A lady who appeared on Dragons’ Den has accused BBC producers of’messing with the narrative’.
Anna Brightman, 30, who appeared on the show with her brother William to peddle a variety of cosmetic items, has questioned how her part wound up on television.
She and William made their Dragons’ Den début in 2018 when they requested a £50,000 investment in their cosmetics firm UpCircle, with the dragons who accepted the pitch receiving 2% ownership.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though, with dragon Peter Jones first dismissing their concept, but Anna and William turned things around and secured their large investment.
While the pitch was effective, with dragons Touker Suleyman and Tej Lalvani shaking hands and committing to invest, Anna’s recollections of seeing her performance again were unpleasant.
‘What I found is, it is TV, so you can’t control the narrative that is spun. You are in there for hours, and that is a big fear for me,’ she recalled.
Anna told GB News: ‘When we filmed it the whole thing was such a blur. You’re filled with adrenaline, you come out of there and you go I don’t know what happened, what was said.’
She went on to say that, while company owners featured on the show remember bits and parts of the pitch, you have no idea what the producers would crop, cut, and tweak.
‘They definitely do mess with the narrative. There were snippets that were put in answers to different questions. Huge portions of what happened are left out it seems very strange looking back on it.’
In a statement on the company’s website, Anna and William stated that they were’standing for three hours’ in front of the dragons and had no idea what the BBC planned to show in the episode.
As of 2024, UpCircle has continued to strive for a zero-waste beauty line, producing its products using upcycled materials and claiming to be cruelty-free.
However, three years after their appearance on Dragons’ Den, Anna was included to Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 list for 2021, which recognises 30 businesses under the age of 30 who are renowned in their respective fields.
Unfortunately, there aren’t always pleasant endings for company owners when they face Deborah Meaden, Duncan Bannatyne, or Sara Davies.
John Nicholls, who featured on the show in 2017, thought he had a clever idea to help dog owners pick up after their pets while on walks – a twist on the old ‘pooper scooper’ concept.
Poor John later claimed that the dragons were attempting to scare him by squirming and even losing their anger with him, stating that the dragons were unexpectedly ‘aggressive’.
Dragons’ Den is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.