‘Wellness coffee’ laced with cannabis? I’ll stick to Nescafé

You know you’re getting old when the phrase, ‘I’m putting my affairs in order,’ ceases to be a vague metaphor and becomes an item on your To Do list.

Entrepreneur Sheila arrived on Dragons’ Den (BBC1) to promote her clever website, called Biscuit Tin, where users can store a will, last wishes, bank account details etc. It’s a nifty idea, saving families a lot of trouble and paperchasing after a loved one dies.

I’d worry, though, about the £50 annual fee. It’d be just my luck to sign up and then live for years.

Simpler, you’d have thought, to organise everything in a notebook. Scouring Amazon, I found one for just that purpose, labelled I’m Dead, Now What? It’s 12 quid new, but you can pick up a used copy for £6.80. I think I’ll buy the secondhand one — my children stand a better chance of a decent inheritance if they get someone else’s.

The dragons turned Sheila down, but they were in a grouchy mood.

Full-scale shouting matches broke out more than once. New arrival Steven Bartlett, 29, who boasts his businesses are worth £300 million, seems to provoke both the den’s alpha males, Touker Suleyman and Peter Jones.

It’s making for the liveliest series we’ve seen in years. ‘Never disagree with me,’ Touker snapped, ‘because I’ve got a lot more experience than you.’ Steven just smirked.

Not everyone noticed the yelling. Georgia, trying to flog her toilet tissue moisturiser, took no notice. ‘I’m Italian,’ she explained, ‘so it didn’t even register.’

After the first two pitches flopped, presenter Evan Davis talked us through a highlights reel from the past 15 years. That proved how badly Peter has aged. He used to look like a moptop 1960s pop star, now he has two days of unshaven grey stubble around droopy jowls.

If Steven really wants to wind him up, he should press a fiver into Peter’s hand and tell him to get himself a sandwich and a coffee.

Even the coffee made me feel elderly as the final business hopefuls appealed for investors. The chaps from London Nootropics billed themselves as an ‘adaptogenic wellness company’, selling coffee beans blended with ginseng and cannabis extracts. What the heck is ‘adaptogenic wellness’? If I’m getting too decrepit to understand a hot drink, I really am ancient.

The parade ground sergeantmajors bellowing insults at recruits on The Queen’s Guards: A Year In Service (C5) were reassuringly old fashioned.

‘Did your father not teach you how to iron your trousers?’ roared one at a quivering teenager with a lop-sided crease. Another stuck his glowering face under a young Coldstream Guardsman’s nose and informed him, at 120 decibels, that his moustache was ‘a hideous growth’.

It’s reassuring to know that, in the Army at least, anyone caught brewing adaptogenic coffee will probably find himself peeling potatoes till he stops being so bleedin’ lah-di-dah. Harried through one drill after another, the troops found a way to take revenge.

As their Major-General arrived to take the final inspection, the band struck up with Darth Vader’s march from Star Wars.

The first half hour of this five-part documentary, about the soldiers famous for their red tunics and busbies, was slow to get going.

It tried to introduce too many characters and became fragmented. But by the time the regiment’s Drum Major was being fitted for his £40,000 goldbraided robes, the narrative was starting to come together.

This promises to be an entertaining series.