Basement Jack - 01 February 2011

Service sector gets the tv treatment

In Mary Portas Secret Shopper the worlds of TV and retail collide with the sort of comic effect not seen since Ronnie Barker's last stammered 'Ger-Ger Granville' and had his fingers savaged by a till in Open All Hours. It wasn't billed as a humorous broadcast but once her crusade for better customer service in retail gathered steam it was pure TV gold.

Being given the Mary Portas treatment appeared akin to being interrogated by an erudite gecko...a gecko that's having a monumentally crappy day. The self-proclaimed Queen of Shops cuts an intimidating figure, like the idea of disgruntlement and dissatisfaction made flesh. Everything is severe and angular; with a face as hard and ridged as a Welsh mountainside and hair that could have been manufactured by Lego she's Cruella de Vil minus the dog butchery and the monochrome barnet. And, God love her, she certainly pulls no punches given the opportunity of taking someone to task. Just ask Chris George, the boss of fashion retailer Pilot, who sat there wide-eyed and quailing as she triumphantly presented multiple examples of shoddy service at his branches.

To give him his due, he rallied as the programme proceeded, fighting his corner in the face of Portas' excess of domineering personality (and of course her camera crew) but you always felt that it was a losing battle - like attempting to persuade Darth Vader to abandon his faith in The Force. Once everyone, Mr George included, had come around to her way of thinking however it was all smiles and hugs - had the resistance continued you felt sure it was only a matter of time before Ms Vader exercised her powers to a destructive end.

For all her spikiness, it's difficult not to admire Mary Portas and her single-minded drive to improve an industry she loves - she has certainly got the hang of using the TV medium as long lever with which to shift any obstacles in her way. If it means we get a little less apathy and a little bit more engagement on the shopfloor, so much the better. But Secret Shopper is not the only small screen examination of customer service standards currently being broadcast.

The hospitality industry is put under the spotlight in Michel Roux's Service - a series in which the impossibly suave Michelin-starred chef takes eight unemployed youngsters under his wing in an effort to turn them into world-class front-of-house restaurant professionals. If you haven't seen it, try to picture MasterChef meets The Apprentice. At times it is as unlikely a coming together of personalities as you see on the ridiculous One Show ('this week Mr T, a pigmy tree-surgeon and a bag of ventriloquist weasels').

Defensive, surly and riddled with attitude, a number of the trainees at times appear to be entirely oblivious of the opportunity they are being given and instead flounce about 'whatever-ing' like they were on Jeremy Kyle. You just want to beat [some of] the stupid chavs around the head with a weighty soup tureen as they opt to bicker and bitch rather than absorb the training being provided by the unflappable, genial Monsieur Roux and his maitre d' sidekick Fred Sirieix (selected for the programme perhaps as he rather resembles someone just released from a high security facility). If they were being coached in footballing skills by David Beckham or singing by Beyoncé there's little doubt they would have shown a little more deference and the audience would have been left wincing a little less.

To be fair I was every bit as nonplussed as the trainees by some of Sirieix's lessons - particularly the so-called 'magic touch' which seems to be a combination of lurking behind a diner has he or she prepares to sit down and applying the lightest of touches as they actually descend onto their seat. Personally, if one of those buggers attempted to magic touch me as I sat down I would be checking I still had my wallet. As a TV spectacle the pleasure comes from seeing some of the trainees beginning to improve, and hearing them mangle the name of vintage wines in their youthful patois. But the real gold lies in the opportunities it provides to shout and swear at the screen when absolute a***hole nouveau riche diners revel in treating the waiting staff abominably.

This also reveals where the show falls down slightly: reality TV relies on conflict to be fulfilling as televisual fare. You need the shrieking, the arguments, alliances, betrayals and just sheer noise to engage a reality audience. Roux is just not cut from that cloth. He's a good guy who wants his charges to share his own love of the industry but he lacks the desire to crush anyone failing to toe the line under his boot-heels - a desire Ms Portas has by the bucketful. Were this series hosted by Gordon Ramsay it would a real sight to see - his temper and the colourful vocabulary that would inevitable feature in dealing with the trainees might mean the show would have to go out after the watershed but viewer figures would be astronomical.

It struck me as interesting that two series addressing retail and hospitality customer service should happen to be out at the same time - what were the odds? A few years back it would have been very unlikely but since satellite and cable TV have become so commonplace there shows for almost every activity and appetite. In the deep hinterland of TV broadcasting lurk those specialist channels offering shows catering to a multitude of beliefs, hobbies and interests. Many of these, while specialist, have clearly been put together with care, thought and quality - some rather less so. It is easy to mock food fanatics who tune into offerings such as Ace of Cakes, Extreme Baking or The Pastry Whisperer (actually I made that one up) but at least they're likely to do something positive with their interest. I worry rather more about those who take an interest on programmes such as Man vs Animal. It's a real show that visits a truly bizarre periphery of the human experience.

Ever wondered who would win a tug-of-war between a sumo wrestler and an orang-utan? Wonder no longer, Man vs Animal sorted out that age-old conundrum (the wrestler was rather easily dragged into the mud by the noble beast). Other equally important televised experiments offered up by the show included a professional eater (!) taking on a Kodiak bear in a hot dog eating contest (Man 0 - 2 Animals); a group of 44 dwarves raced an Asian elephant to see which could first pull a DC-10 aeroplane a certain distance (Man 0 - Animals 3); restoring a little faith in mankind, US Navy Seal Scot Helvenston defeated a chimpanzee in a race through an obstacle course (Man 1 - 3 Animals) and sprinter Shawn Crawford also emerged victorious in a 100-metres race...with a giraffe (Man 2 - 3 Animals). Oh but he was later defeated over the same distance by a zebra (Man 2 - 4 Animals). End to end stuff, I think you'll agree? Holy 'king moley - who is this aimed at and to what end?

Is it possible that we have reached the point where there is too much choice? Certainly the emphasis seems to have shifted from whether we should make a show to whether we could make a show. Where next? Man vs Condiment? Man vs Bacteria? Man vs Kitchen Utensil? After the elephant/dwarf episode, nothing would surprise me.

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