Gary Neville wasn’t even the oddest thing inside the Den
Has Dragons’ Den (BBC One) always been unhinged? It’s been a while since I tuned in. This week there were six dragons – the usual five, plus, for one week only, Gary Neville as a “guest dragon”. Perhaps the thrill of having Gary in the room went to everyone’s heads, because by the end of the episode they’d backed a man who “stumbled across a cacao shaman in Guatemala”, and thrown money at a woman selling “ear seeds”.
We’ll come back to them. First, the couple who pitched their Cosy Cinema concept: a sort of windowless shed with a bed and a giant TV screen in it. A good idea for a kids’ party, maybe, even if Peter Jones noted that it looked “like a boarded-up skip” and Steven Bartlett said: “You are paying £160 to watch Netflix in a shipping container.”
But Neville – footballer-turnedentrepreneur – wanted to know something else. Could people live in them? Neville is interested in cracking the issue of affordable housing and thinks that an upgraded boarded-up skip could be just the thing. Neville and Touker Suleyman were in.
Now, ear seeds. They are “acupuncture without the needles”, essentially stick-on beads you put on your ears. They cost £3 to make and sell for – wait for it – £30. Gwyneth Paltrow recommends them, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Neville jumped at the opportunity to invest: “I live in a family predominantly of women and if I went home and said that I’d not invested in you, my mum, my sister, my wife, my two girls, I don’t think they’d ever forgive me.”
Things went fully delirious with the arrival of Liam Browne and his cacao. Liam looked and spoke like Howard from Take That, if Howard had taken a lot of ayahuasca. He brought a “goddess” with him and sang to his cacao while banging a drum to give it a “heightened vibration”.
“Honestly, you live in a very different space to me,” said Deborah Meaden. “I live in a council house in Withington, so probably, yeah,” replied Liam. Quite a character. He is now in partnership with three Dragons. Neville called him an “incredible ambassador” for Manchester.
It was a generous, feelgood episode. Except for the first pitch. Spare a thought for the nice young man who ran a memorabilia business selling boots worn by famous footballers, and must have thought it was his lucky day when he heard Gary Neville was on the panel. Alas, Neville turned him down on the grounds that footballers would be uncomfortable with the idea of their donated boots being sold for profit. Footballers: they’re all heart.
The BBC is getting 2024 off to a cheery start. Flagship documentary of the week is Nuclear Armageddon: How Close
Are We? (BBC Two). And the conclusion was: very. Maybe build a bunker and start stockpiling tins.
In theory, this should have been terrifying. But somehow it wasn’t, because the programme appeared to have been prompted by two things. One is the box office success of
Oppenheimer, last year’s Hollywood film about “the father of the atomic bomb”. The presenter, journalist Jane Corbin, visited Oppenheimer’s cabin in Los Alamos, and we got a clip from the film. Unfairly or not, this made the documentary seem like a tie-in to a cinema release.
The second thing is the Doomsday Clock, which is “set” every year to show how close humanity is to annihilation. It now stands at 90 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been – mostly thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Corbin went to the offices of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the time, to find out more. But she failed to dispel the feeling that the clock is a bit of a gimmick, and pulling back the curtain to show us that it’s partially decided by Zoom meeting didn’t help.
Nor did Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin, seem terribly scientific when she said: “These are not the weapons that we need for the 21st century. People are scared. It doesn’t feel normal out there.” It was also mentioned, as an aside, that climate change and the threat posed by AI are also now taken into account when setting the clock.
Corbin went to RAF Lakenheath, where a tiny but committed band of campaigners are protesting against the rumoured arrival of American missiles. Her most interesting conversation was with Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who warned against underestimating North Korea. Hecker believes that it’s only a matter of time before it has the capability to hit North America. “I’ve watched them,” he said, “and every time somebody says ‘North Korea can’t do this’ – a few years later, they did it.”