I’ve watched two programmes on TV this week: ‘Inside Nature’s Giants’ and ‘Gerry’s Big Decision’ both on the beleaguered Channel 4. (That’s a lie actually, I switched on the test match when I arrived home last night just in time to see not one but two Aussies getting their hundreds within minutes of each other. It’s going to be a long, hard Summer for Strauss and his boys.)

Anyway, ‘Giants’ was an amazing documentary featuring a pint-sized female American academic in protective goggles, Dr Joy Reidenberg, using a very sharp knife to eviscerate and then clamber inside a beached whale. She explained with compelling enthusiasm during a lengthy autopsy how the animal evolved and the way in which it lived. It even had a cool commentary from the heroic Richard Dawkins. It was dramatic, informative and even found the long-lost vestigial hind leg among the blubber at the back end of the unfortunate beast, a throwback to when it walked on land.  

Gerry Robinson’s programme is big on evisceration but is really a lot less good. It’s an idiot’s blend of ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Dragon’s Den’ in which Sir Gerry journeys around in his Jag having a look at the entrails of failing business and deciding whether he wishes to save them from rotting on the beach by investing his hard-earned millions. All over Britain companies are going bust…but now one man wants to help. 

The only way telly people these days feel it is possible to portray business is as middle-brow drama, otherwise all the couch potatoes switch off. Real drama is far too expensive in this straitened times, so Gerry with a bit of slap, swagger and synthetic jeopardy is the best they can come up with. The vast majority of business coverage now uses the reality TV device with us all hanging on the edge of our seats until the final dénouement when Gerry decides whether he’s going to flash his cash or not...

Sir Gerry is an old mate of MT’s, so I’m not going to slag him off too rudely. I hope he regards it as a bit of fun and he’s good at telly.  The old twinkle is still there and he does the full gamut of emotion rather than the monotonous, one dimensional irritability of Alan Sugar.  

But the point is that reality television is a fundamentally dishonest medium – both actively in what it chooses to portray from a complex story and passively by glaring omissions. Watching Gerrys’ show anybody with even a GCSE Grade C in Business Studies is going to be shouting Hang on a minute. What about…. At the screen.  In its endless and tiring efforts to stoke up a sense of dramatic tension everything is  repeated ad nauseam between the endless commercial breaks.  All at the expense of elucidation.

Last night’s edition featured a long-established but failing family furniture business, HJ Berry from Lancashire. It was a basket case with Sir Gerry eventually deciding on screen - after a lengthy, tear-soaked dramatic pause - to invest the not inconsiderable sum of over a million quid for 60% of the outfit.  But, as usual, the detail and explanation of what this involved was entirely absent.

It won’t have escaped the shrewd Robinson’s notice that the company appeared to own most of the village in which it operated.  So plenty of assets there if the whole thing goes chair legs up at some point in the future. Gerry always was one for bagging a bargain. Just how much more there is to the story than meets the eye can be seen by this statement which sits on HJ Berry’s website this morning. Whilst we were delighted and flattered to receive an offer of investment from someone of such caliber, (sic)  who had obviously seen the great passion & potential we have within our unique company. However we also have to consider the finer detail and long term consequences of acceptance before the board can make their final decision. Finer detail and reality TV just do not mix.

In today's bulletin

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Wanna start a dotcom? Maybe Brent can help

Does motherhood cost too much?

Editor’s blog: reality TV has no bite

Not answering the question, with help from YouTube