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Thanks to Robert Thirkell, customers at British supermarket giant Sainsbury's push smaller shopping carts, train drivers at England's and Wales's public-transit operator Prism Rail enjoy better pay, and couples getting hitched at Antigua's Sandals resort hear the "Bridal March" through new remote-controled speakers rather than through a boombox.

Thirkell isn't a consultant or a noted business-school professor. As the creative director at the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), he has figured out how to turn business into good TV -- and how to use TV to make business better.

Thirkell's secret? Most executives are worried about climbing to the top of the ladder. But with his hit series Back to the Floor, he persuades CEOs to do just the opposite, dispatching them to the bottom rung of their organizations to spend a week as trash collectors, paramedics, baggage handlers, or waiters. The goal: to find out what's really going on at their companies and make them better. In the process, Thirkell has made traditional business-on-television fare (all talking heads and market quotes) look bankrupt. And by portraying bosses as human, he has persuaded his own bosses at the BBC to take business more seriously.

When Thirkell joined the public-broadcasting company 20 years ago, business was peripheral there. "I was told that you couldn't make business interesting," he says, "that it was intrinsically dreary." But Thirkell soon scored an unexpected victory with TroubleShooter, a business-makeover program that cast Sir John Harvey-Jones, the legendary former chairman of chemicals giant ICI, as company doctor. A BAFTA award (the British Emmy) for originality gave Thirkell license to experiment further, which he used to launch Blood on the Carpet and Trouble at the Top, shows that reveled in the drama of failure.

With Back to the Floor, Thirkell tested a more purposeful fly-on-the-boardroom-wall format by inviting CEOs to see and confront grassroots problems in their organizations -- while the cameras rolled. "To make good TV, you need strong characters, high stakes, and testing circumstances," says Thirkell. "Back to the Floor works because we are putting the boss under pressure."

Once a willing CEO has been identified (and many say no), Thirkell's researchers are then sent in as "miniconsultants" to diagnose the company's strengths and weaknesses, its challenges and potential. However, Thirkell's producers are not schooled in business. Instead, he encourages them to enroll in the courses of Robert McKee, the man who has taught half of Hollywood how to write a screenplay. There, they can learn the skills of introducing tension, suspense, and climax into a narrative.

"We're in the business of telling stories," says Thirkell, "dramas that unfold over days. We tell those stories through the customers and workers we choose. We introduce the hero, identify the problem, follow him through the ups and downs and dead ends. And just before the end, when it all seems to be going wrong ... whoosh! Our hero is victorious."

Not every story has a happy ending. Some suspect that Dino Adriano's departure from the top job at Sainsbury's owed something to his poor showing on Back to the Floor. Millionaire restaurateur Luke Johnson, head of the popular British chain Belgo, decided that he'd peeled one onion too many for a moody chef, ripped off his microphone, told producers to "Shove your program!" and refused to allow the camera to keep filming.