It’s hard to believe, but there was once a time when people actually enjoyed watching Dragons’ Den. Maybe your grandparents will be able to remember it. Those were happier times, back before the banking crisis, when it was all the go to borrow as much money as possible to fund the artificially inflated cost of your grasping win-at-all-costs lifestyle.
But that was so long ago. Since then, tastes have changed. People no longer want to watch a row of snooty judges disdainfully crap on the sum total of someone’s life’s work again and again for an hour. They want to watch a load of lovely people baking lovely cakes in a suffocatingly lovely way instead. And yet, for reasons that genuinely elude me, Dragons’ Den somehow continues to labour on.
It was back again last night, for the first episode of what might well be its trillionth series. The peripheries have been tinkered with a little – Theo Paphitis has now been replaced by a bizarre seaside caricature of Theo Paphitis that magically came to life during a thunderstorm, and Peter Jones’ gradual Terry Wogan DNA splice has now reached the haircut phase – but apart from that it was brutally, joylessly business as usual.
Some people entered. “This is my idea,” they said. “Give me money.” “Boo, bad idea,” the Dragons replied. “No money.” Again and again, without any deviation at all, for an hour. Watching Dragons’ Den in 2015 is like being trapped in a particularly miserable Groundhog Day, one made all the more tragic because you don’t realise that you can break out of it whenever you like by turning over to Channel 4 and watching a programme about nice sheds instead.
Dragons’ Den at this point is a loveless marriage. It’s an impressionist forgery of itself, all dead-eyed numbers and percentages and headshakes. They could kill Dragons’ Den off today and nobody would even bat an eyelid. It looked so tired, they’d say. It was an act of mercy.
Most long-running shows will at some point cross an invisible line. Before it, they’re the hot new kid on the block and they can do no wrong. But then – maybe because they refuse to change, maybe because they change too much, maybe just because people get sick of the sight of them – enthusiasm drops away to almost zero. And the shows know it. Shoulders droop, smiles get more forced, what once came off as sparky instinct now looks weary and rote. X Factor has crossed this line. MasterChef is crossing it as we speak. The Great British Bake Off, generously, is three years away from crossing it.
When this happens, the shows have two choices. Either they can lumber on to increasingly diminishing returns, or they can simply bite the bullet. You just have to look at the haunted faces of Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer as they are glumly shoehorned into a succession of progressively desperate-looking formats to see the dangers of the former. The latter has much more dignity. If Dragons’ Den has as much nous as it claims to have, this will be its last series. Shut down the Paphitis clone laboratory. We’re out.
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