Lord Alan Sugar is an accomplished businessman, best known as a television personality starring on the BBC programme ‘The Apprentice’ since 2005. Raised in Hackney with a low socio-economic background, Lord Sugar has an estimated net worth of £1.25 billion and renowned as a powerful figure within the business world – arguably stemming from his matter-of-fact wit. However, is this identity purely derived from his constructed linguistic choices which are carefully mediated through the manufactured context of the show on which he stars? Through an analysis of transcripts – one from a boardroom scene from series thirteen of ‘The Apprentice’ and the other from a day time television interview between 3 speakers – additionally, Sugar’s self-publicised language on his chosen social media platform of Twitter, I hope to analyse which linguistic features establish his powerful whilst generating humour for the television audience as the macro-purpose of the program is to entertain.
The individuals who compete against one another on ‘The Apprentice’ are referred to as “candidates” which is incongruent with the lexical field of television whereby the term ‘contestants’ better fits the style model of a gameshow convention such as this. The countable noun ‘candidates’ derives from the lexical field of business due to its denotation of being considered for a position, for example running in an election or applying for a job. This adds credibility to the program and Lord Sugar’s reputation as it connotes his respectability in the entrepreneurial world by distancing itself from reality show clichés. This also establishes a hierarchy of power due to the subordinate connotations of the countable noun ‘candidates’ and therefore the authoritative role of the employer adopted by Sugar. This idea is reinforced by deferential terms used by the contestants. Whereas there is the formal address “Lord Sugar” used by the other speakers for the purpose of appeasing him, Alan Sugar lowers his register with informal first names or derogatory colloquialisms such as “stupid” and the compounded adjective “control-freak” which further emphasises his superior identity by diverging from the other speakers. This aligns with Giles’ Accommodation Theory whereby our speech is adjusted to accommodate the other speakers to, in this case, diverge from other speakers by emphasising the difference in status and remove oneself from the group . Face threatening acts add to this divergence such as “Ok, I don’t want to hear anymore from anybody now ‘cause I’m gonna summarise” and “I’ve got two teams here… and they’re both rubbish” which serves to permanently cause damage to the ‘face’ (self-image) of the individual you are addressing- establishing the addressee as a subordinate of the speaker .
In contrast to this devised superior status, due to his background, Lord Sugar displays elements of Estuary English within his speech. Estuary English is a dialect and prestige form, associated with the South-East of England, coming into prominence in the 1980’s as a result of the up-market movement of cockney speech and the down-market trend towards ‘normal’ middle class speech by those who wished to distance themselves from the connotations of ‘the establishment’ that was associated by the previous usage of Received Pronunciation . Lord Sugar uses typical grammatical features of Estuary English; for example, confrontational tag questions like “I think it’s time we look at your creation, yeah?” (also helping to assert his authority by placing emphatic stress and going up in pitch on the affirmative ‘yeah’), non-standardisation like the double comparative “more deeper discussion”, omission of the /ly/ adverbial ending “too quick” and also generalised past tense use of the stative verb was “Michaela, was you happy with your pitch?”. The use of this non-standardised form of English in an otherwise formal context demonstrates Lord Sugar’s chosen identity of a self-made man who overcame his poor economic upbringing, now being in a more powerful position whilst showing the language of his past which is associated with the lower-class. This, therefore, adds weight to his achievements, creating more respect from both the contestants vying for his approval and the audience watching at home.
Lord Sugar, due to the pre-established hierarchy of the show, attempts to assert himself as a dominant figurehead by controlling the turn taking and flow of conversation within the suspense filled situation – fulfilling his role as the ‘presenter’. For instance, he continually creates topic shifts with interrogatives like “Michaela, you were project manager?” and “how did you split the teams?”. Lord Sugar’s responsibility within this scene is to ‘hold court’ and act as a mediator between the candidates before deciding which one should leave, contributing to the amount of interruptions and interrogatives he uses like the interruption “M: … I was a bit ner…// AS: I noticed that yeah.” Another interesting linguistic feature is his use of extended pauses –in the case of the following example following phatic feedback “mmm yeah (5). I think…” which yet again stems from the content. This interaction can be described as an ‘Unequal Encounter’ meaning that Lord Sugar’s language choices are created and constrained by the social power situation or power-type discourse that is accepted for this type of encounter – in this case, an employer and workers. In this way, Lord Sugar can afford to use extended pauses as he knows he will not be interrupted or challenged as he supersedes the other speakers in this ‘Unequal Encounter’. This can be illustrated by the length of the utterances used by Sugar and the length of interrupted speech; e.g. “Right, well you’re probably on cloud nine after winning your task so I’m gonna send you down the world’s tallest tunnel slide at The Orbit in Olympic Park so I’ll see you the next task ok?”.
Another role adopted by Lord Sugar in the context of this scene is to play upon his powerful identity by acting as an expert and judge who must determine which team impressed him the most. Simple evaluative adjectives used when discussing aspects of the challenge like “I think the use of the drone was quite good” where the adjective ‘good’ is preceded by the adverb of extent ‘quite’ which operates as a dilution to prevent the candidates to rise above their position in the hierarchy and the rudimentary adjective allows Lord Sugar to retain his professional image by limiting his emotive language. Moreover, in his summation of the challenge, patterning is created through repetition; “…Vitality that yours was the best. [Yeah erm] clearly the best.” In the second utterance, the adverb of affirmation ‘clearly’ had been emphatically stressed in delivery which serves the dual function of intensifying the success of team Vitality and thus distances the other team, moving them further down the hierarchy so the members will know they have a lot of work to do to impress him later on. Lord Sugar uses a parallelism “you go off, come back here” where emphatic stress is placed on the pair of imperatives ‘go’ and ‘come’ as well as the inclusion of the second person pronoun ‘you’, creating a personal address. In this way Lord Sugar is exercising instrumental power by exploiting the pre-established hierarchy of the board room and business context where he holds a managerial position and is able to command those below him on the hierarchy– adding to his powerful identity which stems from his occupation.
However, how does Lord Sugar’s dialectical choices and speech vary when removed from the context in which he holds the power but is instead supposed to relinquish his authority to [an] interviewer(s) who controls the flow of the conversation? On the eleventh of November, Lord Sugar appeared on a UK breakfast television show where he was interviewed by two other speakers – one being Piers Morgan, a broadcaster who he regularly has disagreements with on politics (in particular the recent election of Donald Trump to presidency of the United States of America) over Twitter.
Firstly, there are some differences; more non-fluency features are included in his speech like a string of hedging “look, I know, I know, perhaps”, a repair “you won Britain’s Got Talent – not – you’ve been on Britain’s Got Talent” and an abundance of fillers “and err I..”. As there is a lack of fluency within these examples, the speech may be interpreted as spontaneous (where Sugar lacks the authority normally associated with him). In this way, because his language within the boardroom is more fluent, one could infer that his language has some degree of preparation, scripting and post-production editing which is contrary to the spontaneity with which it’s set out to be. Therefore, this has implications for his identity as it suggests that his quick-witted, astute reputation has been constructed for the television audience and does not truly reflect his personality. In addition, whilst Lord Sugar does not resort to derogatory colloquialisms to assert dominance as he does in ‘The Apprentice’, he does use vocative referencing. He uses the informal first name in the phatic token “how are you Suzanna, alright?” when addressing one interviewer who has not confronted him and uses an informal personal address to create a personal relationship which serves to exclude Piers Morgan. Meanwhile, when addressing the other interviewer, he uses the formal last name “Morgan” which has connotations of a naughty school boy getting told off – humiliating Piers Morgan and raising the prestige of Sugar by establishing that has power in a similar manner to a teacher/parent. Sugar alters his language stylistics in order to diverge from Morgan and distance himself from him as described in Accommodation Theory . This can be seen through the positive style of speech when like the feedback and positive adjective “okay great” when Suzanna answers his question in comparison to the repeated negation “no, no” as well as the imperative “shut up” which is a challenging speaker move followed by an unvoiced sigh. Sugar is more negative in his speech towards Morgan to diverge from him and thus, converge with the other interviewer to paint Morgan as a villain and gain power by disparaging his conservational rival.
Despite the difference in context and the imbalance of power that is uncommon for Lord Sugar to be faced with, there are a lot of similarities in linguistic choices to those used in the boardroom of his own show in the way he makes challenging speaker moves. For instance, confrontational tag questions “…, alright?” and repetition of the interrogative “yes or no?” are seen once again. In the case of the second example, Lord Sugar constantly repeats the interrogative with a staccato delivery – even overlapping the interviewer who is meant to be in control according to the interview style model– in order to create a topic loop and control the flow of conversation in a way that he is accustomed to. For instance, an example of this is as follows, “PM: … just to remind everybody he said on this programme// AS: see what I mean, see what I mean, simple yes or no”. In this way, Sugar is demonstrating instrumental power by interrupting as he is supposedly not meant to be in control but attempting to regain power through these interruptions and topic shifts like “PM: absolutely// AS: you’re name dropping again are you?”. Moreover, a similar colloquial tone is featured in both of the transcripts in the form of derogatory insults towards the other speaker. Whereas he uses explicit adjectives like “control-freak” on ‘The Apprentice’, on the daytime interview he uses metaphoric language like the exclamatory noun phrase “pot kettle!” (preceded by a paralinguistic ‘cheer’) which is referencing the idiom ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ used to connote hypocrisy and accusing Piers Morgan of it. The effect of using a metaphoric idiom in place of a direct insult is that it softens the impact to ‘save the face’ of Lord Sugar as he wants to take the power in this interaction but not appear unnecessarily rude to a TV audience who may not know him and who’s favour he desires.
An example of a grammatical feature that Lord Sugar repeatedly uses within this interaction is patterning to add rhythm to his speech and therefore perpetuate his reputation as quick-witted. He builds an asyndetic list of parallelisms contrasting the first person pronoun ‘we’ and second person pronoun ‘you’ when listing Morgan’s achievements “you know Donald trump, we know that// we know you’ve been to Las Vegas many times, you’ve told us that also. You have a house in Beverly Hills, you’ve got that. You do life stories, you’ve got that”. This builds the scale of achievements and draws attention to their number. This, in turn, connotes the arrogance of Morgan as the public is well aware of his many achievements (because we can infer he has talked about them previously) and a secondary effect of this is it shows Lord Sugar to be humble as he doesn’t boast about his achievements. Another example of this is listing “they’ve taken him into Matalan, they’ve bought him a suit, they’ve bought him a new tie, cut his hair and he’s doing a Trump” where a triadic structure is created with the contraction ‘they’ve’. The lack of pauses and conjunctions as well as an accelerando delivery may be because he fears interruption by other speakers and has to retain this fluency and pace. It also builds the scale of the things Jeremy Corbyn has done to support the point Sugar has made and to heighten/clarify the humour he is building. Likewise, he utilises alliteration for a similar comedic effect in the noun phrase “Matalan Man” where the /m/ consonant is repeated. The brand name ‘Matalan’ (with a reputation of being a ‘savings’ brand’) for similar comedy shows the affluent position Lord Sugar is in because he finds the idea of a powerful man spending money in a typically lower-class shop entertaining. In addition, there is also patterning with a tricolon of interrogatives “yes or no, have you been to the White House? C’mon Morgan, yes or no? Have you been to the White House since he’s been president?” where the patterning of “yes or no?” is phatic in nature. By building a barrage of questions, Lord Sugar closes down the opportunity for Piers Morgan to complete the adjacency pair and format of turn-taking by answering his question, making him appear unresponsive meaning Sugar remains in control of the rest of the conversation.
Nonetheless, how does Lord Sugar present himself when his language choices aren’t inhibited by a professional context or by the manufactured nature of television? Lord Sugar joined the social media platform of ‘Twitter’ in 2011 and currently has approximately 5.45 million followers. He tweets almost every day, for a variety of different purposes; promoting himself or his television programme, giving his opinion on current issues and engaging in debate with his rivals (most typically with Piers Morgan who). When his language is unfiltered and constructed in the written mode, does Lord Sugar’s constructed identity of being a savvy businessman translate to his online audience or does his language suggest that his tweets – and thus, his identity – are manufactured also?
Primarily, many of his tweets feature inconsistent language use, particularly regarding punctuation. In the tweet “You are welcome I am not sure how daft you are. Robbie…. Only Fools and horses” [figure 2], a full stop is used after the second clause but elided in the first and again at the end of the tweet. However, he does use a full stop at the end of another tweet when he says, “Never worried…always a win for me” [figure 4]. This inconsistency may be due to the fast pace of the platform and the swift way in which his tweets are sent, suggesting they are impulsive and self-written, revealing to us his inner thoughts. There are also virtuous errors in the form of non-standardised spellings like “chalenge” which has the medial /l/ consonant elided as well as “Easterners” which is intended to reference the London-based soap opera ‘EastEnders’. Again, these errors imply that the tweets are written quickly and not checked before posting them, perhaps signifying that Sugar is too busy to do so or he is so self-assured that he doesn’t feel the need to check. The non-standardisation is highly unlikely to be pre-planned as it could damage Lord Sugar’s reputation by showing him to inarticulate or a bit ‘simple’ which would disparage his identity as an intelligent businessman.
Sugar keeps the register mostly informal through a variety of different methods in order to converge with the wide demographic on Twitter who have differing levels of education. Intertextual references feature quite heavily in his posts. He references TV shows like “Easterners” and “Only Fools and horses” (which also alludes to his history in the east-end of London and his early entrepreneurial aspirations like the characters from the programme) as well as using the proper noun “Palace” referencing Crystal Palace football team and also the proper noun “Donald” referring to President Trump by eliding his last name and title. Deictic expressions are used in the same way with the determiner “that” referencing a recent football match between the Crystal Palace and Manchester City football teams. This has the effect of converging with his Twitter following who may have similar interests by using shared knowledge to create a personal relationship and show his personal identity which TV audiences are not heavily exposed to. He also keeps the register informal by using colloquialisms like the adjective “daft” and countable noun “mate” which mimics his natural speech and dialect, giving the tweets a more personal voice for the readers to identify with. Across his tweets, informality is established through elliptical structures like “Never worried was always a win for me” where the first person pronoun ‘I’ and third person pronoun ‘it’ are elided. This could be due to the limited number of characters available in a tweet or he is mimicking his own dialect so the readers can get a sense of him and his upbringing in the written mode.
Moreover, he uses patterning in the form of a tricolon of taboo lexis for a humorous effect when discussing a controversial comment made by President Trump where Lord Sugar wrote “sh..itholers – sh..itholians or simply sh..s” [figure 5]. While this drops the register significantly and lowers his prestige, he softens this taboo lexis by censoring the profanity by using full stops in the place of or to separate letters. By censoring, which he is not required to do on a platform such as Twitter, Lord Sugar shows that he is still self-aware and is trying to soften the comment so he is still viewed as an acceptable face for a broadcaster like BBC. This informality in discussing topics and current affairs where his purpose is to convey his opinion contrasts greatly with the language of tweets where he wishes to promote his programme. Polysyllabic lexis like the verb “testify”, an abundance of full stops “I am looking… The Apprentice. I have… right person. …It is… testify.” and an absence of non-standardised spelling are used in a tweet to ask people to apply to the next series of his programme ‘The Apprentice’. This high register which is rare in his tweets could be for one of two reasons. Either he takes longer to construct these posts and checks them because they relate to his business meaning he takes pride in his work – adding to his business-minded identity. The other option is that these tweets are pre-written by somebody else which may imply that his entrepreneurial reputation needs to be maintained by a third party like a publicist, meaning his identity of being down-to-earth and ‘just like everyone else’ is tarnished.
In conclusion, Lord Sugar has constructed his identity of being a successful, self-made man across his written and spoken language. He asserts authority and power regardless of the context by using confrontational tag questions and using derogatory colloquialisms while acting as a mediator by initiating topic shifts. He creates the perception of being dominant and powerful due to the harsh nature of the business world in which he has established himself in. Additionally, he presents his personal side through features of his Estuary dialect and intertextual references. This other side of his identity is presented to his audience for the purpose of making him appear down to earth – emphasising his success even more and retaining popularity by converging with his audience which is necessary for him to retain his celebrity status.