What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (101 page)

Being virtually out of action for over two years, unable to exercise, my weight crept up by a couple of stones, the type of thing you don't really notice yourself, apart from your clothes getting a bit tight. However, when you see yourself on TV and in the newspapers, you realise you're ballooning up.

Fortunately, the second operation seemed to have fixed the groin. I remember joking with Gilmore when I wrote out his cheque that I'd deliberately make the words differ from the figures, so that when the bank returned it to him, he'd have to phone me and say, 'The cheque came back,' to which I'd reply, 'Yeah, so did my fucking groin.'

He had screwed up the first time round. The second time round, he removed a foreign body and proudly presented it to me in a small plastic container. It was allegedly a 'holding stitch that had gone wrong and had attracted some kind of a cyst around it. I told him that in
my
business, if I didn't fix something properly the first time, I wouldn't have the audacity to charge again. He laughed, but of course it fell on deaf ears.

*

Due to the perceived success of the Comic Relief version of
The Celebrity Apprentice,
the following year we did one in aid of Sports Relief. The message about me being unhappy with Patrick Uden's involvement had got through to the BBC and Talkback and, thankfully, this time Michele and her crew were responsible for the production. The girls' team of Clare Balding, Lisa Snowdon, Jacqueline Gold, Kirstie Allsopp and Louise Redknapp took on the boys' team of Phil Tufnell, the MP Lembit Opik, Kelvin MacKenzie, Hardeep Singh Kohli and Nick Hancock.

In the opening boardroom scene, I tried to make the candidates feel at home with a few soft jokes which went down quite well - with the exception of one to Hardeep Singh Kohli. He ended up throwing his toys out of the pram when I asked him if he was related to some customers I had in the early
days, the Kohlis, who had a shop in Green Street near West Ham Football Club. I explained that the mother of the family took a liking to me and used to give me some of her chapatis. I told him that after I ate them, they would have a special effect on me when I visited my other customers that day and I could understand why the West Ham song was 'I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles'. I went on to ask why, when he appeared in the celebrity chef show, he didn't cook them and blow away the other contestants. I know it sounds like another lead-balloon joke when you read it on paper - and maybe there's a lesson to be learned here: don't try to be funny in front of professional comedians - but he took exception to this and claimed he was going to walk off the set, accusing me of a racist remark. No one else could see how my remark was racist, but Michele got into a panic. I got hold of him after filming and told him he was being stupid. How could he even
think
that was racist? I'm the last person on this planet to make racist remarks. I told him, 'I'm Jewish, you bloody idiot!' He calmed down and agreed to carry on. He and Kelvin MacKenzie locked horns throughout the show and had some big boardroom bust-ups. At one point, Kohli accused Kelvin of comparing him to Hitler.

The show turned out great, much better than the previous year's - it was very funny. The girls wiped the floor with the boys in a great victory. As the boys' team lost, I had to find a culprit. Complaints about Kohli's performance by the others boxed me into a corner and I fired him. It was a tough thing to do, considering his tantrums, but the right person was fired on the day. After the show, I spoke to Adrian Chiles, who worked with Kohli on his popular programme
The One Show.
He told me Kohli was very sensitive and always made a fuss over the smallest of things.

Funny how things turn out. Kohli accepted a six-month suspension from
The One Show
in July 2009 over some alleged misbehaviour. The person in question never made a formal complaint, but it seemed
The One Show's
management took the matter very seriously. Kohli was quoted as saying, 'Nobody has accused me of sexual harassment. I recognise I overstepped the mark and have apologised unreservedly.'

Quite frankly, dealing with these egos in the celebrity show was starting to become a headache. We did one more show for Comic Relief the following year and the off-camera arguments - particularly among the girls' team, headed by businesswoman Michelle Mone who rowed with Patsy Palmer (Bianca from
EastEnders)
- were ridiculous. Michele Kurland and the excellent producer Colm Martin were pulling their hair out. The situation was compounded by the fact that Emma Freud poked her nose into my decision on the losing team, which comprised Jonathan Ross, Alan Carr, Jack Dee, Gok Wan and Gerald
Ratner. After I sent them out of the boardroom, she wound them up by saying they shouldn't have lost. While the general spirit of the show was meant to be light-hearted, the team, having now been wound up by Freud, were acting in a very belligerent manner. At one point, I thought to myself, 'Here I am doing this for charity, giving up my time after a gruelling twelve weeks filming the real series, and all I'm getting is a load of stick from these people.' It was only my professionalism and the intervention of Colm (who was frustrated watching this near sabotage) that stopped me from getting up and walking out. It was a bloody joke. The production team was fuming because for a moment it looked as though all their hard work in arranging the task and filming it had been scuppered. Thanks to Nick, the situation was calmed down and in the end we managed to round off the final scene and it made a good show.

Afterwards, I went to the studio cafe, where Emma Freud was sitting with her partner Richard Curtis, and tore her off a strip. I told the pair of them that what she'd done was a cardinal sin in TV production terms and that she should have known better than to poke her nose in. I lost it a bit and asked her if she would storm into an operating theatre and interfere with the surgeon if one of her children were being operated on. She denied interfering, but I advised her to be careful what she was denying, as she'd forgotten that all the celebrities' microphones had been on when she spoke to them and we'd heard every word up in the production gallery. Emma couldn't argue with that. Shades of Gordon Brown during the 2010 election campaign, when a microphone he used when meeting a member of the public was left on after he finished talking to her. The TV company continued recording Gordon and transmitted him calling the person a bigot.

I made it clear this was the last time I was going to do any celebrity versions of
The Apprentice.
I didn't need the aggravation of all the big egos flying around.

*

Back at Amstrad, the writing was on the wall. It was getting even tougher supplying BSkyB and there were stories that Samsung, the giant Korean manufacturer, was after their business. There was also talk of new HD (high-definition) products being the way forward but, as ever, BSkyB's engineering division had excluded us. We were treated as the poor relations, so to speak. BSkyB's new HD product was developed by Thomson, but they were also considering a special PVR that incorporated four tuners, effectively two Sky+ boxes in one, which would enable the user to have full Sky+ in different rooms. I poked my nose in again and managed to get us a contract to develop
this new dual Sky+ box based on a low-price calculation I'd worked out with Ian Saward.

I had spent my whole life hustling in the electronics industry and was starting to lose my heart for the fight. As I've mentioned, the people I was doing business with had changed; they were oblivious to Amstrad's part in their history. Also, methods of negotiation had changed from the days when I used to sit round a table with Stanley Kalms or Sam Chisholm and hammer out a deal. Everything was becoming far more complex and political.

It was clear to me that Amstrad would eventually be completely excluded from BSkyB's plans. This was compounded by the fact that complaints had been lodged with the European Community about the importation of set-top boxes from the Far East (which up until then had been duty-free) with demands that they should now have duty applied to them at the rate of 14 per cent. This, if imposed, would make us uncompetitive. The complaints were stimulated by one of our former sub-contractors on set-top boxes, Technosat, a manufacturer established in old East Germany. They got the hump when we decided to take the work away and make the stuff in China and they went on a crusade, complaining to the European Community and getting the attention of some high-level people in Brussels.

Thomson and Pace, our competitors, were making stuff in Hungary, so it didn't bother them, though producing units in Hungary was a false economy itself, because assembly costs were much higher, yet the quality was lower than we were achieving in China. On top of that, certain key components still had to be imported from the Far East and duty had to be paid on them.

The success of Amstrad stemmed from using a reliable sub-contractor, Picotronics in China, for years. Once you get a smoothly running production line, all you need to do is concentrate on reducing the bill of materials, hence we were able to make good margins of around PS20m per year on set-top boxes.

Bigshots Pace had paraded themselves as the great technological geniuses in set-top boxes, yet they were continually losing money or just about scraping through. They'd embarked on trying to supply the American market and had encountered massive delays. When their product was finally ready to ship to the USA, it was vastly overpriced and so they had to reduce their price dramatically. Their cash pile had virtually gone, since they'd stockpiled the entire inventory.

Large companies like Samsung don't see making a profit as important. When you have fully integrated organisations such as these, which have other divisions making electronic components, then as far as they're concerned,
orders for finished products are just icing on the cake. After all, the other divisions are making a big profit supplying components for the product, so extra profit on finished goods is not paramount. To a certain extent, Thomson was the same, as they still had a lot of interests in microchip manufacturing. Amstrad, of course, didn't make components. Not only did we have to buy them, in some cases we bought them from Samsung- and Thomson-owned organisations.

Even though we were fighting for orders all the time, Amstrad was still a good and profitable company. However, I knew there was only one way to safeguard its future. I arranged a meeting with James Murdoch and put a proposition to him, laying my cards on the table. I told him that most of our PS20m profit was coming from BSkyB. If, hypothetically, BSkyB were to take over Amstrad, all that margin would flow straight through to
him
and there'd also be a great opportunity for BSkyB to eventually place all their orders with Amstrad and ultimately reduce their price. I finished off by saying, 'I'm now sixty years old. I've got a loyal nucleus of around a hundred people who rely on me to provide them with employment. They're a great team of people, but the burden of looking after them for evermore is starting to worry me.'

Then I pulled out what I considered my final trump card. I said that while I was fully aware that he was in charge of the business, he just might want to run the idea past his dad and pass him a message that I wanted to bow out gracefully from the electronics business. I was keen to emphasise that I wanted a win-win situation for my staff and, from a commercial point of view, BSkyB would eventually save a fortune on set-top box procurement. If there were any loyalty left in this world, Rupert would understand my position.

From every angle I looked at it, it was a great idea, but to be perfectly frank I didn't feel confident anything would come of it. To my surprise, James called me back a couple of days later to say they were interested and would like to take it a little further. Then he added that he would be discussing it in confidence with the senior executives at BSkyB, to see whether they thought it was a good idea. When I heard this, I thought it would be the kiss of death for the deal.

Robin Crossley was a technical consultant for BSkyB. He'd been there a long time and was quite friendly with me - he was about the only one there who remembered my involvement in the early days. Robin called me to discuss the matter and we had a good chat. He was a straightforward kind of fellow and after a while I felt he was onside. He told me of some of the disasters occurring with other manufacturers. This was quite heart-warming
because up till then no one at BSkyB had ever mentioned problems with the other makers. Sometimes we'd find out on the grapevine when, for example, Pace shipped a whole load of set-top boxes containing a faulty component and had to rework them all, or had let them down badly on deliveries. I prided myself that Amstrad was always bang on time. Anyway, Robin got the rationale behind BSkyB taking over Amstrad and told me he'd recommend it as 'not being a bad idea'.

I don't know to this day whether this was a bit of internal play-acting on James Murdoch's part or whether Rupert had told him do it, but this process was repeated a few times over until all his senior staff had discussed the idea with me. I had several conversations explaining the rationale to people like Brian Sullivan, the marketing director, and Alun Webber, the chief technology man.

Webber saw the logic of it, but was concerned about relying on just one factory. 'What would happen if the factory burnt down?' was the argument. I explained a very simple principle in electronic manufacturing. While some of the big companies used two manufacturers in their supply chain, it was all academic because both manufacturers used the same components. So the problem was
not
if my factory burnt down; the problem would be if one of the suppliers of a key component in the set-top box was suddenly unable to supply it, then
every
factory would shut down. In fact, the unavailability of a component costing just 10p could stop all the factories making finished products. This was something the Harvard Business School manual hadn't taught them. They'd seen the big picture of using two manufacturers as insurance for continuity of supply, but had completely ignored the fact that both needed customised components unique to BSkyB! The fact is, if they wanted to duplicate
anything,
it should be the component supplier, not the final assembly plant.