Last night I was sitting at home tinkering with this blog (it will have its five-year overhaul soon), when my brother called me to say that there was someone from Virgin Radio on Dragons’ Den. I flipped on the TV and saw that the person being called “Christian” was Robin Banks, a DJ who used to work here and who I know a little. He’s since spent quite a lot of time at Kiss 100, and more recently joined Leicester Sound. You might also know his voice if you ever watch Mythbusters in the UK as he re-voices them in an English accent.
I rewound the Sky+ as I’d been recording the show anyway and watched the full segment. Rachel and Christian were pitching for cash for their business – the Tiny Box Company.
The editing of Dragons’ Den has to be good to keep us in suspense, although it has to be said that as last contestants on, the chances were that they’d do a deal. One of the problems with the format is that sometimes it’s just a little too formulaic.
Their business was for the manufacture of recycled cardboard gift boxes – the sort of item you might get jewellry packaged in. From an external point of view, on several levels the company seemed to be a bit of a non-starter. The idea was unpatentable – indeed there must be hundreds or even thousands of packaging companies. They hadn’t sold all that many, although they had a couple of decent clients. So it was surprising that in relatively short time, three of the dragons had dropped out.
Then something strange happened. I’d have expected that, however well the pair came across, the last two dragons would surely give them short shrift. But Theo wanted to know about their backgrounds. Christian said he’d worked in radio… on-air. He namechecked Kiss and Virgin, and talked about broadcasting in general. But then he’d gone into rehab after which he’d met his business partner. Rachel had a good business background but some kind of illness had struck her causing the loss of both her job and home.
Theo announced that he thought that there might have been some kind of broadcasting background to Christian. How? Theo doesn’t strike me as someone who listens to a lot of Kiss, although his kids might. Maybe he used to listen to the Robin Banks evening show on Virgin? But even then, it might have been hard to tie together a familiar radio voice with a face in a different environment.
Could the producers have suggested that asking about the entrepreneaurs’ backgrounds would be an “interesting” thing to do? In this case, it livened up an otherwise so-so pitch, and in the end, both Theo and Peter pitched in together for £60,000 to back the firm.
It made me think. I know that television is an artifice, and on something like Dragons’ Den, producers will see fit to ensure that a few mad inventions are put in front of the dragons as well as more investable business enterprises. But are the dragons being fed details? Unless they’ve got an uncanny ability to dig into people (and they are shrood investors so they weren’t bprn yesterday), they do seem to have an unerring ability to find out the more interesting backgrounds.
How many times have you seen a pitch going seemingly quite well before a leftfield question – something that might not otherwise be asked – knock the pitch off-course. Perhaps there are hidden debts, or some kind of technical issue. On other occassions they’ll suddenly probe deeply about forthcoming orders, and a contestant will eventually admit that – yes – they have had conversations with Tesco, suddenly making them very investible.
I suppose that I’d naiively expected that the nature of the “Den” with strict rules about not contacting dragons in advance, and the nature of filming meaning that many more ideas passed through the den than made it to air, might mean that the series was slightly more honest.
But in this instance, I think it’s pretty clear that the dragons were “directed” a little. I wish Christian/Robin and Rachel all the best with their business, but I’m just left a little