Dragon’s Den is either one of the best shows on telly or a huge ego trip for its five filthy rich resident dragons funded by the licence payer.
If the latter is the case we should hunt everyone connected with the show down and kill them. Like dogs. Dogs who have already had their legs sawn off and can only move by involuntary spasms in their bloodied trunks.
But sadly it’s actually quite good.
The basic premise of the show, for those who haven’t seen it, is that five multi-squillionaires sit in judgement as a selection of small business folk, budding entrepreneurs and wacky inventors show off their ideas and try to secure investment from the super-moneyed quintet.
The five business mogul Dragons are Richard Farleigh, Deborah Meaden, Duncan Bannatyne, Peter Jones and Theo Paphetis. This lot are good value and each brings their own quirks to the show: Aussie Farleigh looks like a hobbit groomed by Harvard, Meaden resembles a matronly whiplash fantasy, Bannatyne is a largely grinning and incomprehensible Scot, Jones is simply smugness personified while Paphitis actually seems quite normal.
It’s now in series three but what makes the show really work this time out is the fact the show’s researchers have quite obviously decided to have a bit of a laugh and populate each episode with such inept cash-hungry entrepreneurs that you start to sympathise with the dragons as one idiot after another is paraded around after their cash.
Last night’s shows featured a picnic bag, a bizarre motoring website, wellies with patterns, a chair exercise system and novelty sex toys. There was one business proposition that got through, namely a truck wash system, but the rest of the folk were so far out there and so ludicrous that the purpose of the show is now nothing to do with the dragons but clearly to mock idiocy with ambition.
The show is fronted by Evan Davis (above). He’s the BBC’s Economics Editor and you know something’s wrong when even someone with a strait-laced job title like that starts having a sly grin when he’s interviewing all the rejected clots.
But the premise of the current series is genius. Which is more than can be said for most of its contestants…
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