So just how good is Alan Sugar?

Alan Sugar has become the face of business on TV following the success of The Apprentice. But is the nation's favourite entrepeneur really just a has-been?

As the BBC's Apprentice series comes to an end this week, we look at the man doing the hiring. How successful a businessman is he really? Jane Lewis reports

The success of The Apprentice, which, as The Guardian noted, "shuddered to a climax this week with a live girl-on-girl finale", marks the third incarnation of Sir Alan Sugar, the grumpy computer salesman from Hackney. Having epitomised the no-nonsense breed of Eighties entrepreneur, Sugar followed up with a less successful role as chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, and his leathery scowl is now the face of business on TV. Sugar, who this week picked up a Bafta for the show, sees himself as a role model for today's wayward youth. And in a way, he is: you know you're onto something when even nine-year-olds can be heard telling each other: "You're a lightweight. You're fired!"

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.