It is an amazing milestone

LORD Alan Sugar can't believe it's been 20 years since he started inviting the hungriest hopefuls of the business world into The Apprentice boardroom.

- BY YOLANTHE FAWEHINMI

Capable aides: Lord Sugar gets some help from Tim and Baroness Brady

The hit BBC1 show sees candidates compete in a series of challenges and tasks set by the 78-year-old tycoon to prove themselves worthy of entering into a 50/50 business with him and receiving his £250,000 investment.

They do this under the eagle-eyed gaze of Lord Sugar's two trusted business associates and aides, Baroness Karren Brady and Tim Campbell, who won the first series in 2005.

"It is an amazing milestone," says Lord Sugar, of the show's 20th anniversary. "When we started recording this series, you think to yourself, 'Wow, this is 20 years now. What's amazing, of course, is Tim Campbell is now one of my advisors, and he was the one that won it in the very first series, so it's full circle, in a great way," adds the entrepreneur who founded his biggest business venture, consumer electronics company, Amstrad, in 1968.

"The programme itself brings in a new audience every year, because 20 years ago, I had nine-year-olds watching it who are now 29. And the new generation of 16-year-olds are coming in and loving it.

"So the audience is growing. The audience is holding up, and that's why the BBC keeps doing it."

The original Apprentice format would see the winner get a £100,000-a-year job working for Lord Sugar, but it was changed in series seven so the victor would instead secure the mogul as a business partner.