The celebrity entrepreneur on television: profile, politics and power

Abstract

This article examines the rise of the ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ on television through the emergence of the ‘business entertainment format’ and considers the ways in which regular television exposure can be converted into political influence. Within television studies, there has been a preoccupation in recent years with how lifestyle and reality formats work to transform ‘ordinary’ people into celebrities. As a result, the contribution of vocationally skilled business professionals to factual entertainment programming has gone almost unnoticed. This article draws upon interviews with key media industry professionals and begins by looking at the construction of entrepreneurs as different types of television personalities and how discourses of work, skill and knowledge function in business shows. It then outlines how entrepreneurs can utilise their newly acquired televisual skills to cultivate a wider media profile and secure various forms of political access and influence. Integral to this is the centrality of public relations and media management agencies in shaping media discourses and developing the individual as a ‘brand identity’ that can be used to endorse a range of products or ideas. This has led to policy makers and politicians attempting to mobilise the media profile of celebrity entrepreneurs to reach out and connect with the public on business and enterprise-related issues.

Keywords:

• Dragons’ Den
• entrepreneur
• politics
• public relations
• television

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for the their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. The term ‘entrepreneur’ is a highly contested one, but in this instance we are referring to those business professionals who appear on television and either identify themselves as entrepreneurs (onscreen or through social media for example) or are described by the print media in this way.

2. This article comes out of a wider project funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council Public Understanding of Business: television, Representations and Entrepreneurship, ID AH/F017073/1. In keeping with the importance placed by Turner et al. (2000, pp. 24–28) in accessing key figures within the cultural industry, these interviews are drawn from a wider pool of 15 interviews from across the media and business sectors. We thank all those who spoke with us and gave so generously of their time.

3. The original television troubleshooter was Sir John Harvey-Jones who, alongside television producer Robert Thirkell, helped create the troubleshooter format with the eponymous BBC series broadcast in the early 1990s. For more details see Kelly and Boyle (forthcoming).