Lovehoney was asked to expose itself in a forthcoming documentary, says Richard Longhurst.

TV documentaries about retailers are like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You wait ages for one and then four come along at once.

Iceland, Liberty and Poundworld have all had the fly-on-the-wall-treatment recently. Lovehoney goes under the tellyscope for six weeks from March 26.

The attraction of letting a TV crew go behind the scenes at your business is as obvious as the pitfalls. Increased brand awareness and money-can’t-buy publicity trade off against the warts-and-all dangers of letting the public look behind the curtain.

And, of course, nobody wants to be the next David Brent.

Part of Lovehoney’s Faustian pact - and I assume it’s the same for other retailers - is that we had to agree that the channel has total editorial control.

We were shown previews to check for accuracy and whether anything commercially sensitive had been inadvertently revealed, but the channel decides what goes in the show. If you’re an idiot in real life, you’re going to look like an idiot on the box too.

To make Frisky Business, two camera crews followed the Lovehoney staff between September and December 2013. Day-to-day, they were not overly instrusive and became part of the furniture - literally, in the case of the four fixed rigs that filmed our customer care staff around the clock.

Meetings didn’t start until everyone had been miked-up and seating rearranged to ensure that the people who didn’t want to be filmed were off camera - just two of our 130 staff did not want to be on screen, along with sundry bank managers, lawyers and some suppliers.

We learned early on that the documentary makers fed on jeopardy. The slightest hint of a suspicion that something was going wrong would have them salivating.

Early in the filming, we were nearing completion of a new version of the Lovehoney website and the TV people got wind that we might miss our self-imposed launch deadline.

Disaster. They could smell blood. And TV gold.

“What if the new site doesn’t launch on Monday?” they asked excitedly. “Oh, we’ll just launch it on Tuesday instead.”

But not every problem could be resolved so casually. Episode three follows the delivery from China of a container of leather bondage products - you know, floggers, hog-ties, ball gags, the usual stuff.

On opening the first few cartons it quickly transpired that all the S&M gear had gone mouldy. Actual disaster.

We were out of stock of about 75% of these items and desperate to get them back on sale. We were now faced with a massive admin and insurance headache, more lost sales and the prospect of re-ordering everything. Smile, you’re on please-be-candid camera.

Of course, Frisky Business is bound to focus on problems, mishaps and the more unusual items that we sell - all that stuff makes for better TV. But at its core, the series is a true representation of life at Lovehoney and the great work our staff do to keep the nation sexually happy.

Frisky Business is also a genuinely funny programme - how could it not be when we talk about rubber willies all day long?

  • Frisky Business starts on Lifetime on channels Sky 156 and Virgin 242 on March 26.