Page 362 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

doorbell? For a few seconds my head was all over the place, and
although it was lovely to see so many friends, it made watching
myself on TV an even stranger experience. What was odder still
was that as soon as the show started broadcasting my BlackBerry
started ringing. I had to put it on silent so that we could actually
hear the TV. By the end of the show I had 100 e-mails, and that
night my phone did not stop ringing. Literally every second it
would bleep with a text, an e-mail or a call. People I had gone to
school with had Googled me, found my website and sent me a
message. People I had worked with twenty years earlier were
getting in touch. People I’d placed in a job. People I’d never met!
It was extraordinary.
The next day, as soon as offices were open, journalists started
calling. Could I give them five minutes, could I talk about the
current investment climate, could I give them a quote on the
Chancellor? The attention was unbelievable. When Deborah and
Duncan had told me to prepare for some coverage, I had
anticipated a bit in the Radio Times, not constant visibility!
In the weeks that followed, I started to appear on the cover of
magazines – a new Dragon was very exciting in the business
community – and every day my name appeared in the papers.
Before Dragons’ Den I had just been a guy running a business.
Now it seemed I was a celebrity.
If the reaction of friends and the media was one thing, the
response of the public was another phenomenon all together. I
came out of the office one day, on my way to an appointment, and
there was a guy standing there with an envelope.
‘Excuse me, James.’
I looked at him and thought: Do I know you?
‘My name is Darren and I’ve just walked all the way from
Bradford . . .’
Really? But then I looked at him: he actually did look as if he’d
just walked all the way from Yorkshire.

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