A no-show from Sir Alan? Maybe it’s time to tell him: You’re fired!

BUSINeSS has its own coded language. When you are fobbed off over the phone with: ‘he’s just popped out,’ the bloke you want has actually sloped off for a crafty fag.

When a client owes you money and his secretary uses the phrase: ‘I can’t see him at his desk,’ you can be sure he’s hiding underneath it and doesn’t intend to pay. On the other hand: ‘Mr Jones isn’t expected back in the office this afternoon,’ generally means he was taken unavoidably drunk at lunchtime.

Alan Sugar failed to show up for the start of the third task on The

Apprentice (BBC1), pleading that he had been ‘called away on an urgent business matter’.

If your family are telling people that you’ve been ‘called away on an urgent business matter’, then you are probably reading this in the luxury of one of her Majesty’s hotels, and you’re only looking at this page because another inmate has already done the crossword.

Lord Sugar wasn’t in nick, of course. Perish the thought. he simply had something better to do than lecture his 16 gormless apprentices in person, so he did what any busy parent does: sat them down in front of a TV screen and left them to watch a video.

It’s almost forgivable. The sight of that lot, girls with their swollen lips and fake tans, boys with their manicured facial hair, would drain the joie de vivre out of anyone.

But this is his job. The hackney peer is under contract to the Beeb to present the show. Sending a pre-recorded message is hardly the same. If he can’t be bothered to do the hours any more, perhaps it’s time he chucked it in.

There’s no shortage of TV- savvy entrepreneurs who would bite off Auntie’s fingers for a chance to be doing the firing, and it isn’t as if Alan brings unique skills to the boardroom table. Anyone can say: ‘You’re fired.’

It continued to look as if he was laughing up his sleeve at the format when he set the candidates their challenge: they were going shopping. In earlier series, this round has provided some of the most memorable entertainment, with chaotic excursions to places such as Dubai.

This year it was a ferry to Calais. And there were tickets for only half the apprentices. Tasks for the rest included shovelling cattle manure into bags, a metaphor for everything the show has become.

It continued to be the most bad-tempered and spiteful series so far. Plumber Joseph with his ridiculous spiv’s moustache and the endlessly smarmy richard detest each other, and sometimes seemed close to blows.

Charleine told Selina: ‘You’re just like an irritating wasp at a picnic,’ which was rich coming from a woman with a personality like nails scraping down a blackboard. All that nastiness was coated in dense layers of stupidity.

Selina tried to butter up a French vendor by pleading, ‘por favor’, which is Spanish. And when elle, a girl who cites pop star Taylor Swift as the best businesswoman in history, heard the task would begin in Dover, she decided a trip to Ireland must be on the cards.

At least the contestants in the new afternoon gameshow Pick Me! (ITV) are being daft on purpose.

everyone in the studio audience dons the silliest costumes imaginable, from onesies and bedsheets to elaborate fancy dress, in a desperate bid to be noticed by host Stephen Mulhern and get picked to play. As quiz shows go, this one isn’t great. each episode manages to squeeze about a dozen questions into an hour.

But the point of the game isn’t general knowledge. It’s about guessing which players really know the right answer and which are just pretending.

The contestant who guesses right wins goodies, while a convincing liar can collect £1,000.

That gives Mulhern his unwieldy catchphrase: ‘has he got the prize or is he telling lies?’

If all that sounds complicated and confusing, that’s because it is. This show is like a hybrid of Call My Bluff and Deal Or No Deal, with lashings of noisy audience participation.

Pick Me! is loud and irritating. rather like the apprentices.