Ratings soar for Dragon's Den on CBC-TV
Published Friday December 5th, 2008
Have the worldwide recession, panic in the stock markets and daily reports of job losses turned us all into freelancers and entrepreneurs - or just TV watchers?
Perhaps both, judging by the one place where everything is heading in the right direction - ratings for the CBC venture-capitalist series, Dragon's Den.
This past Monday the series hit a new high with just over a million viewers. The week before, 971,000 tuned in across Canada. That's a big jump from the 600,000 or so who were watching earlier in the season.
Host Dianne Buckner initially dismisses the notion that the ratings spike has anything to do with the faltering economy.
"It's entertaining, that's why it's so popular," says Buckner.
She admits, however, there have been an unusually high percentage of people pitching business ideas this season from the hard hit auto town of Windsor, Ont.
"It is true that if ever you had a dream to get away from a corporate job, start your own venture and make your own way in the world, now may be the time to do it."
Originally scheduled to wrap up its third season on Monday (Dec. 8), soaring ratings have led to an order for a 12th episode, which will extend Dragon's Den to Jan. 11.
Even the CBC, it seems, has caught the business opportunity bug. Dragon's Den is its own success story. After launching in Japan (where the format is owned by Sony), the series has been franchised internationally, with versions produced in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Israel, the Netherlands, Finland and Nigeria.
The format is the same in every country: fledgling entrepreneurs walk into the "den" and pitch their big business ideas to proven capitalists in an attempt to secure real investment in their companies. It's the money version of American Idol, with dreams shattered or fulfilled and judges even richer, and sometimes nastier, than Simon Cowell.
This season, the five fiery Canadian Dragons have been Arlene Dickinson, the impressive redhead with the super-villain shock of white hair who owns media company Venture Communications; Robert Herjavec, who made a fortune selling his IT security firm at the height of the dot-com boom; Kevin O'Leary, the bullet-headed host of Business News Network's Squeeze Play, who sold his educational venture the Learning Company to Mattel in 1999 for $3.7 billion; Mountie-turned-multimillionaire Jim Treliving, who owns the Boston Pizza chain; and W. Brett Wilson, founder of Calgary's big oil bank, FirstEnergy Capital Corp.
None suffers fools for a living, and all are quite capable of telling some of these dreamers to wake up.
"They're all trying to give the person in front of them a reality check," says Buckner.
Some people need it, she says.
"Their focus group has been their friends and family who love them and want to tell them what a great job they're doing. What they really need is somebody who is brutally honest to say, 'You're wasting your time and energy and money, and you need to stop that.' "
Then again, there are presenters who get turned down or who even turned down the dragon offers and go on to do quite well.
One such woman will be featured on Monday's show.
"People have this perception that the dragons have all the power and all the money," says Buckner, but just getting on the show gives these budding entrepreneurs national exposure and sometimes results in a better offer from other potential investors.
Then there are the offers even the dragons can't refuse. All five pledged on air to invest $1.25 million in the Uno, a Segway hybrid pitched by Ben Gulak, an MIT student from Milton, Ont.
The prototype even drew interest from The Tonight Show.
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