Right idea was priceless
CALL me dim but I didn’t understand how Innocent Drinks’ special lever was meant to work. BILLION DOLLAR DEALS AND HOW THEY CHANGED YOUR WORLD (BBC2) explored, in its final instalment, the world of work.
This was on the back of exposing the murder of money and the sickness of healthcare, so we expected big things. Presenter Jacques Peretti’s first “deal” of the night was a meeting between two management experts in San Francisco in the summer of 1975.
With unemployment rising and America’s car industry in crisis, these management gurus pondered why Japan, obliterated by US bombs 30 years before, was now soaring. The answer, they thought, was Japan’s unique “work culture”. You didn’t just do your job in Japan, you were part of something. Your company didn’t just employ you, it gave you its values. After a few years and the publication of two influential bestselling books, the experts’ findings were changing work forever.
At the Innocent HQ, Jacques found values and mission statements posted over every doorway. A wall of baby photos reminded staff that they were all part of one big, happy family.
To guard against employees staying too late at work, each floor of the building had a little lever by the door. “Last leaver pulls lever” said the sign next to it, Jacques’ guide explaining that it actually, genuinely, turned the power off.
Once someone had pulled it, you had to go home. Maybe I hadn’t absorbed enough of their vitaminpacked fruit drinks to understand. Surely if someone pulls a lever and you’re still sitting at your desk, they’re not the last leaver?
You are, or someone else is, and either of you could turn the lever back and carry on working. My issue, really, last night was Jacques and his billion-dollar deals.
But the two men in his first story hadn’t made a billion-dollar deal at all, they’d just exchanged ideas. It was the same later, when IBM developer Charles Lickel had a brainwave in a New York steakhouse. A game show called Jeopardy was on the TV and Lickel wondered if he could make a robot that could answer questions as well as the reigning champ.
It turned out he could but no one gave him a billion dollars for it. Ultimately, like Innocent’s kooky signs and the billion-dollar deals that weren’t, this series was just an entertaining way of telling us that the world changes while basically staying the same.
When the poor ever start getting richer, please wake me up.
BRITAIN’S LOST MASTERPIECES (BBC4) set art expert Bendor Grosvenor and social historian Emma Dabiri after the truth behind two portraits in a Carmarthenshire museum. One was said to be of Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery, the other of his wife and both the handiwork of prominent 17th-century painter, Sir Peter Lely.
Not so. The wife’s painting was by Mary Beale, a friend and collaborator of Lely’s and a successful artist in her own right. Their styles were similar, the tastes of their clients much the same.
Something else, perhaps, lay behind the general absence of Mary Beale from the records.
When Lely put out a mediocre painting, later experts said it must have been the work of Mary Beale. When she did a great one, they said it was Lely’s. I doubt many women were too surprised by that.