turned down Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The man who refused a Bailey photo shoot. And the man who declined dinner at Number 10 because it clashed with his birthday. He did go on Room 101 – not because he thought there was mileage in it, but because it was one of his favourite shows – and listed “men who wear wigs” as one of his pet hates. But when Paul Merton asked him to wear a wig, as a joke, Sugar cut him dead. It was painful to watch. Sugar doesn’t like someone else being boss. That’s his job.

NEW SECTION

Sugar wants to be a straight-talking, no-nonsense role model. That’s why he agreed to present BBC reality show The Apprentice. He had an idea that the first series would be a masterclass in business (it wasn’t) and a showcase for the best in entrepreneurial talent (it wasn’t that either). But it did give an insight into Sugar’s way of doing things. As he says at the beginning of The Apprentice, “I don’t like liars. I don’t like cheats. I don’t like bullshitters. I don’t like schmoozers. I don’t like arse lickers”. Sugar made business look sexy.

The first series was enough of a success for Sugar to agree to a second, putting another set of entrepreneurs through the most gruelling job interview of their lives. Sugar says he’s still looking for “the next me”. And considering he’s nearly a billionaire, there has been no shortage of volunteers. “But you can forget about flashing your eyes or having a handsome attack” he says. “It ain’t gonna impress me”. You better believe it. The series began with 14 candidates – by the end, 13 will be told “You’re fired.”

It’s already causing a stir. In the first task of the second series, the teams were asked to make money by buying and selling fruit. But while the boys got the best wholesale prices by barter, the girls did it by flirtation. And, in the boardroom, came under attack from Sugar for using sex to sell. Contestant Karen Bremner was indignant, and said Sugar was talking old-fashioned nonsense. “We got reprimanded for having a laugh with the market traders” she says, “but if we had adopted a formal business tone they would have felt patronised.”

Sugar reckons we all need to understand business. All of us – even Janet and John. Sugar opens an imaginary book. “Mummy gets £100 a week from Daddy because Daddy goes to work” he reads. “If Daddy doesn’t go to work, Mummy doesn’t get the £100 and Mummy can’t go to the shop to buy bread. If Daddy wants to get more money he can start his own shop”. Sugar is frustrated at how out-of-date the modern curriculum is. “At the age of 18” he says, “suddenly it’s ‘Ooh. I’ve got to do something called ‘work’. But I’ll have my gap year first’.”

He has given his fee for The Apprentice to Great Ormond Street. Not terribly generous – the programme is, after all, on the BBC. But Sugar is desperate to be seen to put something back. “One of the things I wish to avoid is people saying ‘What’s he doing that for? Hasn’t he got enough money?’ I really hate that feeling. So if I write an article for the newspapers, or do an advert [like the recent campaign for premium bonds] you’ll always see ‘Sir Alan’s fee for this article has been donated to charity’.” And it’s usually to Great Ormond Street.

That’s not just PR. He is a kind, decent man. If it hadn’t been for contractual obligations, Sugar would have dumped the “You’re fired” catchphrase in The Apprentice. “I would have preferred something like ‘Clear off’”. Just that Sugar hasn’t actually fired many people. “Sir Alan is very loyal” says his legal advisor, Margaret Mountford. “People nowadays have a beauty parade every time they do a new transaction. They go round and see who’ll do it more cheaply. If [Sir Alan] thinks you’re providing him with a good service, he’ll come back.”

Sugar was born into the rag trade. After all, his father, an East End tailor, had the contacts. And the local garment factory was a good, regular employer. But life didn’t work out like that. While he was still at school, the local greengrocers offered to pay him to boil beetroot in a baby’s bath. It meant a 6am start, but the 11-year-old liked the extra pocket money. Then he moved up to making ginger beer – and repackaging rolls of black-and-white film. By the time he left school, Sugar was earning more than his father.

His first proper commercial venture – selling car aerials to vehicle accessory shops – was a £100 start-up. That was the business plan for 1. a Mini van, 2. third-party insurance and 3. £42 worth of stock. The venture was a success. “But I was never going to be a Rabbi or a priest, put it that way” says Sugar. “I was a salesman. And salesmen sail close to the wind. But I’m an East End trader. And that means – speak to the people I do business with – you don’t need any contracts from me. If I say ‘It’s done’, it’s done.”

As the profits grew, Sugar expanded into audio equipment. And, at the age of 21, he set up Amstrad. “My culture has always been one of producing products which are packed with specification,” says Sugar, “but which are priced at a level most people can afford. The mass market. One’s got to be realistic about where Amstrad sits in the market. It’s not Bang and Olufson. It’s the truck-driver-and-his-wife end of the market. By using technology, I’ve brought products to people who would not normally been able to afford them.”

Sugar hurried along the British consumer electronics revolution. But maybe, sometimes, hurried it along a little too quickly. The story goes that the button on his stereo unit marked “Noise Reduction” wasn’t actually connected to anything. “Rubbish” says Sugar. But he admits it wasn’t as sophisticated as Dolby, which reduced hiss but left in the triangle player. “My way was much easier” he says. “A capacitor straight across the output which shut off any frequency beyond 10,000khz. It got rid of the 15,000 khz hiss, but I’m afraid I lost the triangle player.”

Amstrad became a household name when Sugar moved into personal computers. “They did exist,” says Sugar, “but they were £4,000 a time. I made a commercial version for £400. ‘Let’s get rid of the typewriters folks, and we’ll have one of these’. No-one else had the balls to do that. IBM didn’t have the balls. They would have said ‘It’s not industrial quality’. Sorry, but that’s not the point. Think of the painfulness of typing. A mistake? Oh shit. The whole page has to be redone. Cut and pasting? Deleting? Spell-checking? It changed the way people do things.”

Not for long. The hard drive controllers in the PC2000 simply didn’t work, and the series had to be withdrawn. It was a disaster. The court awarded Amstrad more than £57.5 million pounds in compensation, but that was poor recompense considering the damage that had been done to the Amstrad name. And the rumours that Amstrad PCs were prone to overheating didn’t help. It would have been enough to close down other companies. But Sugar was already setting his sights on the satellite TV revolution, and a growing market for set-top boxes.

After 25 years of business, Sugar was also looking elsewhere for his excitement. Which is why he took the job of Chairman of Tottenham Hotspur FC. “It certainly wasn’t about a love of the game” he says. “It was the old blue and reds. We were blues. And someone else was reds. You supported your football team. Taking the Spurs job was all about that. And thinking that I was going to have a bit of excitement. I thought ‘Yeah, I’ll diversify, see what this football is all about, and at the same time rescue the family club from dire straights’.”

His mistake was to make a profit. “Football is about the only industry in the world where it’s embarrassing to make money” says Sugar. The fans saw him as a money man – a business sort, trying to bring buy-low sell-high to football. They wanted him to invest in more players, even if it meant getting the club into debt. “Sorry” says Sugar. “What can I say, but I touch things and people say they turn to gold. Sorry. It’s a natural instinct. Sorry. I had to apologise that the club actually started to make a profit. Sorry. We should have been doing our bollocks like everyone else. Sorry.”

Tottenham’s first Premier League season ended with an unremarkable mid-table finish, and the club’s manager, Terry Venables, was removed from the board after an acrimonious legal dispute. “I remember the scenes at court” says Hewer. “We had to bundle [Alan] into a lift and get him out the back door because there were all these hooligans. Spitting at him. Shouting a lot of anti-semitic nonsense. Whether they came from the far right, I don’t know. But we filmed them, secretly, and gave the footage to the police.”

Amstrad is unmistakably his home. In the reception of the Brentwood HQ, he has a dedicated lift that takes him straight to his tenth-floor office. And, in his big, grey boardroom (it’s clean, you understand, but terribly grey) his chair is bigger than anybody elses. It is Sugar’s kingdom. And where he comes to generate The Big Idea. “With the exception of some products in the audio range,” he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever delegated the responsibility of dreaming up a product. What I call the key, blockbuster products have all been down to me.”

But Amstrad isn’t what it was. “It was a giant company up until 1997” says Sugar, “Then we said ‘The company’s actually worth £600-700 million, here’s £300million in readies. Bang, we’re going to give that back to you the shareholders’. I got quite a bit of that because I had 35 % [of the company] at the time. Then we sold off the mobile phone company, and broke off the computer side of the business and formed Viglen, which is another company I own, leaving Amstrad as a small telecoms satellite receiver company.”

But that’s the thing about technology companies – big or small: there is always something new to make. “I’ve lived through the steam-driven fat cartridge Philips VCR when it first came on the market” says Sugar. “It had an analogue clock on it – it was a £1,400 Jodrell Bank lump of equipment. The first video machine I produced was £700. Now they’re £49.99. But who wants one? That’s the fascination of this industry. We don’t go to work because we have to. We go to work because of the excitement of developing a new product.”

That excitement, sometimes, gets the better of him. Like the way he has staked his personal reputation on the Amstrad e-m@iler. This odd little machine – designed to move Amstrad forward – was, essentially, a souped-up telephone with a screen for emailing. But the third version of the machine, with a colour screen, was badly delayed, and launched at almost the same price as an all-singing, all-dancing laptop. It stopped production around Christmas. But Sugar is refusing to drop it. He promises a fourth version by the end of the year.

Sugar’s faith in the e-m@iler won’t be shaken. He believes that, in the future, everyone will need a screen to bring data into their home. An electronic Yellow Pages, if you like. “You might argue ‘Well, isn’t that a PC?’. Well, no. Because a PC is a cumbersome bloody thing. You’ve got to press a button, wait for it to boot up, fart a couple of times and then the hard drive kicks in. Then you’ve got to do some key stroke to get to the programme you want. Then you’ve got to go to www blah blah blah. The e-m@iler will be simpler.”

Sugar’s single-mindedness is a strength – if Amstrad is doing the business. But, since the company has been struggling of late, analysts have talked of it as a weakness. He has been Chairman and the Chief Executive of Amstrad since the former CEO resigned in October 2001. Which isn’t considered best practice. And he has a son on the board, even though he sold his shares in November. The balance of power and authority in Amstrad seems to have disappeared. And, theoretically, Sugar has too much control.

PIRC took it upon themselves to voice their concerns. “Sir Alan serves as the chairman/chief executive, with a further four executives sitting on the board, including his son. In addition there are two nonexecutives, only one of whom we consider to be independent. The potential risks of a concentration of power at the head of the company and the lack of independent representation on the board are well known. As a result we are recommending opposition to the re- election of Sir Alan to the post of chairman-chief executive.”

The Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS) added to the mounting criticism in November last year by awarding Amstrad the wooden spoon for the worst Annual General Meeting of 2005. “Amstrad’s Chairman Sir Alan Sugar did not attend because he was ‘away on business’,” said Ian Jones, Head of Corporate Governance at CIS. “For a PLC, what more important business can there be than the annual shareholders’ meeting? And to make things even worse, the deputy chairman was also away on business.”

“First up, we don’t have a deputy chairman” says Sugar. “But I think it was the first time in 25 years that I couldn’t make an AGM. The AGM has its date set in concrete – three or four months in advance. It has to be set because it gets printed in the annual report that goes out. And something just came up. But I don’t have to be at the AGM. It’s just some little stupid little idiot writing stories again. And he can go and fuck himself. He can stick his bloody share certificate right where the sun don’t shine as far as I’m concerned.”

Amstrad’s half-yearly results in December were better than the City expected. But the company left itself with over £40million of cash. That’s 25% of the market capitalisation. Analysts suggest that Sugar is keeping Amstrad cash-rich because he’s lost the hunger. He is getting ready for retirement. Sugar dismisses the idea out of hand. “I can’t just go out and spend the cash to keep people happy” he says. “I tell you, if there’s a deal to be done, I’ll be the first one to do it. You can be bloody sure of that.”

There is a genuine entrepreneurial streak about Amstrad – and Alan Michael Sugar. Unlike Sinclair and Dyson, Sugar may still be one of the first UK innovators to come up with not one but two world-beating products. “Having said that, we’re in a fashion industry whether we like it or not” says Sugar. “And things change.” Sugar will do his best to change more quickly. Like he says, “I can tell you where every screw, and every nut, and every bolt is in my company. I know everything [in my business]. Never ever underestimate me.”