TV preview: Dragons' Den returns and Gregg Wallace takes us back Inside the Factory

They’re back, and they’re going to ask some quite reasonable questions

Here be dragons: a sight to put fear into even the most intrepid of entrepreneurs (BBC)

What better way, I ask you, to spend the evening of the Christian Sabbath than to watch some would-be businesspeople being mercilessly ridiculed by a gang of billionaires? Mammon mocking mammon, I guess. Actually, they’re maybe not all billionaires, but may as well be. There was a chap called Peter Hargreaves in the news this week, who helped built the Hargreaves Lansdowne personal finance company, and he said that he’d willingly drop $4bn of his $4.6bn wealth because of Brexit because it’s worth it, and he’d still have $600m left. That’s a perspective on life we can all take on board.

Anyway the outspoken Mr Hargreaves isn’t a dragon, which is probably a shame by the sounds of it, but we have a panel all the same: Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Touker Suleyman, Jenny Campbell and Tej Lalvani, back for Dragons’ Den. And they’ll be sitting around in that old warehouse surrounded by piles of BBC props department £50 notes asking “awkward” questions, pulling faces and – and you can also see this happening – moving the financial cogs around in their astute brains to work out how fast they can make some money of their own from the ingenues before them. Even though this is the 16th series and the proceedings are fairly formulaic, not to say predictable, there’s something addictive about the show, probably because there’s a never ending supply of people willing to come and be humiliated. Which is, after all, the key to good television.

I say “awkward” in inverted commas, though, because the questions they ask usually aren’t that awkward at all. They ask about what they charge for their product of service; how many customers they have; who owns the business now; what the debts are; the turnover; profit margins; firm orders rather than woolly promises from retailers; the competition; status of patents; have they done a P&L? That sort of thing. Not in truth all that difficult at all. Too often the well-meaning types have the air of eccentric inventors who think it’s great that they’ve invented a bog brush with an inbuilt smartphone or a teapot that glows in the dark and ask if they can have £200,000 for a 10 per cent share in the business. And then cry.

The real deal or a clever forgery? Bruce and Mould are on the case (BBC)

Thrilling as all that is, the most pleasure to be gained from Dragons’ Den are the spin-offs where some of the ideas the dragons rejected with maximum prejudice are revisited, their owners now preparing for their stock market listing from their mansions, surrounded by piles of real £50 notes, just for show. Maybe one day one of them will turn up on the Dragons’ Den panel. They’ve been there, after all.

Another way to make money is to get lucky, by finding some long lost Goya in granny’s attic, or by defrauding people through artistic forgery. Fake or Fortune, presented by Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould are engaged on a mission to discover whether a still life purporting to be the work of William Nicholson is in fact just that, and worth the £165,000 the owner paid for it in 2006 (maybe worth more now), or whether it isn’t, and is worth sod all. I challenge anyone to resist near-fatal attacks of schadenfreude as the series goes through its five-episode run.

Healy and Wallace reveal their sauces (BBC)

Less morally ambivalent viewing is afforded by Inside the Factory, which this week’s discovers the secrets of the mass manufacture of curry sauce and supermarket samosas. Just as Dragons’ Den insidiously, but valuably, introduces the general public to the world of venture capitalism, and Fake or Fortune to the world of art and antiques, so Inside the Factory gently puts the dull business of manufacturing into the nation’s living rooms – and makes it look like fun, which it is, of course. Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey churn out the weak puns and sense of wonder that are the hallmarks of this surprise success.

Such is the ingenuity and, sometimes, sheer stupidity of the criminal classes that I usually prefer true-life crime shows to the fictional telly cops, or leastways since they stopped making Columbo (1990, as it goes). The Detectives is ITV’s latest stab at the crime-solving-by-documentary genre. This week; armed robbery and domestic violence, so a nice balanced mix there. Alternatively, or additionally, there is BBC4’s Cardinal, which continues the craze for imported detective shows, in this case from Canada, and as an Anglophone production, no need for subtitles. Not as gruesome as when they do that thing with the seal cubs, but violent enough all the same.

In Papua New Guinea, young men’s skin is cut with the patterns of crocodile scales to represent the strength and power of an ancient crocodile spirit (BBC)

Given the current craze for tattoos, about which there should be a “robust” national debate but there isn’t, I thought I should mention Extraordinary Rituals, which features self-mutilation on a scale that makes most young folk with a gecko penned onto their arse look pretty tame. (And why geckos always?) I’ll admit that I’ve seen someone with a manically grinning Nigel Farage on their calf (as a tattoo, not the real former Ukip leader) with the slogan “Cheer Up Snowflake”, but generally we lack taste and originality in our tattooing. Why not gain some inspiration from the Maoris or the tribespeoples of Papua New Guinea?

A pizza topped with 24-carat gold is among the items reviewed by the ‘Peng Life’ crew (BBC)

Otherwise…I can still recommend Peng Life, featuring the YouTube Chicken Connoisseur Elijah Quashie, plus helper twins, The Twinsons, and I admit to utter indifference towards the European Championships, that is of athletics, swimming and something else, which reach their sweaty conclusion on the BBC this weekend.

Dragons’ Den (BBC2, Sunday 8pm); Fake or Fortune? (BBC1, Sunday 9pm); Inside the Factory (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm); The Detectives (ITV, Thursday 9pm); Extraordinary Rituals (BBC2, Friday 9pm); Peng Life (Channel 4, Friday 11.05pm)