Don’t bank on Channel 4 cashing in with its wheeler-dealer challenge
Say what you like about alan Sugar, and I often do, but he knows how to make a quid. From barrow boy to property billionaire, the boss of The apprentice is a serious businessman.
So what is comedian Sue Perkins doing as the presenter of a show for amateur entrepreneurs,
Double The Money? What business has she got, telling people how to do business?
We can accept her as the hostess of a baking contest because anyone can eat a cake. and like every TV comic, she has the automatic right to front a travelogue — tonight, she’s Lost In Thailand (see Pick of Today’s TV), following her jaunt to alaska earlier this year.
But she wasn’t selling ice cream to the Inuit while she was up there. In fact, many comedians, from Ken Dodd to Jimmy Carr, famously have a blind spot about accountancy.
‘I do worry they’ve got the wrong product for the conditions,’ she fretted about one of the couples on Double The Money. She sounded about as
BLURB OF THE WEEK: Netflix breathlessly plugs its latest costume drama as, ‘A winesoaked sex romp in the hills of Tuscany descends into an all-out scramble for survival.’ The show is The Decameron, based on a 14th-century literary classic. Is this a parody? Apparently not.
convincing as Joey Essex pontificating on quantum physics.
The show takes 13 duos, hands them a sum of cash and challenges them to do a spot of wheeler-dealing to increase their bank balances by 100 per cent. It’s a format apparently devised by TV toffs who regard the thought of actually having to make a living as amusingly quirky, a world of arfur Daley enterprises.
One father-and-son team, Dale and Harvey, dressed up in superhero capes like Del Boy and Rodney to run a car wash. Kallum and his grandma Paulette filled the boot of their car with bottles of pop and drove to the seaside — but picked a cold, rainy day for their venture.
Trying to keep track of 13 pairs was dizzying. Mother and daughter Shana and Talia made cupcakes and cookies to sell, pals Faye and Clare did fortune-telling at a fete, Chelsea estate agents Cosmo and Louis tried to sell bouquets at £75 a bunch. all of them have a touching back story, of course, though cramming their personal tragedies into a couple of sentences emphasised how mechanical this all was.
The logistics of the show were less obvious. In the first round, couples were each given £250 and told to come back with £500 or be eliminated. Next time, they’ll have to double £500 to a grand, and so on until in the final episode they’ll have to bank £20k.
But whether they can keep that cash is not explained. If so, cheating will be easy: round up fake customers (neighbours, friends, social media followers if you’re a Modern young Thing) and win by loaning them your own money to buy your wares. It’s a simple dodge, and at least one of the competitors appeared to be doing just that.
We also don’t know whether betting is allowed. What’s to stop players sticking £250 on a horse at even money?
Lose and it’s a free flutter — win and you pocket the cash. arfur wouldn’t say no to that.