SIR Alan Sugar’s belligerent boardroom manner returns to the nation’s television screens tonight, but a young North Yorkshire entrepreneur recently came face-to-face with the businessman who arguably boasts an even more fearsome reputation than the star of BBC’s The Apprentice.

Durham University student Pete Southern, a former pupil of Stokesley School, in North Yorkshire, has returned from Sri Lanka where he starred in an Apprentice-style reality TV show that pitted six UK and six Sri Lankan students against each other to find out who possessed the most entrepreneurial spirit.

Judging the latter stage of the competition was Sri Lankan tycoon Dian Gomes, a Harvard Business School graduate and sports fanatic who is the driving force behind his country’s Olympic boxing team.

Mr Southern said: “Mr Gomes is not a man to be messed with.”

The Sri Lankan show, produced in partnership with the British Council, will not be shown to its four million viewers until the new year, so Mr Southern said he is unable to reveal if he wins. However, his business acumen sufficiently impressed Mr Gomes to offer the 19-year-old an internship at his lingerie empire, MAS Intimates.

Mr Southern intends to take advantage of the offer once he completes his engineering degree, but in the meantime he is combining student life with building a mobile cafe business.

He used his engineering skills to overhaul a battered old Land Rover, turning it into a coffee bar to sell Italian coffee at local events.

“It’s a seasonal thing to do, over the summer and winter periods and when I’m not at uni,” he said.

After answering a suspicious- looking email offering him an all-expenses paid trip to Sri Lanka, Mr Southern was selected for the Ideators show and flown to Colombo, the country’s business capital, where he spent a month in a penthouse apartment with his fellow contestants.

Their tasks included being woken at 4am to sell fish at a local market.

“That was tough, especially as I couldn’t speak the language,”

he said. “At least, by the end of the day, I knew the word for fish.”

The British Council is the UK’s international cultural relations organisation, which works to build understanding between people in the UK and other countries, and to increase appreciation of the UK’s ideas and achievements overseas.