Alas Sugar and Jones
Sir Alan Sugar teamed up with Griff Rhys Jones to save the Hackney Empire. Now they have reunited to lay on a fundraising extravaganza involving teams from the Square Mile.
Sir Alan Sugar and Griff Rhys Jones are an unlikely double act. One left school at 16 and, following a short stint as a civil servant, went into business on his own and, after making his first fortune as Europe’s biggest computer manufacturer in the 1980s, is now worth more than £700m. The other went to Cambridge University to study English, served his comic acting apprenticeship with the Cambridge Footlights Revue, and went on to become a television star through programmes such as Not The Nine O’Clock News, Alas Smith and Jones and Wilt.
What they do have in common is a love for a grand Edwardian theatre in one of London’s poorest boroughs, the Hackney Empire.
Sir Alan has a soft spot for the place because he grew up locally, while Rhys Jones sees it as one of the great London venues. Between them they played central roles in the campaign to return it to its former glory.
It is a restoration that has been achieved at a price, however, a price that is still in the process of being paid. Hence the Sir Alan Sugar Challenge, an innovative fundraising exercise, which involves nine resourceful teams from City companies and institutions competing to raise cash to make a dent in the Empire’s overdraft. And CityA.M. has pitched in as the venture’s official media partner.
The teams will assemble at the Empire tomorrow for a training session from the Naked Apes, a consultancy that uses techniques employed by stand-up comics to make people more entertaining and persuasive. In the evening they will be joined by their supporters for a grand auction hosted by Sir Alan in which they will bid for a venue in which to stage their events.
The organisational genius behind the whole process is Rhys Jones, whose involvement stretches back to the day he was “ambushed” by Roland Muldoon and Simon Thomsett (the Empire’s artistic director and general manager respectively) in a Richmond cafe in 1997.
At the time, the theatre was in desperate need of refurbishment and the pair needed someone to front a money-raising push.
Before they met their target, they had written to him as a patron of the Empire to ask him to become chairman of its fundraising appeal.
Rhys Jones turned to a friend for advice on whether to accept and was told that he wasn’t the right sort of person for such a role. What they really needed was a retired politician, he said.
But as the man who presents Restoration for the BBC admits: “I’ve never been able to say no to anyone”.
Rhys Jones was appearing in the Ben Travers play Plunder at the Richmond Theatre at the time and met Muldoon and Thomsett in the break between the matinee and the evening performance.
“I said, ‘Oh, all right’, says Rhys Jones, sitting at the kitchen table of his impressively proportioned home on Fitzroy Square.
“I assumed it would mean I had my face on the brochure because I didn’t know what a lottery fund appeal involved. The lottery appeared to have a lot of money available at the time and I assumed it would be buggin’s turn. I assumed we would be an absolute shoo-in because I thought: ‘the Hackney Empire, what a great thing’.”
As it turned out the lottery fund’s coffers were empty, and the Empire’s appeal was rejected.
“It had been turned into a slush fund for the government and every time the Dome needed money, it got a handout to fund things such as colossal ad budgets,” he recalls, with a slight trace of bitterness.
“At the same time, the Empire was denied money because the fund was not confident we could raise matching funds.”
And so Rhys Jones and his colleagues at the Empire embarked on an exhausting slog of phone calls and meetings with potential donors. And many of their targets were in the nearby Square Mile.
“I used to go in at 9am to see people who were exactly like the John Cleese character in the merchant banker sketch,” he says. “They would say: ‘What’s in it for us?’
“It’s a great myth that there is all this corporate money washing around. I went too see one man who I’d read in the newspaper the day before had just been paid an enormous bonus. He called in the charity person, who was slightly miffed that I’d got that far without consulting him, and said something along the lines of how they had built the Jubilee Bridge, cured world poverty and still had change out of £50,000.”
“On the other hand Bloomberg were the most brilliant help. They came in with £30,000 a year that paid for our office and that raised the £15m that paid for the project.”
But the real star at this stage was Sir Alan Sugar. He was born in Hackney and went to the borough’s Brook House School but — most poignant of all — he used to buy fish and chips from a shop next door to the Empire.
He weighed in with two hefty donations totalling £1.3m in late 2000 and early 2001. These helped persuade the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council to pitch in too and, with the renovation budget in place, the theatre was closed and the builders moved in.
Unfortunately, the construction company involved had clearly never troubled the judges at the Builder of the Year awards. As Rhys Jones put it in Unfinished Masterpiece, his short satirical history of the Empire:
“Dismayed by the news that the whole place had been built in 38 weeks, builders decide to take at least two years to make a few changes. They also underwent 37 changes of management during their abortive tenure as the Empire’s builders, according to Rhys Jones, and — when they went bust in July 2003 — some of the money due to subcontractors disappeared with them. This left the Empire with a shortfall of £4m and, while £800,000 of that remains outstanding, the work was completed in time for the theatre to reopen in 2004.
“The work is finished and it’s an extraordinarily beautiful place,” says Rhys Jones. “People should go if only to see the beautiful interior. From the outside, it’s a rather ordinary Edwardian terracotta building but inside it’s a real pleasure palace.”
For his part, Sir Alan is delighted with the result. “Having grown up in the Hackney area, I’ve always had an affinity with The Hackney Empire,” he tells CityA.M., “and I am delighted that the venue has now been restored to its former glory.
“Over the past few years I’ve assisted where I can, to ensure that the Empire keeps its doors open and it was a great honour to officially open the renovated complex in September last year.”
The 1,500-seat theatre now hosts around 100 different acts a year, from Harry Hill and The Miss African Caribbean Queen Beauty Pageant to Jamaican farce played by the Blue Mountain Company and whirling dervishes from Turkey.
And a proportion of the repertoire is drawn from performers living in the local community.
It’s a turnaround of which Sir Alan has a right to feel intensely proud, and all that remains of Rhys Jones’s task is to clear the remainder of the debt.
As part of that last push, he conceived a competition involving City firms competing to raise cash. Not unnaturally, he turned to Sir Alan — by now riding high as presenter of The Apprentice — to front it.
“He’s the saviour of the whole project and I felt bad about asking him to get involved with this,” says Rhys Jones.
“When we talk about people making gestures and putting in money it doesn’t really tell the whole story. Alan has given us enough money to buy a great big house in the south of France.
“If you ask someone if they would rather have a Monet to hang on the wall or help this or that charity, most people would say they’d rather own the Monet. Giving a big lump of cash is a heart-stopping thing.”
Sir Alan was more than willing to lend his support. “When Griff asked me to get involved in this new fund-raising event, which will support the work the theatre does with young people,” he says, “I was only too happy to lend my name to the challenge and I look forward to seeing the teams in action on 20 October and the results of their fund-raising events.
”Best of luck to all the teams — it will be interesting to see who has the best business head and is the most successful at being both creative and entrepreneurial.”