The Call Centre

Episode two
You have to hand it to Nev Wilshire. If you look for dead eyes and insincere smiles at Swansea’s third largest call centre, you’ll be looking in vain, thanks in no small part to Nev’s relentless onslaught of distraction techniques. No one on this documentary team asks his employees what they actually think about having to cold call people to promote PPI compensation or ‘eligibility’ for loft insulation, probably because they’re too busy being cajoled into one of his morale-boosting schemes.

This week, these include finding a date for the office sad-sack, assigning a handsome young recruit to one of a number of enthusiastic female team leaders, and auditioning to represent the centre in a national competition to find the voice of Wales’s call centres. It’s probably telling that the one staffer to go off-message departs without much real explanation for her behaviour: this is the anti-‘Dispatches’, rejecting any pretensions to actual journalism in favour of an upbeat, entertaining whitewash.