TV REVIEW: You would think that company directors and their PR advisers would have learnt by now that allowing a fly-on-the-wall film crew onto a business premises seldom ends well. Hospitals and veterinary clinics get away with it. Profit-obsessed multinationals do not.
The Secret Life of the Office BBC2, Tuesday
The Office Network 2, Monday
Believe Nothing ITV, Sunday
Début: The Terms Network 2, Wednesday
But still they cut a spare set of keys and put an extra tea bag in the pot for the cameramen. Do you think that the people behind The Secret Life of the Office dragged their equipment to the Holiday Autos rental company in search of heart-warming tales of corporate caring at the modern day coalface? If yes, then give them a call, because this kind of stuff is television gold.
The second part of this series concentrated on The Workers, following new staff as they bedded in at the Holiday Autos call centre. They were there either to work on sales, or deal with complaints. The ideal way to deal with complaints, it turns out, is to disarm the caller with empathy. "How terrible for you," you say. "Thank you for taking the time to complain. I realise it takes time and effort." It cuts them off at the knees.
There were plenty of good cameos. Best was a furniture designer called Dominic Bond de Souza Punez. Excuse me if that name is incorrect, but it's one to give the note-keeping hand cramp. When you are designing an office, said the man with the name that sounded like an accountancy firm, it is "like improvising a key". He swished his arms and closed his eyes like a conductor in the pre- performance hush. He had designed a new office for the executive director, Clive Jacobs, and was about to unveil it to him.
"This is a very special moment for me," said Dominic Bond Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus. It was all the more special for the viewer knowing that things would inevitably go awry. A table was wobbly. Dominic Bond de Souza Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel threw a wobbly. "There is a point at which detail becomes obsession," he snarled. Clive's secretary rocked the table with her el- bows by way of demonstration.
For Holiday Autos, detail had long become an obsession. Like all big corporations it was engaged in a drive towards unattainable levels of efficiency. No food at your desks. If you must leave your desk, tick the reason why from the following list. No cuddly toys or personal items allowed at your desk. A ground-breaking policy on cough lozenges was drawn up.
Meanwhile, the staff - young men and women buckling at the knees as they carried the weight of the company - grew ever more disillusioned as the demands grew bigger. Team leader Julie was called in and told they needed to reduce the number of complaints from 100 a day to 30. "I know you can't do it overnight," she was consoled. Two days would suffice. Julie passed on the information to the drones. "Failure is not an option," she concluded by way of a sweetener.
Meanwhile, the senior management had "a brainstorming session". After a lengthy discussion about who should be in charge of the flip-chart, they began with a little word association.
"What exactly defines the culture of Holiday Autos?" the chairwoman asked as if she was addressing the leaders of a dying tribe. The brains were a little slow in storming in. "Fun" was the first word. Everybody agreed that fun was a good word. As were "respect" and "commitment" and "co-operation".
This was a great braindrizzle. What it was for was never explained, but they kept shouting out those words. "Pride." "Fun." Oh, we've already said that. They were competitors at an optimists' Scrabble championship.
The Secret Life of the Office was making a point about the Orwellian nature of it all. Most of us, though, get enough of the Orwellian overtones in our own offices, so this was best watched as entertainment. If you don't work in a call centre it will have been highly enjoyable. If you do, then please hold for an operator.
It's a pity that we were shown so little of the executive director, Clive. He issued directives banning soft drink cans, had set up Caribbean theme rest areas for staff and, when walking into his new office, did so with the look of a man who had just been given the keys to his own strip club.
There's a David Brent in every company, and it's so much more agonising if they have sunk right to the top. Brent, if you don't know, is the socially inept, painfully mediocre branch manager of a paper merchants' at the centre of the comedy, The Office, last summer's instant classic. Network 2 is currently showing the first and so far only series, and it doesn't only stand up to repeated viewing, but improves each time. You stop laughing after a few minutes of each episode to just gape in awe at its brilliance.
The joy of The Office re-runs, on the eve of its second series, is that you are watching a character uninhibited by his own success. Most great comedy characters inevitably lean on the characteristics or the catchphrases that made them popular in the first place: Father Dougal, Victor Meldrew, Homer Simpson. As writers run out of places to send their characters, they often just put them where they're most comfortable.
The novelty of Ricky Gervais the actor is also still intact. He developed David Brent's persona over a couple of programmes, most notably The 11 O'Clock Show, in which he appeared as a politically incorrect, loudmouth reporter with a nasty streak that bypassed his brain and went straight for his mouth. In Brent, he arrived at a far subtler, more complex character, but whose mannerisms were similar. The patronising shrugs, the twitch of the nose, the swinging on the chair. The affirming "hey?" at the end of some particularly offensive sentence that prodded home his self-satisfaction. At the back of your mind lurks the uncomfortable thought that the reason Ricky Gervais is so great as David Brent is because he is the only character he can do.
Apologies for the pessimistic sermonising, but you can blame Rik Mayall. This week he was rattling his chains and giving a terrible glimpse into a possible future.
Mayall created a classic comedy character a couple of decades ago by snorting and yelling and thrusting his groin a lot. It was funny in its time, but he wouldn't let it go. He is a man who wouldn't be able to give the eulogy at a funeral without ending it with a raucous "woof" and a thrust of his hips. Now, just when you thought he was assigned to the little time capsules that are digital channels, Mayall is loose on ITV. This is not a drill.
In Believe Nothing, Mayall plays Adonis Cnut. Oh Lord. He is a snorting, groin-thrusting academic with a brilliant mind. He has a dumb, boot-lick butler and lives in university rooms where an attractive female professor has newly moved in next door.
Her name is Dr Awkward. The jokes just keep on coming. It is Blackadder as it could have been in the wrong hands. In Saudi Arabia, they have a way of dealing with that sort of thing.
If you happen upon it, you will quickly be investigating the nearest calendar to see just what year you woke up in this morning. There are jokes about feminism that are delivered as if this is a concept so novel that the actors should stop after the gag and enjoy the moment. Bawdiness runs wild. All the lessons of style and delivery learnt by British television over several decades are deemed irrelevant. In last Sunday's opening episode there was a joke about Janet Street-Porter's teeth. It's possible that it was initially delivered in 1987. The timing is so terribly off target that nothing should be ruled out.
The short film series, Début, returned this week with a masterclass in how to tell a story in 10 minutes. Most dramas take two hours to bring the plot nowhere, so when a piece like this comes along you feel like hugging the television with gratitude, that you have been rewarded for the bit of effort needed to sit down and watch a couple of short films, made on the cheap by people who haven't made films before.
Written and directed byMike McCormack and Johnny O'Reilly, The Terms was a dark, inverted fairytale, with the title referring to the details of an execution pact between a father and son living in a caravan on some boggy piece of hell. John O'Toole, as the father, looked as if he had been dug from the turf itself, and Eamonn Owens continues to make acting look like the easiest thing in the world. The script was exquisitely tight, telling a complex story with the minimum of lines, and it was shot with brutal, effective bleakness.
You normally hit the ad break after Début feeling that your duty has been done rather than your mind sated. But when it's the latter, you know you have stumbled upon film-makers you have not heard the last of.