OPEN

Being an online-focused sort of person when it comes to media there are only three kinds of TV viewing I indulge in:

1. Children’s TV. Like many parents of young children, CBeebies theme tunes bounce round my head far too much of the time. Charlie & Lola is my favourite. Tommy Zoom is  my son’s.
2. DVD / on demand series. There’s a very limited amount of time to watch TV together between work and child-herding for my wife and I. Channel surfing doesn’t usually cut it. Box sets and Virgin Media (one of the few reasons I keep it on) definitely do.
3. Shouty telly. In short TV that you can enjoy shouting at. The Apprentice is in full swing – hurrah! There’s nothing better than yelling at the contestants as they fluff, goof, ape business jargon and try to stab one another in the back. The Apprentice: You’re Fired is also excellent for shouting at, partly because of the weird z-list panels of business or theme-related celebs they bring on to debate the week’s episode.

Naturally Dragon’s Den is my other Shouty Telly favourite. So I was sad to hear that the BBC had dumped Richard Farleigh from the line-up. Farleigh was obviously an outsider among the street-fighting, pure-bred entrepreneurs that make up the rest of the Dragons team in the last couple of series.

The Daily Mail is blaming political correctness for Farleigh’s departure (well it was going to be that, house prices or the EU, wasn’t it) but it’s just as likely that the other Dragons edged him out if the on air body language and vibes were anything to go by.

Although Farleigh was minted like the rest of them, he made his pile in the city rather than bootstrapping and there was always a sense that the others wished he wasn’t there.

At times it seemed that Peter Jones or Theo Paphitis were so enraged by his floppy haired politesse and refusal to confirm to their gruff consensus that they were going to leap out of their seats and lamp him one. That made for good viewing in itself.

If you’ve never seen Dragon’s Den, Charlie Brooker has it down pat in this clip (you need to watch from 1 min 50 secs in)… Happy Monday.