Doug Richard, founder of School for Startups

Entrepreneurs who seek funding for their enterprises on TV shows such as Dragons' Den are quite real. They are the same mixed bag of hard-working, insightful, diligent, deluded, arrogant and passionate folks that turn up in the offices of angel investors and venture capitalists to pitch every week.

The celebrity entrepreneurs who vet them do play it up a bit for TV. But the Dragons are all successful in their own right, and they accurately exhibit the kind of determination and insight an entrepreneur needs to succeed.

In the real world, the tone and rhetoric of pitch meetings is more respectful than you see on TV, but entrepreneurs and investors do get impatient when confronted with bad ideas, poorly thought out plans and people who won't listen to questions being asked or alternatives being offered.

The most successful entrepreneurs I've met have a reputation for random acts of kindness. Why? Because you never know if that 19-year-old who asks you for cash at a university event isn't tomorrow's Steven Spielberg. If he is, you want him to remember you kindly. If he's not, there's no harm done. Celebrity entrepreneurs are in a tough spot in wanting to be nice and also hoping not to be barraged by those seeing help.

The kind of bootstrapping love fest that occurs when you gather a bunch of successful entrepreneurs in a room with about 30 smart would-be entrepreneurs would make for a new kind of reality TV. The experienced people would tell the newbies how to start and grow their enterprises with little, if any, outside investment. I've thought of producing that show because it would be such a change of pace. But for now, I just let the environment occur naturally, as it always does at my events.

Professor Martin Binks, director, University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation

Nobody would seriously expect programmes such as Dragons' Den and The Apprentice to tell the full story. They do not set out to document reality, they aim to entertain. Few would even expect them to reflect the true nature and contributions of the celebrities involved.

A welcome side-effect of the TV focus is the attention that it draws more generally to the role of entrepreneurship. At Nottingham University Business School there is a long tradition of engaging with entrepreneurs and businesses as part of our research, teaching and learning.

For example, more than 60 practising entrepreneurs and businesspeople are involved in the mentoring of around 800 first-year undergraduates. The experience of working with so many entrepreneurs over the years demonstrates a huge variety of characteristics. We might expect this to be captured in a TV documentary but not in "reality TV", where the focus will tend naturally towards the entertainment value of the cut and thrust of entrepreneurial activity.

This view is supported by evidence from both entrepreneurs and business advisers, most recently in the December 2009 survey reports from the UK Business and Business Adviser barometers. A large majority agreed that TV entrepreneurs do not reflect reality. But when we asked our first-year undergraduates, it was disturbing to find that they were more prepared to take the TV representation at face value. Experience suggests that subsequent work with local entrepreneurs serves as a timely reality check.