Task Den with a revamp
I’VE started watching a lot more of DRAGONS’ DEN (BBC1, 8pm) since it moved from Sunday nights on BBC2. To be honest, I’d got out of the habit of watching it altogether. It was clashing with Antiques Roadshow a little too often for my liking. Something had to give.
But despite falling back in love with the show, I do think it’s time it had a revamp. It’s being going, after all, since Tony Blair was (a) still Prime Minister and (b) had yet to adopt the look of Catweazle, and so a little shake-up is surely overdue.
My suggestion – and I’m tempted to enter the Den myself, to put this idea to them directly; I’m sure they’d love it – would be to make it more like Channel 4’s TASKMASTER (9pm).
Admittedly, these two shows already bear more than a passing resemblance. In both cases we have the same five people competing in each week’s episode, and being asked to do a succession of jolly odd things.
In Taskmaster tonight, for example, each competitor is being asked, by a man with a beard, to “say the word ‘metronome’ between every tick of a metronome, while also blowing up a balloon until it’s bigger than your head, then neatly gift-wrap the balloon and eat three whole popadoms”.
On Dragons’ Den, meanwhile, each dragon is being asked, by a different man with a different beard, whether he or she would like to invest £50,000 in exchange for 2.5 per cent equity in a firm that’s created “the world’s first genetically personalised meal shake”.
(Having given the product a slurp, Sara Davies pipes up first with an observation of potential significance: “It tastes bloody awful,” she says.)
Taskmaster’s strength is that the battle between its five competitors is actually heading somewhere.At the end of the series there’s a trophy for whoever’s performed most successfully – specifically, a trophy depicting host Greg Davies’s head.
It’s the nastiest trophy ever made, of course, other than those you get if you win a hoopla or the Champions League, but that’s not the point. It’s something to aim for.
It’s time for the Dragons to pursue something similar.A similar trophy depicting the head of their own host, Evan Davis, would be the obvious choice.
Elsewhere, in the first semi-final of BRITAIN’S BRIGHTEST CELEBRITY FAMILY (ITV, 8.30pm) Joe Pasquale’s bunch face Colin Jackson’s.
Much like University Challenge, you’ll be able to play along with confidence provided you know your Shakespeare, your chemical symbols, your solar system, your international airport codes and your Little Mix.