TV: Showing no mercy

The judges on Dragon's Den choose whether or not to break the hearts of eager inventors, while in the strange world of The Honourable Scaffolder, being killed or spared depends on how much you're willing to pay

Surely no greater dilemma has exercised the minds of people in recent years than that age-old question: how do you keep the unused half of your cucumber fresh in the fridge?

To be honest, I was never aware before that this was a major quandary for humanity, but at least one person has invested huge amounts of his time and £20,000 in his own money into solving this problem. Like many an eclectic genius before him, the man and his invention turned up this week on Dragon's Den (BBC2, Thursday), which appears at times to be the last refuge for budding entrepreneurs whose inventions have failed to attract funding by conventional routes.

Occasionally, "inventions" is rather a misnomer, as with ideas such as a selection of pocket-sized short stories to be sold alongside coffee in coffee shops (short stories don't sell, even when they come with free sachets of cocaine, never mind caffeine). Or beach towels with pockets that resemble other towels with pockets.

No matter how bizarre your invention, on Dragon's Den, you get six minutes of public fame – or ritual humiliation – courtesy of five multimillionaires who say things like, "I would rather swallow gallstones than invest in your product."

Unfortunately, our friend who invented the elaborate contraption to slow down the delay of cucumbers, ("a cucumber condom", as one dragon put it) left with no investment.

It was nice, however, to see the stakes turned on the professionally exasperated "dragons" this week by Dubliner Lara Goodbody. She turned her back on millionaires Richard Farleigh, Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meadon, who all wanted a 30 per cent stake in her company, Yogabugs, in return for an investment of £295,000: she was only willing to offer 15 per cent.

Occasionally, good ideas like this come along, but generally, it is just a sort of Pop Idol for grown-ups, with the advantage that while you may get to witness their humiliation at the hands of the jury, you don't have to hear them sing.

Some years ago, I was approached by an American film director who was yearning to slip free from the "go projects" of soft porn where he had made his money. He wanted me to write a film script that would be "a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Deirdre of the Sorrows". I took a pass, but I suspect that if someone did twin these two worlds together, you might get something akin to The Honourable Scaffolder (RTÉ2, Saturday), part of the Shortscreen series of new Irish films.

This is in no way to mock this short, which was written by Conor Barry and directed and produced by Brendan Muldowney (with Catherine O'Flaherty co-producing). It is simply to give a sense of the eerie, lost universe that the short film created – a world that cleverly existed with no need to contextualise or locate or explain itself.

It was a film of growing, slightly nightmarish power where, after you adjusted to the dislocation of place and history, you were slowly drawn into the moral dilemmas it posed. Its world was an unnamed one where a good "scaffolder" could swiftly end, or indefinitely prolong, the suffering of a hanged person by standing underneath the gallows (the scaffold), either pulling on the legs of the condemned person to break their neck or supporting their dangling legs on their shoulders to slow the strangulation and prolong their death.

Scaffolders worked for the highest bidder, those seeking mercy or revenge. What they could not do was show mercy or honour, lest they face the fate of the person they spared.

With good performances by Frank Coughlan and Simon Jewell among others, it made for arresting and original viewing, and would make even the most intrepid inventor turn his thoughts to higher matters than wilting cucumbers.