Such risk takers make for compulsive viewing

Entrepreneurial shows are forging a new genre. Call it "totally-out-of touch-with-reality TV". Even the austere Dragon's Den couldn't escape its moments of mad fantasy. In last week's finale, the Dragons were more like possums caught in the headlights as they listened, stunned, to a woman's bonkers pitch for their investment in her "relaxed kids" business, couched as a new age fairy-tale.

By the time she had reached the Jack and the Beanstalk references even the most hardheaded of the Dragons were complaining of the surreality of the experience.

The latest offering, Make Me A Million (last night, TV One, 8.30), takes the unreality factor to whole new levels. The first unfathomable notion is why Emma, Ivan and Chris, three multimillionaires collectively worth about 130 million quid, haven't anything better to do.

The next bit of illogicality is their selection of proteges, whom they will invest in and mentor for a year, in a competition to be the first of the three partnerships to make a million.

Against all reason, Ivan chose two young solo mums who can talk the talk about committing "110 per cent and more if necessary" but who don't have childcare arranged or a business idea.

Tycoon Emma went for Kate and Fergus, who aim to achieve "world domination" by marketing an aerated bed. Yep, that's a bed with fans blowing air through the mattress. And Chris, who has a big, glitzy mansion worthy of Footballers' Wives, has gone for the gay couple whose dieting product is "going to be bigger than Weight Watchers", if only they knew what it was.

If that's the quality of magnates' decision-making, it makes you mightily suspicious that their business successes must be the result of sheer fluke.

Make Me A Million is in danger of becoming compelling viewing. Rare is the show where the one you're going to love to hate emerges so clearly and so soon.

Twentysomething Kate is begging to come a cropper. She has all the answers, expressed in fluent marketese and backed by the wealth of her couple of years' experience as a PR flunky. She boasts a breathtaking arrogance that makes her incapable of distinguishing between being put down and being taught something she needs to know. Every time Emma tries to tell her a few home truths, we get a whine from Kate about how she feels disempowered when someone treats her like a pupil and she doesn't "take being patronised lightly".

Next up on the fantasist list is solo mum Karen, who despite being handed a business idea on a plate by one of Ivan's mates and an opportunity of a lifetime, still can't get her head around the fact that if you want to make money you might have to put in some time in the office.

But the show's most unreal element, by a millionaire's mile, is Emma, whom I'm convinced is really being played by comedian Dawn French. She looks like French, sounds like French and the scene in which she took her proteges to entrepreneur boot camp in her country mansion was 100 per cent pure French and Saunders satirical sketch.

This alone could carry the show. Watch out Donald Trump: the prize for TV's best unwitting self-parody is slipping from your grasp.