The arts are in a bit of a state just now. Okay, we all knew that. The money that was there in the past - and where it was coming from - just isn’t the same any more. Finding a new way of doing things is the buzz. Looking outside the box.
Maybe someone should call in Alex Polizzi, who’s just begun series two of The Fixer, the family business first-aid programme that aims to turn around enterprises hovering on the edge of financial disaster (amazing, given current times, that some are still hovering at all). Tolstoy was not wrong - unhappy families sure have something special about them, and Britain’s chicest hotelier gets to play psychologist as much as business adviser.
Last night’s episod, Peachy Pics, homed in on a mother-and-daughters photography studio, a recent start-up to boot (always riskier, unlike last week’s east London curtain-makers who’d been going almost a century). Hard to call the show a state-of-the-nation project though, even if Aylesbury is the lowest income town in the home counties. And business ideas that stem from the desire to work with your nearest and dearest (until you actually start working with them, that is), putting up the life savings in the process, must be among the trickiest out there.
The result's not unlike affectionate sadism (or is that masochism?), and that can’t be bad for viewing figures
The thing going for mother Andrea, or Andie, Lane and daughter Rachel was that at least they could take a respectable portrait picture. The other two, Emma and Nicky, looked like (and almost admitted) they were competing for the least competent manager award. In Polizzi’s words, they had to get off their bottoms and do something (you know she’s up against a tricky case when Polizzi herself gets bleeped - this time it was Nicky bagging that role).
The weapons this make-over instructress prefers are a generous laugh, quite enough to keep the serotonins flowing, with a sort of matronly directness - posh vernacular, you might call it. And a seemingly inexhaustible rolodex of contacts ready to give their advice for free. Some involve a bit of a baptism of fire: when she was plunged into the studio of a London glamour photographer, poor Andrea could hardly keep her finger steady on the shutter for nerves. The result's not unlike affectionate sadism (or is that masochism?), and that can’t be bad for viewing figures.
Last night’s wished-for happy ending was postponed: Peachy Pics had changed its name like the branders suggested, risked it all on a lease on posh new premises, and discovered there was commercial photography out there, too. But no closure though, because of wiring problems beyond even the producers' control. More ominously, one of the daughters was out of the picture for most of the second half. Was there more strife than we were seeing?
Polizzi herself is a natural. If BBC Two ever decides to put her out to pasture (or when the branding agencies just stop returning her calls), she’d give some of the presenting faces over on BBC Four a decent run for their money. Perhaps that’s an outfit that could do with her help behind the scenes too.
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