I'm Free!

Having been on holiday for the first one and then missed the second one, I was feeling a bit left out of all the banter about the TV documentary Inside John Lewis.

I caught up with it via the BBC iPlayer at the weekend and found it mildly diverting. There’s not a lot that competitors or retail watchers will learn about the business from the programme - that’s not what it exists for - but what it does do is give an insight into the culture of the organisation. The problem is it makes it look odder than it actually is, and a bit like Grace Brothers, an image it’s spent years trying (and succeeding) in moving away from.

Any retailer agreeing to take part in a fly on the wall TV programme is taking a calculated risk. It’s trading off the risk of embarrassing stuff which they’d rather not be made public against the value of, in this case, three hours of prime time BBC airtime. The hope is that by retaining some degree of control, the ‘free advert’ elements will outweigh the less positive parts which the producers will demand because fundamentally a lot of stuff that goes on in retailers doesn’t make fascinating telly.

So there was quite a lot of boring stuff following the fashion team on a trip to Paris, and shots of shoppers gushing about how great John Lewis is. But in the second episode there was also a lot of completely over-the-top stuff with MD Andy Street dashing around the Victoria Street HQ, running from press conferences on the ‘At Home’ launch to staff meetings announcing a redundancy programme, in what was portrayed as a one-man mission to save John Lewis from imminent collapse.

It was all as camp as Christmas and I couldn’t take all the hammed-up drama seriously, but the uninitiated viewer will have been none the wiser and from the commentary might well have thought the chain’s future was in real jeopardy. In which case, given that one of the great attractions of shopping at John Lewis for big ticket items is the confidence it won’t go bust, is quite an odd thing to want to show on a BBC documentary.

Retail director Gareth Thomas, who features prominently and coincidentally whose early retirement was announced a few weeks back, made some quite provocative comments about the direction of the business which it seemed very odd to me for a director of the business to make in front of the TV cameras.

There was some pure comedy too in the build up to the opening of the Cardiff store, especially seeing one particularly annoying and cocky chap from the Valleys trying to learn how to make pancakes in front of a highly unimpressed chef in the Place to Eat. Then there was the trainer doing his very best to impersonate David Brent in a training session for new staff. Except he really meant it.

I’ve never been convinced by these programmes as PR exercises and I’m still not. John Lewis is a great organisation and a great retailer and I’m not sure it will have gained enough from the programme to justify either the hassle involved in its making and also the cringeworthy bits. Of which there were plenty.

Looking forward to episode 3 tomorrow night.