Don’t checkout too early
THIS might seem a bold statement on my part, but when it comes to documentaries about supermarkets, I think you’d struggle to find a more fascinating hour’s worth of material than in Channel 5’s INSIDE TESCO: 24/7.
The snag is, it’s an hour’s worth of fascinating material concealed within a documentary series stretched out for three times that long, the second part of which goes out tonight (7pm).
This means that getting to the interesting bits – the history of the firm, the archive footage, the reminders of how a typical Tesco store used to look when you were growing up (“Ooh, look, Tesco Home ’n’ Wear jeans. My mum used to make me wear those…”) – means having to wade through an awful lot of stuff it’s a struggle to give even one-and-a-half hoots about, bigging up the brilliance of the company as it’s run today and bombarding us with stats I assume are meant to wow us. These days, viewers are told, the supermarket has “around 10,000 own-brand food products”.
Bully for Tesco.
“Tesco distribution centres employ around 16,500 people around the UK.”
Well, great.
But like I say, the archive material is still a joy. Tonight we begin by looking at the post-war years. (Second World War, that is. We covered the post-First-World War years last week, remember? Or were you staring out the window again, chewing gum?)
Rationing was set to continue for a good many years, so founder Jack Cohen needed something of a re-think. Inspired by the way they were doing things in America, he introduced the idea of self-service. That, and buying goods wholesale, then repacking these with his own labels so he could sell them more cheaply. They didn’t call him Canny Jack for nothing. In fact, they didn’t call him Canny Jack at all; I just made that up. But they should have done.
In the 1960s, Jack also introduced a new way to reward his regular customers, signing Tesco up to the increasingly popular Green Shield Stamps loyalty scheme. Depending on how much they’d spent, customers would be issued with a sheet of these stamps that they could lick and paste into a special book. Once they’d filled enough of these books, they could exchange them for all manner of exciting products, such as a bottle of mouthwash to take away the icky taste from licking all those stamps.
Elsewhere this evening, still on a nostalgic theme but taking us back a few more years, KING ARTHUR’S BRITAIN: THE TRUTH UNEARTHED (BBC Four, 10pm) finds the story of Arthur approached with some scepticism by Professor Alice Roberts BSc, MB BCh, PhD.
As if she’s some kind of expert.