Dragon's Den/Women At The Top, BBC Two

Feature writer

Saturday 15 September 2012

The new series of Dragons' Den (BBC Two, Sunday, 9pm) has started and, as usual, it's impossible to take your eyes off Hilary Devey.

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Mark Smith

The founder and CEO of Pall-Ex, the world's most glamorous pallet distribution company, is known for huge, crenellated outfits that make her look like a tiny human controller staring out of a very large and shiny machine.

But this year she's really gone for it, with an outfit that's bigger than ever. She appears to be wearing replicas of the Sydney Opera House on each shoulder, which leaves her head to bob in the middle of them like a buoy in the harbour. It is disturbing, and rather wonderful, like The Mekon in make-up.The key to the look is padding. In Devey's other series, Women At The Top (BBC Two, Thursday, 11.20pm), which looks at gender issues in the workplace, we got a glimpse inside Pall-Ex's secret headquarters somewhere off the M1, and there it was: padding. Her office chair was padded. Her cheeks were padded. Even the fluorescent tabard she wears in the warehouse was padded. She may have to obey health and safety rules like everyone else, but that doesn't mean Hilary Devey can't look fabulous. And she does. Flash Gordon chic may be a bit much for most people but it's clearly what Devey likes and she goes for it, unapologetically, which is what you can do when you're rich. But more importantly: Devey is self-made, a working-class woman who built a business and is now a television star.And that matters just now. Last week, Julie Walters warned that drama and television could become the preserve of the well-off because young people from poor backgrounds won't be able to afford to go to drama school. Certainly TV, which in the 1960s and 1970s tried to tell the story of the working class, seems to have utterly abandoned them to the clutches of reality shows and Jeremy Kyle, while the posh ponce around in big dramas such as Parade's End or Downton Abbey.Devey is a welcome contrast to all of that. She sits in her chair in the Dragons' Den like Emperor Ming's mum, handing out advice and admonishments that are invariably sensible. And, best of all, she does it all in a voice that growls like one of her 40-ton articulated trucks tackling a one-in-10 gradient. "To come in 'ere looking for £100,000," she told one contestant, "you're off the wall." And then she dismissed him, with a wave of a hand weighed down by diamonds.So good is the performance that it's starting to feel like Devey is the only Dragon that counts. Dragons' Den has always been a hard programme to truly love, largely because it fetishises money with endless shots that linger lovingly over great piles of tenners, but Devey has softened this and put it into context. She clearly still has the urge to make money, which is good, but she also has a zeal to help and an instinct for fairness. And even better: she does it all while looking like the leading lady of a glamorous soap opera about a palette distribution company somewhere off the M1.

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Dragon's Den/Women At The Top, BBC Two

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