HE IS a greedy, bullying entrepreneur with possibly murderous intentions. But the lead character in BBC One’s new Blackpool drama has provoked a protest from the head of the CBI.

Ripley Holden, an arcade- owner with ambitions to open a Las Vegas-style casino at the Lancashire seaside resort, is the final straw for Digby Jones.

He has endured David Brent, the “boss from hell”, but now the CBI Director-General is calling for television bosses to stop demonising the people who create Britain’s wealth.

Mr Jones told The Times: “Business people are portrayed as greedy or crooks. We need to encourage more young people into wealth creation. It is very disappointing to find yet another negative portrayal of the business world.”

Mr Jones complained to ITV after Coronation Street ran a storyline about a serial killer businessman. He said that he had been told: “Everyone hates businessmen.”

David Brent, the ultimate office bully, has become the image of British business seen around the world. Mr Jones said: “It might be great comedy, but would the BBC choose a bully in a trade union or in the Church?”

David Morrissey plays Holden in Blackpool, a musical drama written by Peter Bowker, who wrote episodes of Casualty and produced a modernised Canterbury Tales for the BBC. The ambitious Holden is brought down when a dead body turns up on his premises and he becomes the prime suspect for murder.

Mr Morrissey described the entrepreneur as “a man who wakes up in the morning and says: ‘You’re a winner.’ And what that means is that everyone else is a loser.

“It’s all about putdowns. So he is a bully. He’s bombastic. He’s very recognisable, I think.”

From Basil Fawlty onwards, a negative representation of business managers prevails, which Mr Jones said was depressingly familiar among drama and comedy producers.

Radio is not immune. A delegate at the CBI conference last week asked: “Why is Matt Crawford, the only businessman in The Archers, portrayed as a crook?”

Luke Johnson, the Channel 4 chairman and entrepreneur behind The Ivy restaurant, said: “Business people have had an image problem in popular culture since Dickens and Mr Gradgrind. Hopefully, Britain is adopting more of the positive American ‘can-do’ attitude and that will be reflected on screen.”

Mr Johnson cited Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the Channel 4 series in which the irascible chef tries to turn round failing restaurants, as a programme that could encourage entrepreneurs.

Jeff Randall, the BBC’s Business Editor, said: “I have never believed that stereotypes in television drama and comedy have that great an influence.

“Far more damaging is a general media-wide bias, which portrays business people as rapacious casino operators only interested in ripping people off. There is an underlying feeling that, if you have made money from nothing, then you must be a spiv.”

Next month Mr Randall appears as himself in The Man Who Broke Britain, a BBC Two dramatised account of a financial meltdown provoked by a rogue trader at a British investment bank. Mr Randall said that the scenario required a level of imaginative dramatisation to attract and maintain the interest of a wide audience.

Yet in America the biggest hit shows portray entrepreneurs as heroes to be emulated. Thirty million viewers watched Donald Trump, the property magnate, select a thrusting new executive from a group of hopefuls in The Apprentice. Sir Richard Branson is offering the presidency of his Virgin empire to the winner of a rival Fox series called Billionaire.

The BBC said that it could not point to any positive portrayals of the business world in comedy or drama. However, it is remaking The Apprentice, with Sir Alan Sugar in the starring role. A BBC Two documentary series I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss, in which Gerry Robinson, the Allied Domecq chairman, advises family-run companies how to improve, is said to have turned round many of the businesses that it featured.