Put real business on TV and I’ll reach for the remote

Lucy Kellaway - Put real business on TV and I’ll reach for the remote:

"Business telly, so the newspapers tell us, is “the new rock and roll”. This isn’t saying much as in the last week alone opera, literary festivals, fatherhood, private equity and farming have all been held up in the UK press as being the new rock and roll too.
Yet business TV has more claim to the cliché than most. While it isn’t exactly cool, it is increasingly popular – which is more than can be said for farming or fatherhood. There is The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den and now a new series, Tycoon, and all attract enormous audiences.
Earlier this month 6.2m people watched The Apprentice – nearly twice as many as a documentary that was on the other side about Princess Diana dying in a tunnel.
There is a catch. The reason these programmes do so well is not because business is suddenly fashionable, but because they don’t have anything to do with business at all. Take the new show, Tycoon. In it Peter Jones, the handsome-ish entrepreneur who is also on Dragons’ Den, is helping “ordinary people” launch their own businesses. One of these ordinary people is an ex-Page 3 model, another a former bodyguard to the Sultan of Brunei and a third a winner of the World Karaoke Championships. This is freak-show TV, as much like real business as Big Brother is like real life."