Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
READY FOR A FIRE FIGHT
The Dragons battle over some of the biggest – and strangest – businesses yet as they return to the Den for a new series
Do dragons have a particularly acute sense of smell? Well, these human ones do. Peter Jones, normally so composed, looks decidedly green around the gills. Jenny Campbell and Tej Lalvani are trying not to breathe in. Touker Suleyman can’t bear it, and Deborah Meaden actually physically recoils. Blimey! This is a woman who owns 14 horses. How pongy can this be?
‘The trouble with television is that it can’t convey how awful the smell was,’ she tells me later when filming for the new series of Dragons’ Den has finished. ‘I’m not squeamish but I couldn’t handle it. The whole place reeked.’
What on earth was going on? Well, the pitch in question involved a former science teacher trying to convince the millionaire Dragons to invest in his business, a rather niche one that arranges dissectionand-dinner events. Yes, participants get to enjoy a meal while watching human bodies being dissected.
Macabre hardly begins to describe it. ‘Obviously at the start we didn’t have a clue what was going on,’ explains Peter. ‘It looked as if there was a body laid out in front of us, and this silence descended. The stench made us think it wasn’t a pretend one. I couldn’t quite believe it. I was thinking, “This isn’t a prosthetic. We have a real dead body in the Den. Is this guy Hannibal Lecter?”’
Actually the ‘body’ was a prosthetic one, but the innards were those of a pig – and whiffy with it. Never have so many millionaires looked so ill at ease, or at least just ill, when the heart was removed.
Certainly, the opening pitch for the new series of Dragons’ Den will require a strong stomach on the part of the viewer. ‘Nothing like it’s been seen in the Den before,’ admits Peter. ‘It seemed it couldn’t be for real. Who’d want to take their wife to a dinner-and-dissection event? I did think, “Are we being set up?”’
We can’t reveal what happens with this off- the- scale bonkers business idea but let’s just say that, after their initial disgust, the dragons embark on a little dissecting of their own – of the business figures – before deciding whether they want to invest. Bottom line? The smell of money is strongest of all.
All five dragons are hooting about this when we catch up with them to find out how filming has gone on the 16th series. There seem to have been quite a few funny moments in this batch of pitches, not least the one that involved Peter Jones – all 6ft 7in of him – clambering into an auto rickshaw. Many of the pitches seemed to involve food, and there is much talk of ice cream and cheesecake. Deborah gets quite excited about the discovery of a seeded bread with ‘no flour, no gluten, no anything’. There are other nonfoodie pitches that sound very odd too. There’s the tent you can wear, which seems to have raised eyebrows. Also some sort of dog loo.
Away from the mad pitches, what joys await us with the new series? Well, viewers will be watching a Dragons’ Den that is quite different to the one that first hit our screens back in 2005, by all accounts.
Peter, the only original Dragon still standing, says the striking thing for him this year is the size of the businesses the dragons are being asked to invest in. No longer is the Den peopled with tiny startups that have been launched around the kitchen table. This year they
heard a pitch from a company with a turnover of £4 million.
Woah! Why does a business this successful need a leg-up from a Dragon? Isn’t it against the very ethos of the programme? ‘Well, it’s interesting,’ says Peter. ‘They’ve perhaps tried to target one of the Dragons before – outside the show – and had no joy, so they’ve decided just to apply.’
The other trend the Dragons are seeing is more foreign businesses coming to the UK and pitching to them. ‘ This year we’ve had another first – an American company that had previously pitched to Shark Tank,’ reveals Peter, referring to the US version of Dragons’ Den. It’s flattering, he adds, to discover that someone has flown halfway around the world to woo you.
So how many pitches are actually successful? Jenny says there have been a record number of contestants leaving the Den with deals. ‘I think it was 29 this year, which translates to about two per show. That’s incredible.’
It has meant some rather furious fighting from the Dragons to secure the most attractive investments though. Touker moans that Peter and Deborah are still the most desirable Dragons (‘because they’ve been here the longest. You can’t get away from that. Some people instantly target them’), but it sounds like there have been some tough battles when two or more Dragons want a particular deal.
‘Actually, often it’s us trying to sell ourselves to them rather than the other way around,’ admits Tej. ‘Sometimes it feels like they’re the Dragons.’
Last year, of course, Tej and Jenny (who made her millions via a cash machine company) were the newbies in the Den. Both say they were less nervous slipping into the famous seats this time around. ‘When it aired last time, I watched it with my husband and son and I was thinking, “Please don’t let me look r id iculous ,”’ admits Jenny. She was mostly fearful about how she would be edited. ‘ I reckon only about one-tenth of what’s f i lmed makes it on to the screen,’ she says. ‘You’re putting a lot of faith in the editing team.’
They’re both back again though, which suggests the BBC was happy with the reaction from viewers. Certainly, all five are formidable characters in the flesh, and the banter between them is fast and uncompromising. Mischievous too. Peter suggests I greet Deborah with the words ‘Hi Debbie’, as one hapless contestant did last year – surely sealing his fate (she hates being called Debbie). Touker inadvertently causes a minor spat when I ask him which of the Dragons he most hangs out with when filming finishes. He says, ‘Peter and Tej – men stick together sometimes’. When Deborah – who famously thinks the Dragons should be thought of as neither one gender nor the other – hears this, she is not happy. ‘He said what? Well, I’m not having that,’ she storms. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s not true.’
The fact the show is still going strong is quite astonishing, given that when it started it was a niche affair aimed at the business community. Still, not everyone’s a fan, as a recent encounter Jenny had reveals. She was hailed across a restaurant by a man who’d been looking her way for some time. ‘He said, “I know you! I’ve seen you on Come Dine With Me.’
Thankfully she has a sense of humour as big as her bank balance. Dragons’ Den returns on Sunday 12 August at 8pm on BBC2.
‘I’m not squeamish but I couldn’t handle it’ DEBORAH MEADEN