Thursday's TV: Gerry's Big Decision, Channel 4, 9pm
Failing business owners beg generous Gerry Robinson for money
2 July 2009
Gerry’s Big Decision
Channel 4, 9pm
IS your business failing? Do your employees take turns to insult you, belittle you and generally question your quota of the earth’s oxygen? Did your girlfriend blow her £130,000 of life savings and sell her house to keep your ramshackle operation afloat? Are you a husk of a man, broken by the weight of the world, crushed by fate and circumstance, willing to do anything to save the tattered threads of an increasingly pointless existence?
Great! Fancy begging an old man for money on Channel 4?
That, essentially, is the premise of Gerry’s Big Decision, where each week two failing businesses must out-pity each other for the cash of former Arts Council and Granada head honcho Sir Gerry Robinson. It’s like Dragons’ Den crossed with Oliver Twist.
Tonight’s episode sees two failing breweries. In the pathetic corner is the aforementioned Malcolm Grey, inept boss of the Itchen Valley Brewery in Hampshire and human stressball for his equally inept employees. In the pitiful corner are Liz and John O’Hanlon of O’Hanlon’s Brewery in Devon, who are both slightly hampered by the fact each thinks the other is running the company.
The end result is more tragic-comic than uplifting, but tempered by how plain nice Robinson is. He’s like the Dickie Attenborough of the business world.
And that fact has predictable – if not exactly hard-nosed – consequences. It’s a three-part series – old Robinson better have deep pockets.
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