Watching the "where are they now" show confirms that Dragon's Den provides some pretty outrageous promotion for those who appear on the show. TMP remembers the good old days of BBC propriety, when Blue Peter religiously used to cover the name of "Ever Ready" on its distinct blue batteries, using black tape.
It's not as if Peter "as seen on TV" Jones, Theo Profiterole & Co need any freebies - especially as their victims get quite thoroughly mugged for equity in a manner that borders on disgraceful, where they are blatantly using their benefits of celebrity – provided by the BBC licence payer – to leverage the poor mugs off their own businesses. With gullible souls like this eagerly turning up to be brutally insulted and financially raped on TV, it's a mystery how any of these ideas ever make any money.
TMP respectfully suggests that part of the work of reforming the BBC might include asking the Dragons to hand back half the equity they have stolen, by exploiting the BBC and our licence fees? Better still, let's adopt an interactive format and more liquid market where the entire audience can choose to participate and "buy shares" in the ideas being paraded.
However "good" the TV, the idea that an entrepreneur is required to spill the beans on their business idea in a way that alerts competition must be fundamentally wrong.
And then however attractive the proposition, the Dragons nearly always end up saying they'll invest only if it's a guaranteed monopoly with patents to squash any of the competition (that has just been woken up) - and if the owner hands over half the business in return for a ride with the licence-payer funded publicity machine.
The whole eco-sermon is based on a well prepared and tedious chanted litany of assumptions; acts of faith that are every bit as specious as those which form the basis of any sermon delivered by any wild eyed and rabid preacher, for whom the absence of unimpeachable scientific proof is a small inconvenience that is dealt with by dismissing any doubters as Satan's spawn.
We've known for 100 years that fossil hydrocarbon energy oil was going to run out. We didn't know when we would reach "peak oil", but now we have, and the present distraction is not about climate change, it is about the politics of energy security.
So let us all stop being quite so easily suckered and insist on the truth. It makes little practical difference, since the reality is that we need to explore and develop any and all alternative energy options as fast as possible. However, over many years, one party has had a better track record of creating climates for commercial progress and success in a competitive world than the control freak nannying of Labour's command and control obsession.
If the government was actually serious about carbon emissions for any reason other than an opportunity to herd the sheeple and raise taxes, it wouldn't cost ~3-5 times less to fly 300 miles than go by train.
Talk of storms brought about by fractional global warming needs to tempered by more than just an obsession with CO2. Solar activity is at a 50 year low - and the last time there was this few sunspots happened to coincide with a year (1903) when an unprecedented and massive storm devasted the Great Lakes area of North America. DO we really belive we are more influential than the sun - whose solar wind blasts this planet's atmosphere at an increible but reasonably steady 280.2km /sec.