Listen, we don't know how to tell you this - it's as much of a shock to us as it will be to you - but Alan Sugar, he's... he's gone.

Dead? No, of course he's not dead. But Sir Alan Sugar has stepped down as chairman of his company Amstrad after 40 years. That means that all those wonderful jokes about the crappy-looking, pointlessly impractical email telephones he hawked so mercilessly during the first few seasons of The Apprentice are all worthless now. Really, he may as well be dead.

Anyway, even though he's left Amstrad, Sir Alan Sugar's still going to be the terrifying boss figure on The Apprentice. However, there's bound to be some changes - those taking part in next year's Apprentice will now be battling for a prestigious £100k a year job keeping watch for the rozzers while Sir Alan flogs boxes of unsold email phones from the back of a van in an MFI car park.