So here we are – considering the Twitter exclamations of a couple of B-list hard men. It must be the silly season. Yesterday Joey Barton, soon to be ex-Newcastle United footballer and Duncan Bannatyne, ‘serial entrepreneur’, took to their Blackberries to bring to the eagerly awaiting world thoughts on their current predicaments.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was Barton – normally better known for nutting or scything through those who cross him both on and off the field – who raised his game, by choosing to quote George Orwell. ‘In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act,’ typed Joey onto his keyboard, doubtless without his lips moving once. Nice to see Joey, as he trains alone up in the bleak North East, is maintaining his dignity.

By contrast, Bannatyne, responding to a Russian by the name of ‘Yuri Vasilev’, who had made unpleasant threats against the Scot’s daughter, came up with the following beauty: ‘I offer £25,000 reward for the capture of the coward who calls himself @YuriVasilev_ double if his arms are broken first.’ I wonder if he ran that one past his PR first. Probably not, as it was later deleted.

Now we’re all aware Bannatyne likes it to be known he is capable of handling himself. He has, after all, been in the thick of a Glasgow ice cream van war which makes Khe San or the Siege of Sarajevo look like Paris in the Spring. He slugs it out in the gym game where nobody takes any prisoners. Yes, Duncan is the kinda guy who, when people get in his way – or even merely up his nose – responds according to character. In his youth, Bannatyne was dishonourably discharged from the navy for trying to throw an officer off a boat landing jetty in Scotland. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a military detention centre and later did 10 days in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison for non-payment of a £10 fine in relation to a charge of breach of the peace and resisting arrest.

It’s this sort of aggression – the threat of snapping a few limbs – albeit manifest in a TV studio and playing up for an audience, that we see displayed on Dragon’s Den. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, this capitalist, enterpreneurialsm thing, and everyone in the Den wants to be supreme champion – or supreme bitch, if you’re Deborah Meaden – leaving all the other contenders vanquished at the edge of the ring as they get the gig with Levi and his Reggae Reggae sauce.

I don’t know about you, but this worries me just a little bit: teaching the impressionable that business is little more than a cross between a game of cards and a cage fight. The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, like Horrible Bosses, are entertainment. A sometimes pleasant diversion. Bannatyne has said he would love to have been an actor and paid to get himself a walk-on part in a Guy Ritchie movie. Well, it wasn’t going to be a Almodovar pic, was it? (You could, incidentally, see Joey Barton following the Vinny Jones route in front of the camera – as long as he could learn the lines and avoid thumping the best boy.)

Why do we worry ourselves about these people? Why on earth do 372,000 devotees follow Bannatyne on Twitter? Because it’s a pleasant diversion from gold hitting an all time high this morning, turmoil in the international money markets, the Americans fiddling while their Capitol burns and the spreads between German and Spanish long term debt reaching desperate levels. That’s why.