Flatpack Empire
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
There can’t be many urbanites in the UK who haven’t puzzled over the assembly instructions for a piece of Ikea furniture, let alone had the odd experience of being funnelled like a mouse in a maze through one of the firm’s vast depot-like stores. For this series, the Swedish company has granted a camera crew “worldwide access” – from their design headquarters in Sweden to Indian furniture factories and Polish sawmills – to film the £33billion corporate Goliath’s global operations over the course of a year.
Perhaps the biggest surprise (and certainly the thing that Ikea wants us most to know about) is their current move – unthinkable previously – into collaborations with prestige independent designers and other brands, such as audio giants Sonos and fashion designer Virgil Abloh. Among the more interesting is a project with British furniture designer Tom Dixon. “It’s not a sofa-bed, it’s a bed-sofa, but it’s really it’s a platform for living,” says Dixon, a mite grumpily, likening his role to that of a “benign parasite, where I can make a living out of this huge beast”. Maybe they’ll call the finished product “the bed bug” instead of the Swedish names that us Brits struggle to pronounce. Gerard O’donovan