At Home With Hilary Devey: Dragon’s Den Is Massive Shiny Stately Home
HILARY Devey is the newest TV star on Dragons’ Den, the BBC talent show that enables rich business people to get recognised on the street. Her job, for those of you not versed in the tired show, is to be part of a panel who humiliate members of the public who dare to step before them and pitch an idea. The dragons will then smirk, sneer, exchange knowing nods with one another or present a magic pile of beans that will make both them and the pitcher richer.
Self-made millionaire businesswoman Hilary Devey is here to breathe fire. She looks like a deranged Dot Cotton who’s let her bangs grow out and likes to keep her clothes uncreased by pulling them on over the coat hanger and the wardrobe. The BBC’s creepy trailers sought to foster the idea that Devey is angry, possibly demonic – a Saturday morning cartoon baddie.
But we get to know otherwise because we’ve read her interview on Hello! magazine.
We meet Hilary in her “flamboyant stately home“, Rangemore Hall in Staffordshire. Stood in the middle of her gold and red hued room, Hilary is dressed in a white jump of a style not seen since the days of Pan’s People and the racier scenes in Howard’s Way. Hello! says she is “tough and unncompromising” on the telly. But in person she looks like she’s about to dance and offers the same warm toothy smile in every photo.
What do we learn of Hilary? Well, we learn that she is on her third husband – two divorces and marriage to a Turkish man whom she later discovered was already married. She has a son named Melvit, whose been a heroin addict and now does nothing, not even heroin. She suffered a stroke that cost her the full use of her left arm. She has two Yorkshire terriers called Mixie and Dixie.
She tells us that on the way to Dragons’ Den she was “physically sick“. And she likes to dress up:
“…I’ve got a red mink waistcoat that I wore at Christmas with a big red hat with berries on it.“
She’s had a tummy stuck. She’s had diabetes and alopecia. She has an Alexander McQueen dress, once modelled by Naomi Campbell. She has properties in Spain, Marrakech and is about to buy one in Palm Bech, Florida.
She has nine horses, King Edward VII’s bath and access to a bomb-proof steel room.
And now that she’s on the telly, she has fame. And you can’t buy that – or can you..?
Posted: 16th, August 2011 | In: TV & Radio Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
