Love it or loathe it, reality TV has been the most popular, innovative and defining genre of the past decade.
But it has often been dogged by controversy about a key pillar of its credibility: its authenticity. Critics have sometimes wondered whether conflicts on shows like Wife Swap are contrived by directors and whether footage is edited heavily to create spurious narratives.
One immensely successful subset of the genre is the talent show, where largely hapless amateurs compete in a particular discipline and are whittled down by a panel of judges. Although the majority of these shows centre around the all-singing and all-dancing members of society, the other leader in this field are the shows that focus on entrepreneurial and business skills.
The two most successful examples are both in the BBC’s stable, namely Dragon’s Den, where aspiring and inexperienced entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to a panel of multi-millionaire venture capitalists in the hope of securing investment, and The Apprentice, where 16 hopefuls compete in a series of business-related challenges for the prize of a £100k-a-year job working in one of Sir Alan Sugar’s businesses.
True talent
For many of us unimpressed by the likes of Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity, havens for the talentless, narcissistic and washed up, here finally were reality TV programmes that showcased and rewarded true talent.
Does the imperative to entertain sometimes conflict with the goal of identifying and rewarding enterprising talent?
Venturing into ‘the Den’ to persuade ‘the dragons’ to provide financial backing were entrepreneurs seeking to take their start-up to the next level or inventors with an ingenuous product to push. At worst, you at least admired their bravery in dropping their career to pursue a dream of business success, and risking humiliation on national television; at best they were innovative and commercially astute, plugging a gap in the market and helping to solve society’s problems with their inventions.
On The Apprentice it was gratifying to see those with the keenest commercial instincts rewarded with a highly paid job and the cocksure but incompetent given their marching orders.
But does the imperative to entertain sometimes conflict with the goal of identifying and rewarding enterprising talent?
Simon Woodroffe, Yo Sushi! founder and dragon on the inaugural series of Dragon’s Den, said that “one of the reasons I left, is that the BBC wanted to get crap people on so that I could kick the shit out of them, and I didn’t really want to do that.”
In September 2006, the Sunday Mirror alleged that dragons had withdrawn from deals for spurious reasons, forced entrepreneurs to withdraw by imposing unfair terms or broke off contact with no explanation. The dragons countered that deals only fell apart when it transpired that the pitches had been less than candid.
These entrepreneurial beauty contests have raised the profile of businessmen and women hitherto only known to the FT-reading fraternity. Not types to waste opportunities, the impossibly tall Peter Jones and rather more diminutive Duncan Bannatyne have capitalised on their new-found status as TV personalities, with Jones appearing in the derivative Tycoon and American Inventor, and Bannatyne narrating documentaries and even popping up on entertainment shows.
