Trisickle Magazine

Mark’s TV: Dragon’s Den

Poor old James Caan. A few months ago the cuddly, beard stroking Dragon was forcibly evicted from the ‘Den’ reportedly because Duncan Bannatyne doesn’t like him. Seeing as there’s a high likelihood that Duncan Bannatyne only likes people who wear full length dress mirrors I think it’s probable that Caan’s vacated seat has got far, far more to do with the fact that he tried to buy a baby, and not in some dusty backroom, recorded by the indiscriminate dictaphone. No, Caan had the balls to offer a 100% investment for 100% of the ownership of a Pakistani baby on a publicity tour in front of television cameras. This wasn’t even an orphan baby, the brand so beloved by pop royalty, Madonna and professional teenage wank fodder (and, to a degree, actress) Angelina Jolie amongst others, Caan actually propositioned a family with the promise that the child could have a great life and want for nothing in the care of James’ childless brother. Like I say that takes balls, and a more than healthy dose of stupidity.

This bizarre haemorrhaging of Caan’s common sense and brain juice was naturally followed by a bout of Olympic Gold Medal standard back peddling on the Dragon’s part, but inevitably it was not enough to save his job in the cutthroat world of Dragon’s Den (his predecessor, Richard Farley was fired without any real explanation so god knows what he did), and now we are being subjected the nightmarishly pointy, Hilary Devey. For those of you who haven’t googled Devey already (and if you have I hope for the sake of your eyes that you had safeSearch on) then the best way to describe her would be if you tried to imagine the kind of nightmarish Spider-Queen that probably ravages the fevered mind of Tim Burton as he frets in his sleep over which beloved classic he can have Johnny Depp and his wife rape onscreen next.

In a way, Devey is perfect for the increasingly ridiculous Dragon’s Den. In a TV show which has long skipped past the point of pantomime, she’s turned up dressed as the evil stepmother. Without the grounding influence of Caan, Dragon’s Den now has no likeable ‘characters’ at all and so instantly reverts to its most base form with the start of this latest, ninth series. Bannatyne sits and scowls whilst making notes in his book (presumably he’s writing cheques to hit-men in Russia), Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones try to come up with the best pun, exchanging wry looks like the two kids at school who shared a weird hobby and only hung around with each other, whilst Deborah Meaden glances over at a scowling Devey with the incredulous look of someone who has just found themselves suddenly thought of as ‘the hot one’. And the contestants? Well they simply don’t matter. The budding entrepreneurs haven’t been the focus of the show for a long time now, with more and more time being devoted to the Dragons scoffing, suppressing giggles with their jacket sleeves and generally being complete pricks as often as they possibly can be in sixty minutes. In the average episode of DD, only one product receives any investment, with the rest of the show devoted to Jones, Bannatyne et al picking apart the business pitches. Sometimes they’re entirely correct, questioning figures and distribution plans, but increasingly they’re playing up to the cameras, playing at being TV personalities and getting away with far more twattery than would ever be acceptable in the real business world.

It’s genuinely impressive that a show with such a rigid and predictable formula (and a non-fiction show at that) should last for nine years, but Dragon’s Den should really be about the people who put themselves out there and the products that they’re trying to bring onto the marketplace. As it is, it’s far too focused on giving its pet businessmen (and women) an inflated sense of self importance as big as their wallets and if Dragon’s Den is to have any hope of surviving for another nine years it needs to clear the board of its complacent, preening Dragons in favour of some new blood, passionate market leaders with more fire in their bellies than thoughts of TV stardom in their heads.

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