I am sure some of you in the UK watched Burn Up recently (BBC on 23 and 25 July), an epic tale of climate change and bad behaviour in the oil industry.  You probably watched it for the double treat of Adam from Spooks and Josh from the West Wing.  What you got instead was a programme so short on authenticity that it made Spooks look like a Le Carre novel and the West Wing look like the Bush administration.

I must confess it was so silly I watched only the first 90 minutes and could not face the second leg.  But it portrayed the oil industry in such a clichéd, cynical light that it made for bad drama, and not just PR.  The first half, among other plot lines, portrayed a major oil company trying all it could to stifle any momentum behind climate change both in its own activities, which seemed to involve killing as well as bribing people (I never found out whodunnit), as well as in the US congress.  You do not in real life rubbish a distinguished environmental scientist’s views by dragging up accusations of sexual harassment, you get Nigel Lawson to write a book or Channel 4 to create a programme like The Great Global Warming Swindle.

My frustration is not the natural exaggeration of drama, but that business people are never portrayed with any subtlety or any real humanity.  They are always cartoon characters, and usually villains.  The “hero” of Burn Up opens his address to the graduate induction seminar with: “you think because we chuck a few million dollars at solar panels, we actually give a shit about renewables….”.  It was all downhill from there.  Oil good, solar waste of space.  The energy debate in a nutshell.          

It did make me wonder if business can ever get a fair representation on TV or in films.  In every hospital drama, from Holby to House, it is the administrator who is the pantomime villain.  The most awarded depiction of a business person in cinema recently was the stunning and depressing portrayal by Tilda Swinton of the compromised in-house counsel in Michael Clayton.  Businesses and business people are invariably portrayed as unfeeling, cynical, self-interested, emotionally retarded, amoral, money-obsessed and wildly ambitious.

And, of course, if you develop a TV programme that exists to create a new generation of business people, that is exactly the formula you adopt and why BBC’s The Apprentice is such compulsive viewing.  Yes, I love it.  I am sure all Apprentice candidates are, in practice, really nice people, and love their mothers and their bosses, but the demands of the received wisdom of TV turn them into cardboard cut-out monsters you would not want sitting in the next cubicle to you.        

Am I right to be so depressed?  Should I not just sit back, pop the popcorn and enjoy the fantasy?

There is a serious reason.  We will never attract all the brightest and the best to join the corporate world if this image really sticks with people.  Most people may see past it; reality TV is not reality.  But I don’t want anything to stop the idealistic graduate thinking, “I’d be more at home at Greenpeace, but I think I stand more of a chance to change the world if I join Shell”.  Yes, businesses do bad things, sometimes criminally bad things.  But for the bulk of the time, the cock-up theory wins over the conspiracy.  If you can get good as well as bad lawyers represented on TV, surely it’s not too much to ask of business people.

As a postscript, Burn Up seemed to be so modelled on Shell circa 2001 that I’d think someone should sue: charismatic retiring chairman called Sir Mark, check; major investment in Canada’s oil tar sands, check; glamorous female head of renewables, check; handsome thirtysomething new chairman who discovers the meaning of climate change by having an adulterous fling inside the Arctic Circle, er, no check – they prefer cocoa and seismology up there.