What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (92 page)

'Well, Alan, we've done well to get where we have so far - people have been great - but we're miles away from commissioning a builder.'

'How much do you need to finish the project off?'

'Loads - we need at least another two to three million to do it.'

'Two to three million? Okay, well, now you've got it!'

'What? We've got it? What do you mean, Alan?'

'I mean -
you've got it.
I'll give you the two million and now we'll get on with bringing the Empire back to life.'

'I don't understand, Alan. I'm in shock!'

'Look, mate, this might not mean anything to you, but I've been involved with Tottenham Hotspur for the past ten years. I don't know if you know anything about football, but I rescued the club from near extinction. Tottenham is also a great institution - I was a fan as a kid and I kind of did it for old times' sake. Anyway, to cut a long story, I got a load of stick, so I sold out.'

'Hold on, Alan, I may be in the entertainment industry, but I haven't been living on Mars.
Everyone
knows the flak you've taken over Tottenham, but what's that got to do with the Empire?'

'Well, it's as simple as this, Griff. The Spurs fans' loss will be Hackney's gain. I made some money selling Spurs and I want to throw some into helping the Empire and the people of Hackney. So let's get on with it.'

'I'm flabbergasted, Alan, you've blown me away, I don't know what to say.
After years of campaigning and fund-raising, it's finally going to be a reality. It's fantastic!'

A few days later, a big sign went up on the front hoardings of the theatre: 'THANK YOU, SIR ALAN, FOR SAVING THE EMPIRE'.

The issue was picked up by the media, including one of the serial hecklers of me while I was at Spurs, freelance journalist Matthew Norman. Being Jewish
and
a Spurs fan, he felt doubly qualified to comment on me and thought he would have a last swipe. In the past, he'd written sarcastic articles which included allegations that I referred to some of Spurs' black players using a nasty Yiddish expression. He also said I only bought the club to make my father happy on his death bed. All crap. Of course, my lawyers kicked his arse and the papers in question coughed up loads for Great Ormond Street. This time, he suggested that my donation to the Hackney Empire had nothing to do with any philanthropic thoughts, but was a way of me saving tax. The thick prick couldn't even get that right - there were no tax-saving implications at all.

I will finish where I started on this football thing. I'll say it again: I wasted ten years trying to do something great for that football club. Yes, I put Tottenham into a sound financial position, but as far as performance on the pitch was concerned, we did nothing.

Amstrad suffered the most. In those ten years I don't know what I could have turned my hand to, but I'm sure I would have turned my hand to
something
- and I'm absolutely sure the fortunes of Amstrad would have been far better. In fact, after I was free of football and had refocused on New Amstrad, we
did
see our fortunes rise again - and perhaps that tells you something about me.

Am I a one-trick pony? Can I only concentrate on one thing at a time? I guess the answer to that must be yes. It is perhaps because I have to be in
total
control and understand everything about everything - every last nut and bolt.

Football took its toll on me. People say that in the period I was involved in football, I lost my sense of humour - 'What happened to the Alan who used to make us laugh?' The Alan who used to make them laugh went into protective mode. He assumed that everybody who spoke to him was sniping; he looked for the ulterior motive behind every question put to him.

I felt an immediate sense of relief when I left Spurs. For one, the media stopped mentioning me, which was great. I know that Ann and the family were glad that I was able to relax a bit, once all the stress of the constant
fire-fighting was over. But it's true to say that the scars remain and to this day I still find it hard to shrug off the feeling that every question has an ulterior motive; I still remain sceptical and untrusting of new people I meet. I have never regained the light-hearted sense of humour I had as a younger man - it's really now just dry sarcasm.

To be fair, these days when I visit the club on match day and take up my seat in the directors' box to watch the team, I come across passionate Spurs fans who still thank me for putting the club on a sound financial footing. There is a certain smugness about some Spurs fans these days, knowing that out of all the Premiership clubs Spurs is one of the most financially stable and well run. In recent times we have seen great clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United turned into a financial mess by their foreign owners. We've also seen irresponsible financial management resulting in clubs like Leeds United being relegated from the Premier League after going into administration and now trying to claw their way back from two divisions below, and, more recently, Portsmouth facing the same struggle.

Daniel Levy, the current chairman, has continued to run Spurs based on the solid foundations I implemented in my reign and has managed to balance competing in the transfer market with keeping the club well insulated from financial danger while turning Spurs into a force to be respected on the pitch. So I guess I can look back and say that I am happy I took the club from the verge of extinction and helped it to move forward to the position it is in today - a club on the verge of success.

On another positive note, my daughter Louise got married to Mark Baron on 5 August 2001. Mark was once a member of the boy band Another Level and had also been brought up in Chigwell. The wedding was a grand affair in the grounds of Bramstons. The ceremony and party were held in a massive marquee and, once again, Simon's sons Nathan and Matthew were page boys. We also had a new addition to the family, Daniel and Michaela's firstborn son, Alex. There were some funny pictures of Alex taken on the day. Michaela, being a typical Jewish mother, was always worried that her baby boy was hungry and the pictures showed little Alex wasn't so little - she had chubbed him up good and proper.

As usual, all our family and friends were at the wedding, as well as people from Amstrad and some from the world of football. In his speech, Mark joked that when he asked me for my daughter's hand in marriage, he saw a look of relief on my face that he'd only seen once before - and that was when I'd finally sold Spurs to Daniel Levy!

Hired on
The Apprentice
!

2002-6

While I was preoccupied with football, Amstrad's relationship with BSkyB was going down the pan. By the time I came back to Amstrad, I found we'd lost our position as BSkyB's main supplier. Instead, Pace had got their feet well and truly under the table, aided and abetted by their new managing director, Malcolm Miller, who had joined them from Sega. To make matters worse, there was talk of a change in technology from analogue to digital and none of our engineering people had any experience of digital satellite receivers.

The BSkyB situation had been deteriorating for some time. While I was involved with Spurs, I left it to other people to continue the relationship. The last I'd heard, BSkyB had reverted to selling equipment through retailers (and paying them a commission for signing customers up) with Amstrad supplying the retailers. However, unbeknown to me, BSkyB had exhausted that initiative and had decided once again that they would sell direct and arrange the installations themselves, buying the equipment directly from manufacturers. The only problem was, they weren't buying it from us!

Sam Chisholm had been replaced by a new guy, Mark Booth, and when I looked at Sky's management team it was unrecognisable. A new wave of people had been brought in on the marketing side, younger people who knew nothing of the history between Rupert Murdoch and me, between Sky and Amstrad. It was quite an amazing phenomenon. When I tried explaining to this new wave of people who I was and what Amstrad and Sky had done in the past, they couldn't have cared less. It didn't occur to them that the existence of BSkyB - and their very jobs - was largely down to Amstrad. That was all history now.

You can imagine my frustration when confronted with this attitude. Considering what I'd been through with Rupert Murdoch and Sam Chisholm in establishing Sky over the years, I thought the way I was treated by this new wave of individuals was disgusting. Simon, our sales director, told me, 'They're not interested in listening to stories from the past - we're treated just like any supplier. They talk about Samsung, Thomson, Pace and Amstrad in the same breath - there's no special relationship going on here any more.'

I called Mark Booth. When Mark took the job, one of the first things he did was meet up with me to have a recap on the past. At the time, he was quite sympathetic to my feelings; now, however, he told me that things had to be handled in 'a more professional way'. It wasn't as dynamic as the old times, when I could get on the phone to Chisholm and they'd give us an order. They'd now put in layers of management whom he could
not
be seen to undermine. This was very much the case in the technical department and these people now had a big say. Some of the technical staff taken on in this new regime were ex-Pace employees who were still very pally with the Pace organisation. It appeared to me that the new regime certainly had a tendency to support and side with Pace. They also enjoyed the hospitality Pace dished out, not to mention flying off to every electronics fair in the world for no reason at all. These jobsworths would use any opportunity to slope off when there was a good junket going. They probably justified it on the basis that they had very important business to discuss with their suppliers, including Pace, who of course would be at every exhibition. The fact that they may have seen and spoken to them the week before made no difference!

There's a lesson to learn here. When you are faced with the situation I was, where you actually
know
the top man, what you imagine to be 'playing your trump card' turns out to be administering the kiss of death. You might speak to the boss and try to influence him to override his lower-level management, and this may work once, but after that you've made enemies for life with those managers. Believe me, I tried it. It got to a stage where it was like pouring oil on the fire. The more my people alluded to 'Sir Alan's great relationship with Rupert Murdoch, the more difficult these people would be, particularly those in the technical department. And the commercial people would find it very easy to cite the technical department as being the ones holding everything up. Unfortunately, it took me a while to realise this new wave of people were a different breed and that my intervention wasn't getting us anywhere.

I decided the best thing was for Simon to go along and play the game with BSkyB's new management, and Ian Saward to join the game with his
engineers on the technical side. I'd let
them
be the front men, while keeping me fully informed.

The problem with BSkyB in those days was a classic example of a company which - how can I put it? - was simply making too much money! There were endless divisions, all with executive heads of department. Each and every time some marketing brain surgeon came up with an idea, a new division was formed or a new feature was incorporated on the product or a new method of procurement was introduced.

One example was the e-auction. Simon explained that we were going to be asked to tender for an order for digital set-top boxes, but this tender was going to be conducted on the internet, the idea being that all the manufacturers go online at the same time and start beating each other up. The BSkyB people would oversee the e-auction, like people watching a dogfight, baiting the manufacturers with comments like, 'Your price is still not good enough - someone else has come up with a better one.'

I'd never heard of anything like this before and told Simon it was absolutely ridiculous. Why not get on the phone to BSkyB's buyers and tell them that if they've got three suppliers, we'll just go along with the price they want to pay, as long as it's fair, and get a third of the orders? In truth, none of the manufacturers ever expected 100 per cent of the orders - we all understood that BSkyB needed three manufacturers to protect their supply chain. But Simon told me I was banging my head against a brick wall trying to reason with these people.

As the e-auction went on, Simon called me up and told me it was getting stupid. We were being prompted by BSkyB to reduce our price ridiculously. I told him to type in something derisive like, 'We're not playing this space invaders game any more. Goodnight. Call us when you get some common sense,' and we logged off.

Mark Booth had been moved on by then and the new CEO was Tony Ball. He also came to see me when he first got the job and tried to pick up some history. At top management level, I was still respected and a friend of the company. Tony Ball was a reasonable fellow, he spoke my language and wasn't a bullshitter in any way, shape or form. I called him and went straight for the jugular, telling him this new wave of people and their mad ideas were a total and absolute joke. I couldn't stand by any more, sitting there on the periphery, being treated as if we were a piece of shit with all this e-auction bollocks.

I said to him, 'The place is being run by a bunch of Harvard Business School graduates. In the meantime, your so-called best pals, the ones who
helped your boss start this business, are being kicked to one side, being asked to piss about playing space invaders with this new cyber-bid scheme.'