Against a background of high youth unemployment and a summer of rioting, Sugar said he hoped to show a different side of the nation's teenagers – or at least the super-articulate, highly driven individuals competing in the show –and motivate those struggling to find work.
"This programme goes to prove that you can start to make some money and stand on your own two feet. That's what I think you should do," the Labour peer said. "There's too much of … what I call an expectancy culture of things being provided. And I'm afraid to say the goody-goody benefits system we have in this country has made it a bit too cushy for people, and now its a wake-up call. Not everybody needs to go to university. They can go out and start working straight away."
The former enterprise tsar said that while he had been a supporter of Gordon Brown, he had not backed all the Labour government's choices. "Not everything that went on under Labour I agree with [such as] the benefits system and social apprenticeship schemes, which are really parking people and moving them out of the unemployment numbers," he said.
At the beginning of the past decade, young people had believed they could skip getting their hands dirty and start at the top because they had an idea, he said. "They wanted to come in, be a dotcom, go to a venture capitalist … That's all gone. That's finished. That era is over," he said.
As the show begins next Monday, this year's 16- and 17-year-old would-be entrepreneurs get off to a typical Apprentice start – badgering passersby into paying wild amounts of cash for ice-cream with sometimes questionable flavours.
Sugar suggested the young apprentices might actually be better than their adult equivalents, who have amused audiences for years with their fondness for business jargon, machiavellian plotting and bulletproof self-belief.
The winner will receive ￡25,000 to spend on their business, but Sugar admits he controls the cashflow, and that he drip feeds it into projects slowly. Last year's winner, Arjun Rajyagor, has yet to receive all of his prize money.
Sugar hopes the show will encourage people to start their own businesses even without his – or another investor's – backing.
In typically irascible style, Sugar does not cut the young apprentices any slack, lambasting them for claiming credit where it's not due and not being able to do basic maths. But their results are impressive and, he hopes, inspirational.
"We want to show you can start something from nothing and get away from this culture of university, then gap year for two years, then go and get a job at some consultancy, then go on the dole," he said.
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