Robert Thirkell on Broadcasting

have spent my TV career making heroic stories, from Jamie's School Dinners to Back to the Floor, following real people in business through their ups and downs, in order to better understand them and what they do - so I was asked to write an article about business programmes for this column. But there aren't many programmes about business on television at present, apart from strands like the venerable Money Programme soldiering on in its ghetto. It's rather good, but when did you last watch it?

When people talk about a resurgence in business programmes they don't mean these; rather they mean shows like the The Apprentice and Dragon's Den. Both are criticised by big business for giving a misleading impression. The Apprentice is "not a business programme, it is entertainment," says the CBI boss, Digby Jones. This is not surprising as, great as they are, they are designed as entertainments, and made by the entertainment department. Will science and history be the next genres to be exploited by entertainment?

This week it was announced that The Apprentice is to get a new team to run it. Michele Kurland and Kelly Webb-Lamb come from a background of making business programmes with content - Trouble at the Top and Back to the Floor. They have the ability to prove Jones wrong.

I have been writing a book, The 100 Rules of Television, and the 27th rule is that you should never give commissioners what they ask for - because they won't thank you for it. I was introduced to the former BBC director general Greg Dyke by Mark Thompson, the current incumbent, as the person who always made the films that I was told not to. I have never been interested in making derivative shows because, inevitably, two years after any big hit there will be a glut of copycats that the controllers have commissioned. TV commissioners, however, don't usually stay long in their jobs so will probably have been promoted or fired by the time your series is finished. Then it will end up as a positive benefit if your show is entirely original, not derivative at all, and in fact has little in common with the original commission or original commissioner. And if your commissioner has survived they will almost certainly have forgotten why they commissioned your show in the first place; they'll be focused instead on their latest hit. Best of all, if you have ignored them and are making what others are not, you stand a better chance of surprising and pleasing the people who really count, the audience.

In my view now is the time to be counter-intuitive and make programmes about real businesses that the public care about. How does McDonald's work? Is the Tesco-isation of Britain right, and can we fight back? Or there's an idea I was discussing this week in which we put business wrongs right. Suddenly a range of business ideas that involve the community in action are bubbling up, from millionaires sorting out Third World problems to kids running a toy factory. Even Jamie Oliver is turning to parent-and-business power in the Jamie's School Dinners update.

Now is a big opportunity for business programmes, exactly because there aren't many real business programmes on TV. What is not being fed sufficiently is the thirst for real content about the real world.

Many worthwhile documentaries may be being squeezed out of the schedules - so much so that the once famous BBC documentary department has been subsumed, and its boss Alan Hayling has resigned as a consequence. But in my view now is the very time to back the genre. If serious documentary about meaningful subjects with strong storytelling was a share I would buy it - the time to invest in a sector is when it is on the turn (indeed BBC2 announcedd a new strand of 40 documentaries this week and Channel 4 is to make more episodes of Cutting Edge).

As people become bored by all the derivative series, as they inevitably will in 18 months' time, content will again become king. An increasingly literate and educated population want to understand more. This is why modern formats about work originally took off, notably Back to the Floor and Faking It. But they unleashed a monster: programmes with a similar form but no content. It is why, when entertaining series with content do come out now, they capture the public imagination and are such a hit. It is why it won't be a derivative programme or series that has everyone talking in a couple of years time; rather, it will be a surprise, well-told and with meaningful content.

And I hope that this time it will again be about real business.

Dumb and dumber? No

Many believe TV is dumbing down, and that, if it is to be entertaining, it should have as little content as possible. Then there are dull and worthy documentary-makers who believe the opposite. But Jamie's School Dinners proves that you can win if you have both. At last year's Edinburgh International Television Festival, seasoned programme-makers were asked what advice they would give to new entrants. Among the responses were these: "get knives for teeth, a leather hide for skin", "drink several pints of syrup a day and line your larynx with velvet to aid your skills of persuasion", and "if you'd kill your own grandma for the right storyline then you're perfect". But they are wrong. entertaining TV with integrity, meaning and content is the future and can have huge impact. The public is sometimes far more clever than we think.

Robert Thirkell was named the number one television producer in the United Kingdom by "Broadcast" magazine