Episode one of Peter Jones’ Tycoon was interesting to watch, the format seems to be an odd mixture of The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den and Big Brother. The way the contestants responded to Jones made it seem rather like they were contestants on The Apprentice rather than Tycoons in training.

The contestants consisted of:

Elizabeth “Make It Happen” Hackford, who proceeded to tell us that all her family and colleagues think she is mediocre (nice and supportive then aren’t they). Unfortunately she didn’t manage to live up to her self styled brand as she didn’t make it happen. Hackford was planning to launch a vodka fruit drink but couldn’t find a name or point of differentiation. The drinks can now be found as VTox.

Lauren Pope , who lets face it had probably been written off by most of us once we learned she is a glamour model, plans to establish an inspirational brand to sell clip-in hair extensions for the 16-30’s market base. I’m not sure what her management would make of the fact that she told viewers that she wears clip-in extensions and told Jones that she looked good on the packaging because they touched up the artwork. Fair play to her though she did appear to have just knuckled down and got on with producing a product, I look forward to seeing how she does.

Justin Chieffo, ex bodyguard and world karate champion with balls of paper mache… apparently. I like the idea of his product, a carrier bag dispenser, lets face it we should all be doing more to reuse, recycle or just avoid plastic bags, but I just don’t see it working as a business.

Iain Morgan’s idea is to be the sole import agent for micro radio controlled helicopters, which sounds more like a job than a business to me, fortunately he’s clearly got a bigger vision in the form of Bladez Toys. I’ve no doubt sales of the helicopters will go well.

Tom Thurlow’s business idea was to start a free newspaper for teenagers, unfortunately it seems Piers Morgan has beaten him to the teenage newspaper market with First News.

Cathy Caudwell-Todd and Helen James didn’t look too promising to start with as they seemed to be a little put out by the suggestion that they rebrand, but they then suddenly turned around, rebranded and made over £1K worth of sales. Their Sod The Gardening range is available on their website (still with the old girly gardening brand).

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