The Business Inspector, Wednesday 9pm, Five

Posted by Stewart Turner

Hilary Devey © Five

If you’re pitching a new TV troubleshooting show in the vein of The Hotel Inspector or Country House Rescue, the first thing you need is a fearsome matriarchal presenter. With Hilary Devey, a gruff Lancastrian who made her millions in the haulage industry despite once living in a poky flat above a chip shop, Five has struck solid gold.

Each week brassy Hilary – a woman whose turn of phrase and straight-talking demeanour hint at a previous life sat behind a sewing machine in Weatherfield – will be dispensing some priceless nuggets of business acumen from underneath her immaculately-coiffured barnet. Oh, and showing off her implausibly big chandelier collection.

First up for the Devey treatment were a couple of florists, going under the depressing moniker of “Leaf It Out” and operating from a deserted industrial estate in Milton Keynes. Unsurprisingly, they were losing cash and over fist until our hero dropped by to boom: “I’m Hilary, and I’m your business angel.”

In this instance, being an angel consisted of popping round to one of the girls’ mum’s house to tell her to stop bankrolling the florist, and advising the hapless Donna to get some tints in her hair and take her hands out of her pockets before going to see a prospective client.

Hilary was more taken with second victim Gary as he frothed about his frankly ridiculous “table art” with all the enthusiasm of a hyperactive puppy. After waddling out in one of her trademark wraparound skirts to inspect his wares – essentially mirrorballs and footballs perched on clumsy perspex tripods – she was so taken she badgered him into renaming his company “Wow! Tables” in order to take the business world by storm. Er, thanks Hilary.

Whether Ms Devey had turned these ailing businesses around or not was a bit of a blur by the end of the programme – but one thing’s for sure, it was a hoot watching her try.

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