Thousands of people in the UK, like me, are part of a sordid and secret society. My family do not know about my participation in this community, and neither do my friends. To them I am a normal person, who smiles and nods and holds conversations. And then I go home and – I can barely bring myself to say. I … debase myself by watching loads of clips of Dragons’ Den on YouTube.
The DDYTUK (Dragons’ Den YouTube UK) community is made up of people who once innocently watched a Dragons’ Den clip on YouTube, and thought that would be the end of it. But then it gets its claws in you. Each clip is the same: between nine and 11 minutes long, and encompasses a pitch in its entirety. The ride up the lift; the “Hello, Dragons”; the smile and awkward cough; the two-minute spiel and five-minute interrogation; the bit where Duncan Bannatyne turns completely sideways for some reason; the offers. Somehow, over the course of this, you become deeply attached to the success or failure of a product, and when you move out into the real world and see it on shelves, you feel a pang of support. There is a little noise buried deep within the Dragons’ Den ambient soundtrack – a chirruping little bip-boop – that comes feverishly to me in my dreams.
I was reminded of this when watching Aldi’s Next Big Thing, which is a bit like Dragons’ Den – or that Apprentice task where they pitch to supermarkets – just without the good bits, like the drama and the tension and the reason at all to care. The format is this: it’s all right to like Aldi now because every year a newspaper finds itself surprised to declare that they have the best Christmas pudding or a really good sub-£10 red. Aldi, as a result, is constantly buying up huge orders of new products to put in their almost 1,000 British stores. But how do they find them? Well, budding food entrepreneurs come to their HQ and pitch. And Aldi tastes each one and goes: “Is there any way you could make this pie for 69p?” And they go: no not really. And Aldi goes: thank you for your time.
This is what I understood from Aldi’s Next Big Thing (Channel 4, Thursday, 8pm), anyway, which is a programme that almost but doesn’t really show the process of taking a really nice cake someone makes at home and turning it into 100,000 units sitting in a truck. This might be because the show is all over the place. The first half is aiming for early MasterChef-round high drama, where six cooks are invited to a windowless room to prepare a tray of food for three judges (Aldi’s Julie Ashfield, presenter Anita Rani and that clone of Gregg Wallace the US army made in a lab, Chris Bavin), but always falls short. When the trays emerge, contestants are encouraged to tell a story, which usually means they bring a framed picture of their family out and start crying. Then Julie Ashfield tastes all the food, asks whether it would make sense to freeze it and whether they can make a million versions of it by next week, and sends them home when they say no.
The second half of the show is more interesting. The two contestants who survived the crying-and-serving-things-on-a-tray stage are sent back to their home base to try to figure out the logistics of making their handmade meals in a huge factory run by machines. They sometimes have to redesign their packaging to make it more supermarket-friendly, for instance, and the insight into that process is actually quite intriguing. Essentially, the best part of this show is watching someone optimise their recipe for a ready meal. The rest of it is very tired TV I’ve seen dozens of times before.
But by episode two … I found myself oddly absorbed. I have been trying to figure out why, and I think it’s because there is an absolute absence of peril. When Aldi’s Next Big Thing is good, it taps into the ambient sort-of-interestingness of Inside the Factory, where Gregg Wallace just wears a hairnet and occasionally says “Wow”. Watching someone work out a kink with the dryness of a chicken pie was bizarrely worth the 40 minutes of nothing that led up to it. If you are afraid of joining the DDYTUK community because you find the fact that things actually happen in Dragons’ Den too intense, I have an unlikely solution for you. An hour of watching Aldi figure out if they want to sell this cake or not might just be the low-stakes TV you’ve been looking for.
