After much fanfare and pre-show hype, the Irish version of Dragons’ Den has turned out to be a very big disappointment. Let’s be in no doubt here, the producers have followed the format perfectly and the production of the show is excellent, but the quality of lot of the participants and some of the Dragons themselves has to be called into question.
The UK version of Dragons’ Den has been very well received for several seasons now, and has featured some great British entrepreneurs including Theo Paphitis of La Senza and Ryman, Duncan Bannatyne of Bannatynes Health Clubs (as well as loads of other stuff), and Simon Woodroffe of YO! Sushi. All fantastic entrepreneurs, with hundreds of millions of pounds of net wealth on their books and all fantastic success stories in their own right.
Ireland’s version of the show features a decent selection of Dragons taking into account the size of our little nation including Bobby Kerr, a native of Kilkenny just like yours truly. He did, however, go to school in CBS Kilkenny – hardly as good as my alma mater St. Kieran’s College. My favourite of all the Dragons has to be Sean Gallagher, not only for his reasonably funny quips delivered in his unique lilt, but for his enthusiasm to at least try to make offers to entrepreneurs.
Some of the ideas on the show are awful, and I regularly feel slightly ashamed to be Irish watching it. I frequently hope none of our neighbours overseas are watching the stupidity of ideas like a system for ‘cleaning’ cash in supermarket tills, some crazy dudes who were trying to flog ‘Leprechaun Hair’, and €1 million before it was even properly off the ground.
That’s one of the real falling points of the show – the valuations the entrepreneurs put on their little businesses, especially when it comes to putting a value on websites. Do these people forget that Ireland isn’t the biggest area in the world? We have a tiny population, but yet these people put crazy valuations on businesses which are solely aimed at the Irish market. Are they stupid? At least go into the den with an expandable brand, or even an idea which can be sold to a worldwide market.
Some of the ‘entrepreneurs’ are clearly chaps and lassies who bring crazily bad ideas to the den with the sole aim of ‘getting on de telly’, and quite a few can barely string a sentence together, nevermind pitch for investment or run a business. These people should have been weeded out in the early stages of the auditions for the show, but perhaps the producers didn’t actually have that many applications?
If you do a search on Twitter for Dragons’ Den using #ddire as your search term, you’ll find an increasingly frustrated audience Tweeting about how bad the show has become, and reacting furiously to some very awful investments. So what do you think? Is Dragons’ Den a clear winner or a sore loser?
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Yes i should come back. Its entertaining.
Even if the Dragons are lightweight … but Sarah Newman is a C*NT