It’s not a genre which springs too many surprises. Ever since Sir John Harvey-Jones strode into shot a good 20 years ago, the template was set for the sort-your-life-out documentary. Expert enters, throws up hands in horror, delivers a quantity of home truths, exits. Like the talent contest, it’s a flexi-format, applicable to kitchen cleanliness, child-rearing, the high street and, in the case of The Hotel Inspector, mouldy B&Bs on their uppers. In The Fixer, Alex Polizzi has checked out of hotel salvage and turned her attention to putting a smile on the face of ailing businesses.
In episode one we were in Kettering, where an outlet trading in wedding dresses was facing bankruptcy. A turnover of not far shy of 200 grand in the previous year had yielded a profit of just over three percent, or five grand. The proprietress,a mumsy lady called Anne who had remortgaged her home, paid her two squabbling daughters but not herself. Enter the lady in red - the colour of anger, and of debt.
Deploying the big bad killer smile with which she slips a stiletto between ribs, Polizzi asked the mumsy Anne if her failure to deal with the business side of the business was down to lack of will or lack of ability? The office being - literally - a cupboard out the back suggested a lot of both. In this strategy vacuum, the premises had been allowed to bulge with unsellable dead stock – 75K’s worth - yards and yards of florid satin and lace, puff sleeves and miscellaneous meringue up at which every fiancée in Northants seemed to have turned her nose. And whenever a blushing future bride did fancy one of these monstrous confections, Anne would scrupulously not flog it to them if it was beyond their budget. “Wakey, wakey!” advised Polizzi.
The story that Polizzi unearthed here is not significantly different now that she’s no longer carpeting hoteliers. A family business is prey to the same tensions no matter what the iffy product. In this case the two daughters were at each other’s throats while the mother continued to treat them like babies. While treading the thin line between interfering and holding back, it didn’t take Polizzi long to kick them up the arse in triplicate and for the business to return to health with a grand reopening and a televised trip to church for 10 local couples to renew their wedding vows in the company's dresses.
You wonder who volunteers for this form of highly public therapy. On the one hand it’s the last refuge of the desperate, but if it all works out it’s a shrewd form of advertising. Quite how it worked out in this case remains somewhat opaque. The ladies hit rock bottom when they shifted only 11 old dresses out of 150 in an everything-must-go sale, for example, only for the viewer to be told that off camera someone had bought the lot off them. Who? Why? We were not told.
As with Mary Queen of Shops, in the end you watch Polizzi for Polizzi. On this evidence she seems determined to be slightly less in-yer-face than when sorting out hotels. Perhaps she's treading more gently now she's on the BBC and/or off her home patch, but it could be simply that these three women aroused her more to pity than wrath. But she’s nowhere near angry enough. Someone should fix that.
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