It’s been a week of mixed fortunes for Fozzie Bear lookalike and Simon Cowell-David Brent morphdroid, Alan Sugar.

The bad news for Siralan, as he must be called, is that his company Amstrad has pulled the plug on his emailer. The jurassic gadget has long been a subject of mirth among geeks, but the besotted Siralan just kept clinging on, like Linus in Armani.

The good news is that The Apprentice – The X Factor for people who use the phrase "end of" without feeling embarrassed – slaughtered all comers in the ratings.

After the break: Siralan sacked the cancer man!

Assorted channels have helped to warm us up for The Apprentice Vol 2. BBC2′s Dragons’ Den (a punctuation honey trap dressed up as a programme title) kept Siralan’s seat warm through the autumn, and is now returning on us like curry-burps in 10-minute Best Of chunks.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Five rolled out Selling Yourself, a preposterous programme that I adore because I am psychotically fascinated by 22-year-olds whose life’s passion is to be an estate agent or, for the love of God, a wedding planner.

BBC2′s own Apprentice support act was a catch-up with last year’s winner, Tim nice-but-pinstriped Campbell. It was the dullest 10 minutes of telly I’ve watched this year. (The programme was half an hour long. Life’s too short.)

The main attraction finally took to the stage on Wednesday. The man with the Chelsea bun face and his band of arse-lickers did not disappoint, particularly on the love-to-hate side of things. It’s not nice to despise anyone, but it can be very pleasurable, and I am having a lovely time not liking ADHD idiot Jo Cameron and cloven-hoofed Syed Ahmed. Long may they last.

Siralan himself is too daft to despise. Unable to call women women, he instead calls them "girl"s or, egads, "ladies". This does not make him evil, but it does make him a socially dim neanderthal who thinks that etiquette is something to do with respect (aw, quaint) rather than a way in which the powerful distinguish themselves from, and belittle, the less powerful. Siralan is a master of belittling the less powerful, particularly those who haven’t got penises.

Having been referred to several times as "ladies", the women’s team assumed they knew what they were dealing with. So they got their tits out to blag a load of free fruit, and promptly won the first task. They returned triumphant to collect their prize — a furious dressing down from Siralan for "using a bit of female". FFS!!!, as they say on the internet.

Sugar’s first sackee was Ben Stanberry, the nicest man who’s ever been on television, and therefore not at all welcome in The Apprentice. (Tim was nice, too… hm, statistical blip.) Ben was not only the nicest man on telly ever, but he’d recovered from cancer. He was also gracious, wise and eloquent in defeat, as demonstrated on Adrian Chiles’ You’re Fired after party. I don’t think Ben was real. I think he was CGI.

Anyway, my money’s on Badger.

* The Apprentice, BBC2, Wednesdays at 9pm
* The Apprentice: You’re Fired, BBC3, Wednesdays at 10pm

* Selling Yourself, Five, Tuesdays at 8pm
* Dragons’ Den (Best Of), BBC2, Fridays at 9.50pm