Alan Sugar Does Not Use Prostitutes

The server here at Knowledge Towers is under a strict rota tonight, so I have but fifteen minutes to attain a marginally higher level of understanding of our universe. Speaking of which, the world's greatest TV show, The Apprentice, returns to our screens tonight. I'm talking, of course, about the UK version, not the jazzy Stateside predecessor with Donald Trump. The guy is the worst autocue reader I've ever seen, and then there's that hair. Everybody knows it's a wig, and it's of a quality seemingly beneath the standards of your average dole queue member, and yet a multi-millionaire goes on national TV with it trying to escape from his head. No, I'm salivating at the return of our vastly superior version, with the infinitely more sensibly coiffured Sir Alan Sugar - but you can call him Sir Alan. Or, as Phil Tufnell called him, Sir Sugar. Just don't forget the Sir. He didn't seem to enjoy being called Sir Sugar - a moniker perhaps only suitable if he was being addressed by a hired escort.

Sir Alan may be slick, laconic and also the epitome of not taking prisoners (I only realised today that this is a rather grisly phrase), but he's not quite the UK equivalent of Trump, mad hair or not. He ranked 84th on the 2007 Sunday Times Rich List, which isn't bad, but if you consider that Britain's best tennis player is Andy Murray, and the 84th best is probably about 3 years old, you can see that there's ground to be made up. Amusingly enough though, for all his efforts to get his prospective employees to turn poo into diamonds through a baffling hour of wheeling, dealing and guesswork, he has taken the easy route in recent years:

The majority of Sir Alan Sugar's £830m fortune comes from property investment in Mayfair.

It doesn't get much less entrepreneurial than that. But, despite the fact he may missed the chance to be as rich as Bill Gates, and hasn't had a successful product out since Will Smith first sat on his throne as the Prince of Bel-Air, he's still a lot better than the utter shower of buffoons he has to select from. So will it be a young, incompetent man or a blandly attractive, compliant woman this time round. Can't wait to find out...