I have enjoyed following Lord Alan Sugar on Twitter for some time now. He
has some pithy put-downs for trolls, isn’t shy to advertise himself or bendy
nail-files and is the go-to-guy if you want to find out what the score is in
any Spurs game, but you don’t have a TV or access to anything on the internet
apart from Lord Sugar’s Twitter feed.
Last week he tweeted "I'm looking for a name for my new book, out in
Autumn. It’s all about my 10 years in telly.” He was asking the people of
Twitter for a title. Was he an idiot? It was obvious what was going to happen,
surely.
There was no mention of any kind of prize for this rather important
service, presumably the honour of having assisted a multi-millionaire was
reward enough.
It appeared to be laziness at best and at worst self-defeating foolishness.
Surely anyone could see that his Twitter feed was going to fill with thousand
of smart-arses tweeting the same four basic “Sugar” puns and obvious Apprentice
references, liberally sprinkled with abusive remarks about his Sid James face
and his culpability for foisting Katie Hopkins on the world.
Sugar tried to preempt this by explaining that “You’re Fired” “You’re
Hired” or “The Apprentice” would not be acceptable titles.
But that wasn’t going to stop the smart-arses. And it wasn’t going to stop
me. I resolved to come up with as many terrible titles for his book as possible
and tweet them all to him.
I weighed in with “Firing Blanks” which works nicely on just one level, but
would also be doubly excellent if the book is to reveal Sugar’s lifelong
struggle with impotence (I am not saying that he has had one, just that it
would be a great title if he had). Then I went for the more prosaic “Alan’s
Story”. I really hope he chooses that one - what it lacks in a pun, it makes up
for in being an accurate summation of the contents.
Given Sugar’s propensity to sympathise with contestants who share his
upbringing, “I Remind Me of Me At That Age” would be a cracking title. As would
"Sugar Cubed" but only if the front cover was a Rubik's cube that
featured Alan’s face, with maybe Nick Hewer, Karen Brady and Katie Hopkins on
the other sides.
Or he could go for "You're Fayed" with the cover being a picture
of Alan pointing at Mohammed Al Fayed.
The difficulty was thinking of a pun that no one else would come up with.
It meant stretching language to its limits. I liked “ Ass poo full of
sugar” (A spoonful of sugar – I love any pun that requires brackets to explain
it), though to really work it would need Lord Alan to contract some kind
of rectal diabetes.
How about, "My Cor-pick-you-hmmmm Vitae” (Curriculum Vitae). It’s clever (if you ignore the first bit) because
Vitae means life.
If Shugs could get in a fistfight with the Dragon’s Den lot between now and
publication day he could have “My Bloody Banatyne”.
I am determined to keep tweeting him such awful and wrong suggestions for
the rest of my life. It’s such fun. You should too.
Ultimately the best title might be, “I Asked the Public To Come Up With
the Name of My Book and this was the Best They Could Do. But Still, I Knew
This Would Happen and it Would All Go Viral and Thus Everyone Would Find Out I
Had a New Book Coming Out. That Muppet Herring wrote a Whole Column About it. Who’s
the Idiot Now?”
