The Naked Office, Thursday 9pm, Virgin1

The Naked Office © Virgin 1

In the recession-ravaged world of advertising, desperate times call for increasingly desperate measures. But rather than shed a few jobs and come down hard on stationery theft, ailing Newcastle company Onebestway has decided to call in the TV cameras and enlist the help of a radical business guru.

Well, I say “business guru”, but one presumes David Taylor, introduced to us as a “best-selling author, top trouble-shooter and part-time lecturer at Warwick University”, managed to scribble out “wild, deluded fantasist” from the script in the nick of time. I may be wrong, but I don’t envisage “naked brainstorming” troubling the MA Business curriculum any time soon.

Slipping into his impressive “Poundstretcher Paul McKenna” mode, David announces that he’s going to save the ailing company with a radical new plan. “It’s the most extreme technique I’ve ever used,” he booms. “It’s the ultimate expression of trust.” And best of all, it’s also the ultimate way of spicing up Virgin1’s viewing figures by whacking the word “Naked” into the title of what is essentially a pretty dull bit of TV.

After the Onebestway staff have not unreasonably lined up to ask our business guru what exactly he thinks turning up in the buff will achieve in terms of productivity, David sets to work with a series of tasks designed to lead up to the heady climax of “Naked Friday”. First he provides a temp called Luka to help out around the office and get them in the mood: binding, franking, photocopying, that sort of thing, all performed deftly with his todger out.

Next up, the staff are asked to go and photocopy a part of their body, in a bid to see who’s making the most progress. While receptionist Sam can’t wait to slap her boobs on the warm, greasy glass of the Xerox machine, less-than-enthusiastic Morgan provides an altogether more telling Photostat – his right hand with the index finger extended. Will he and his colleagues lighten up and drop their trousers by Friday? If you’re in any way interested, tune in.

by Stewart Turner, Wednesday 8 July 2009

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Panorama: Chocolate – The Bitter Truth, Wednesday 9pm, BBC One

Image
Posted by Stewart Turner If you settled down to watch last night’s Panorama with a brick-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the arm of the sofa, the chances are it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth. Reporter Paul Kenyon got trussed up in his best Man from Del Monte finery and went undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa, and the results were pretty shocking. Cocoa’s only been growing in West Africa for a couple of hundred years since sweet-toothed colonial powers took it over from South America, but the Ivory Coast and Ghana are now the world’s biggest producers. Sadly it seems a fairly hefty amount of it is farmed by kids – some as young as eight – who’re smuggled over the border from the poverty of neighbouring Burkina Faso to work long days cracking open cocoa pods with machetes. But surely the kindly men churning out our KitKats and Crunchies would something to say about that, right? Well, sort of. Kenyon found that one farm which uses child labour supplied a company selli...
Read more

Knight Rider

Image
To men of a certain age, David Hasselhoff will forever be the epitome of leather jump-suited cool and absolutely not a washed-up alcoholic who’s never quite lived down that claim to have single-handedly dismantled the Berlin Wall. And sure enough, The Hoff crops up for a cameo at the end of this series opener, albeit in a scene emitting a more pungent stench of cheese than a 60-year-old slab of Stinking Bishop. Hoffheads will doubtless have serious reservations about this Knight Rider remake, which aired in the US last year. To a certain extent, they’d be right to – but that’s not to say this two-hour pilot is awful. It’s just that after a reasonably entertaining opening, complete with the obligitory high-octane car chases, edge-of-the-seat casino showdowns and a bit of Man v Cold-Hearted Machine banter, it all becomes a little tedious. Of course, there’s some serious suspension of belief required from the word go. One has to wonder whether the Pentagon would really allow it...
Read more

Tower Block of Commons, Monday 9pm, C4

Image
Posted by Stewart Turner Most commentators agree the Labour Party needs nothing short of a miracle to win a fourth term when the country goes to the polls in May – and if they were looking to veteran MP Austin Mitchell to win over a few hearts and minds and score a few political points in last night’s highly watchable Tower Block of Commons, they were sadly mistaken. The show rehoused four MPs – the Tories got two, for some unexplained reason – in grim, inner-city high-rises for a week to see how they coped with a slice of edgy urban life, rather than rowing a coracle around their moats all day and paying their children £30k a year to make tea and fetch HobNobs. With Mitchell’s insistence on getting his very own flat – all the other MPs gam...
Read more