The title sequence of Dragons’ Den starts off like some scary corporate adaptation of all of the SAW films: an aged warehouse surrounded by signs that say ‘danger’ is filmed from scary angles and a thick layer of dim clouds tears across the sky to the sound of even scarier guitar music. But just when you think you’ve accidentally switched over to ‘Hell Tv+’, Evan Davis ruins the mood by saying “these are the dragons” with the tone of an estate agent saying “this is the bathroom”.
Yes, Dragons’ Den, one of a select few programmes that gets repeated on Dave so often that buying the series 1-8 box set would be like paying for music rather than stealing it off the internet. I don’t usually watch it, but chose to this week because the new dragon Hilary Devey looks like if Anne Robinson mated with a haunted tree and I wanted to laugh at her. HAHA, you may be richer and more successful than I will ever be but you are not necessarily conventionally attractive. There we go.
So a few minutes in, and I was pleased to see that the format has remained as rigid as the Dragons’ gloomy expressions when a hopeful enters the room. Trembling business owners still have to beg for slightly too much investment in their ideas (which is presumably paid in cash, based on the stacks of money on the dragons’ desks).
The idea of the first group to pitch was basically a van with a sound system in the boot; apparently this meant that children weren’t going to do drugs anymore. Interrogation ensued, and the hopefuls made a common mistake, stating that they’d broken even in the second year, made £40,000 in the third, thus projected profits for year four were £4.6bn (est). The dragons weren’t impressed. However, as the pitch contained the words “youth”, “community” and “passion”, their dismissal of the hopefuls was combined with words like “regret” and “sorry” to make it seem like they weren’t awful, awful humans.
However it was during the third pitch that I started to find Evan Davis’s excessive commentary a tad grating. Davis basically describes what has happened in the previous seven seconds for no reason at all, a bit like he’s catering for the viewers with chronic short term memory loss. I like to imagine that Evan summarises every small event that takes place in TV programmes out loud when he is at home, much to the aggravation of his wife and kids, although I cannot guarantee this is true.
The success of programmes like Dragons’ Den seems down to the fact that they are based on the ‘judging panel’ format. This involves a bunch of scary men and women (although sometimes there is one nice one) sitting behind a desk or in chairs and deciding whether grovelling, deluded mortals should be allowed to continue with their hopes and dreams. The format has been so successful with dancing, skating, business, singing, comedy and other variants, that it seems you cannot pitch a show to a channel that doesn’t conform to it. So, I’ve devised a few judging panel programmes that I hope will appeal to Britain’s top TV bosses:
1. ‘The Pax-factor’. Members of the public impersonate Jeremy Paxman and are set a series of Paxman related challenges each week before being judged by Nick Knowles and Ronnie Wood. The two finalists will simultaneously interview Paxman himself in a nightmarish vision of a cloning project gone horribly wrong.
2. ‘So you think you can (play) bassoon’: Britain’s top bassoonists battle it out to win the mysterious golden bassoon. Vernon Kay presents.
3. ‘Quick! Hide the evidence!’: hopefuls are tasked with covering up the fraudulent and corrupt behaviour of Britain’s top officials. A junior version is in the pipeline.
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